You may well have seen the stunt already: Tom Cruise on a motorbike driving headlong off a cliff into a valley somewhere in Norway and then, a few nerve-wracking moments later, he finally opens his parachute. As his bike plummets toward the rocks below, he soars upward. Paramount leaked the video six months ago to whet appetites for the release of Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, out on Monday (10 July). Cruise has called it the most spectacular stunt in the movie and “the most dangerous thing he has ever attempted”.
It is 27 years since the first Mission Impossible film was released in 1996 and Cruise is still playing the daredevil hero, Ethan Hunt. That is durability off the scale; if he lived in London, Cruise, who is now 60, would qualify for free bus travel – but he’s still performing his own hell-raising stunts. As a point of comparison, between 1962, when the first James Bond feature Dr No appeared, and 1989, the year of Licence to Kill, four different actors – Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton – had already appeared as 007 and a fifth (Pierce Brosnan) was about to take over the role.
