It’s that time of year again – that point in the cinema release calendar where Tom Cruise does something cool-looking and life-endangeringly unwise. This time around, rather than feeling the Gs in an F/A-18 Super Hornet, he’s Base jumping off a cliff via a motorbike. (You’d think at some point he might like to have a nice extended sit down in a drawing-room comedy, but no, it seems not.) Cruise’s latest gambit is almost certainly the most heavily trailed stunt in movie history, so central to the marketing of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (in cinemas Monday) that a nine-minute video was released showing exactly how it was done.
Cruise is not the only one trumpeting his stunty wares. Dead Reckoning is joined in cinemas later this month by Oppenheimer, a film for which the notoriously visual effects-averse Christopher Nolan elected to recreate a nuclear explosion, rather than resort to CGI. Par for the course, really, for a man who has never met a truck he didn’t want to immediately flip over.
