Tom Cruise's Latest Death-Defying Action Blockbuster Has 2 Of His All-Time Greatest Stunts

Tom Cruise’s latest death-defying action blockbuster, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, isn’t his best, but it does have two of his all-time greatest stunts. Since Christopher McQuarrie took over the franchise, Mission: Impossible has become an exercise in one-upmanship, as McQuarrie sets out to top the size and scope of the previous films’ action, and Cruise puts himself in even more extreme life-threatening danger.

The Mission: Impossible movies don’t bend action sequences around a story that Cruise and McQuarrie want to tell; they bend an arbitrary story around a bunch of action sequences they want to shoot. If Cruise wants to jump a motorcycle off a mountain, then McQuarrie will come up with a serviceable plot to get him there.

Cruise has been making Mission: Impossible movies for 30 years now, and the latest installment just might be Ethan Hunt’s last rodeo. The actor hasn’t officially retired from the role, but there are currently no plans for a ninth movie. The most recent one was called The Final Reckoning, and it had a very Mission: Impossible – Endgame feel to it.

If The Final Reckoning really is the end of Ethan’s journey, then it serves as a satisfying finale. It’s not his greatest adventure — that distinction still goes to Fallout — but it does feel like a climactic culmination of the entire saga, and a definitive conclusion to the story. It has the same cathartic sense of finality we got in No Time to Die and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is streaming on Paramount+ now, so if you missed it in theaters, it’s the perfect time to catch up. It’s not a perfect movie — its evil A.I. storyline is trite and overcomplicated, and there’s a lot of boring exposition to sit through — but it does feature two of the greatest stunts this franchise has ever seen.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning Has Two Of Tom Cruise's Best Stunts

About halfway through Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Ethan has to get on board a sunken submarine to retrieve an important MacGuffin. This sequence adheres to the golden rule of these kinds of set-pieces: everything that can go wrong does go wrong.

While Ethan is inside the sub, it starts careening toward the edge of a cliff. Nuclear warheads are rattling around, Ethan is tumbling every which way, and the only way to escape is through the torpedo chute, where his scuba suit gets caught. It’s an exhilarating scene that keeps you glued to the edge of your seat — you even forget about his plot armor.

It’s pure visual storytelling. For a good chunk of the movie, The Final Reckoning becomes a silent movie and tells its story entirely through Ethan’s actions and body language. Being underwater makes everything so much more intense, like the final battle in Thunderball.

That’s the peak of the film’s action until its third-act climax, when we finally get to see the biplane chase that’s been touted since they were promoting the last movie — and it’s well worth the wait. Ethan’s nemesis gets away in an old biplane (because he needs analogue tech that the Entity can’t track), so Ethan hijacks another biplane and chases after him.

The primary-colored planes — one bright red, the other bright yellow — lend the whole sequence a delightfully pulpy feel, like something out of Tintin or Dick Tracy. But it’s not just a dazzling visual experience; it might be Cruise’s all-time greatest stunt. Seeing him hang on the wing of a plane, getting spun around, you witness just how far he’s willing to push himself for our entertainment.

How The Final Reckoning Delivered The Greatest Action Sequences Ever Filmed, Wrapped Up In Three Hours Of Exposition

The submarine sequence and the biplane sequence are two of the greatest action set-pieces I’ve ever seen. They belong in the action sequence hall of fame next to the lobby shootout from The Matrix and the car chase from The French Connection. I went back to see The Final Reckoning at the theater a second time just to relive those two action pieces on the big screen.

The only problem is that those two hall-of-famers — two of the greatest action sequences ever filmed — are wrapped up in three hours of exposition. The Final Reckoning is a punishingly long movie, and the majority of it is taken up by overlong, overcomplicated dialogue about overplotted nonsense.

Between the Entity’s nuclear arms race and the ham-fisted attempts to tie the whole series together as one cohesive story (does anyone even remember Kittridge?), The Final Reckoning has a ton of exposition to get through. But it’s worth sitting through all those “Entity, Entity, Entity...” exposition dumps to get to two of the greatest action set-pieces ever put on film.

Tom Cruise's Next Movie Will Be Very Different From Mission: Impossible

For his past 11 movies, Cruise has been exclusively an action star, but he has a long history of great dramatic performances in darker, more challenging roles. He’s a classic movie star, but he’s also a terrific character actor, and you can see that in Rain Man, Magnolia, Tropic Thunder, and Born on the Fourth of July.

With his next film, Digger, Cruise is finally back in character-actor mode to give us another quirky, weird, funny performance like he gave in Magnolia or Tropic Thunder. Set to be released on October 2, Digger is a dark comedy epic from Birdman’s Alejandro G. Iñárritu, and it couldn’t be more different from Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.