If the Academy had an Oscars category for Best Stunt Ensemble, this year’s front-runner would have to be “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning.” I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but 61-year-old Tom Cruise has dedicated years of his life planning and rehearsing feats of daring ranging from scaling a 2,000-foot-high cliff for “Mission: Impossible 2” (2000) to holding his breath underwater for an unsettling amount of time in “Rogue Nation” (2015) to jumping across rooftops in London in “Fallout” (2018) to the breathtaking sequence in “Dead Reckoning” in which Cruise as Ethan Hunt drives his speeding motorcycle off a Norwegian cliff, dismounting and BASE jumping into the gorgeous and terrifying valley.
They’re calling this “the biggest and most dangerous stunt in cinema history” and that might well be the case. It’s such an outrageously audacious and beautifully executed feat of daring that on one level it takes us out of the movie, because we know that’s TOM CRUISE doing that s---, and what’s the plot of this story again?
