Cruise’s stunts will leave you swooning
Tom Cruise’s weapons-grade stunt work will leave you swooning with suspense
In the opening scene of Mission: Impossible — Fallout, Tom Cruise became the first actor to pull off a HALO (high-altitude, low-opening) jump, parachuting out the back of a C-17 military plane. That meant an extended free fall at more than 7,600 metres, his five-foot-seven body flying through the air at
320 kilometres per hour with only an oxygen mask to protect him.
Cruise and the production team trained for and strategized over how to perform the twominute stunt for more than a year, with the action star jumping a total of 106 times to get the three takes he and director Christopher Mcquarrie wanted, and for which there were only three minutes of available light to shoot per day, giving them a single daily opportunity to get the shot.
It’s the sort of manoeuvre only performed by highly trained military, and now, Tom Cruise. Naturally.
But the high-flying stunt work that the Mission: Impossible franchise — and Cruise, as Ethan Hunt — has become known for doesn’t end after the opening sequence. The HALO jump is followed by, in no particular order, grisly bathroom fisticuffs, a heart-pounding and relentless Paris motorcycle chase and a London rooftop jump (in which Cruise infamously broke his ankle leaping from one building to another, making for a rare Cruise injury but a winning take that made the cut).
The film climaxes with its most epic stunt yet (if you happen to believe anything can top Ghost Protocol’s Burj Khalifa climb or the original’s silent heist), featuring Cruise hanging off a helicopter above a mountain range in New Zealand (acting as Kashmir), which had the cast certain he was killed mid-stunt. It’s a long and visually sprawling sequence, with blink-or-you’llmiss-it deathly swerves. For each unbelievable save throughout the film, there’s multiple precarious consequences that add up in just this one chain of events. Simply laying witness to it will
have you burning calories in suspense. That should be incentive enough to see Fallout. The plot is secondary to the action — and that’s just fine. The storyline has the expected entanglements of double-crosses, close calls and mini twists as we follow Hunt, and the IMF team join forces with the CIA to steal a set of plutonium cores that have fallen into the wrong hands: a terrorist group that goes by the name of The Apostles. The baddies intend to set off a nuclear attack in the Middle East. Needless to say, there’s a tight clock on the mission.
It may all sound cliché, as action-movie plots often do, but it’s masterfully handled by Mcquarrie, who is the first director to captain more than one M:I film (his last being Rogue Nation). He stays true to the ethos of the original, but raises the momentum. After all, M:I is an action franchise that has managed to reign supreme due to its classic structure, from its opening credits and iconic theme song to its seemingly miraculous ability to remain free of plotholes.
At 147 minutes, Fallout is the longest film in the series, but it manages to feel like the swiftest ride. That’s no easy feat, but the high-octane action moves along quickly thanks to a cast that features the ever-charming Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Alec Baldwin and Angela Bassett. This instalment also marks the return of Rebecca Ferguson as the beguiling Ilsa Faust, who more than holds her own against a slightly more reckless Hunt. It also features The Crown’s Vanessa Kirby, Hunt’s saucy new foe, and Superman Henry Cavill as CIA assassin August Walker, who serves equal parts body and moustache, his sheer musculature an impressive action set-piece itself. Physically, he makes for a very worthy teammate for Hunt; fortunately, he’s spared much dialogue.
Nonetheless, the success or failure of the M:I movies always comes back to Cruise. It’s a strange relationship audiences have to the actor and character in which both seem to merge together. Watching Hunt race against Paris traffic and circle a roundabout on a motorcycle without a helmet is exhilarating — partly, because it’s a great action sequence, but also because you know that’s the real Cruise in there, his cheeks gently puffing, his leg kicking out to steady himself. And while we know he will always make it out alive, there’s a degree of breathless disbelief that hangs in the air thanks to the wonderful confusion between actor and character instilled in us.
At April’s Cinemacon, Pegg said, quite seriously, “It’s a daily stress going to work with Cruise. You don’t know if you’ll see him tomorrow.” Until the day comes that we won’t, which is, let’s face it, impossible, Tom Cruise reigns.
At the time of this interview, Simon Pegg had watched Mission: Impossible — Fallout three times.
But there is one scene the British actor can’t bring himself to watch too closely. By now, it’s fairly common knowledge that the star of the Mission: Impossible franchise, Tom Cruise, broke his ankle while leaping across buildings in London.
That scene made it into the film. When we see Cruise as the dashing and seemingly injury-immune Ethan Hunt limping away in pain after his skyscraper jump goes awry, it wasn’t all acting.
“That was the best take of the stunt,” says Pegg. “He did the stunt a few times. The idea was that he jumps between buildings and hangs on to the side and pulls himself up. He took the impact of his jump entirely on his ankle and he broke it. But it was a very public accident and people knew about it and it was the best take of the movie so they weren’t going to sweep it under the carpet. It’s in there and they own it as well: it’s like ‘check this out.’ If you watch it carefully, you can see it happening. I haven’t watched it with that degree of scrutiny because it makes me feel sick. The producer and him sort of rallied his thoughts and said ‘Right, get up and walk out of shot and then you can collapse.’ That’s what he did. The shot was usable. It ended up being the most expensive shot in the movie, but we got what we needed.”
The most expensive, presumably, because it led to a two- to three-month break as Cruise recovered. But given the fact that doctors had told him he may never sprint again and to expect a ninemonth recovery period, the fact that the actor was back at it in nine weeks is pretty miraculous.
“It gives you an idea of how dedicated Tom is,” Pegg says with a chuckle. “Even his non-cognitive systems are fully committed to their purposes like he is.”
It seems a reflection of the bigger-is-better mantra of the Mission: Impossible series, which began life big enough back in 1996. As with its predecessors, Fallout unfolds with an ever-accelerating pace as the action takes us from breakneck motorcycle chases through the streets of Paris, to skyscraper-leaping in London, to a breathtaking mountain sequence in Kashmir (well, actually, New Zealand playing Kashmir). The plot has Hunt and his Impossible Mission Force teammates, including Pegg ’s Benji Dunn and Ving Rhames’ Luther Stickell, on a mission to retrieve three stolen spheres of plutonium before they fall into the wrong hands and lead to — what else? — near-global annihilation. As always, things are complicated not only by terrorists and their splinter groups but by feuding factions within the government, all of which leads Hunt and his pals to consider some weighty moral questions about the human cost of what they do.
Since making his franchise debut as Benji in 2006’s Mission: Impossible III, Pegg has watched his character evolve over four films from a somewhat nebbish technician to a full-fledged member of the team, albeit occasionally one who is a little more reluctant than the others to partake in the action.
But partake he does. More than ever before, Benji proves himself an indispensable cog in the IMF machinery throughout Fallout. Without giving away too much, we can say that he even engages in an intense bit of fisticuffs this time around with one of the chief baddies. This was no small thing. As Cruise’s ankle can attest, the Mission: Impossible films often require the actors to do the stunts themselves.
“Even though we have a really accomplished stunt team to look after us and to help us choreograph the fights and train us, when it comes to the actual shooting it’s all us,” Pegg says.
“It’s really fun. It’s something you have to concentrate on, you can’t go in there and take your eye off the ball at any point or people get hurt. It was tiring and we both got a bit banged up and bruised but it is so worth it. Because when the actors are actually involved in the stunt process, you don’t have to be as careful when you shoot it in terms of framing faces or making sure you’re not picking up a double. You can just get in there and see what is happening.”
Pegg is no stranger to the world of big-budget films. On top of his fourth Mission: Impossible outing, he has also played the irritable Montgomery (Scotty) Scott in J.J. Abrams three Star Trek reboots and even had an unrecognizable cameo in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But even his smaller films, such as the comedic Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy — 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, 2007’s Hot Fuzz and 2013’s The World’s End, all of which he co-wrote — tend to be action-packed.
It’s a balance Pegg will maintain. He will continue to divide his time between smaller projects, including an upcoming horror-comedy he is co-producing called Slaughterhouse Rulez, and big-budget fare like Star Trek.
“The difference between a big movie and a small movie is generally just the time it takes and the catering, that’s what changes,” Pegg says. “The infrastructure, the filmmaking process tends to stay the same. Whether you are making something that is balls-out crazy or making something that is more studied and small, ultimately the eye of the storm — the cameras, the actors, the director — stays the same.”