‘Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One’ Reveals Another Stunt: Tom Cruise Fighting on Top of a Moving Train
Tom Cruise and Esai Morales engage in hand-to-hand combat on top of a moving train in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One. Photo via Empire Magazine
If there is an actor known out there for doing his own, life-risking stunts, it’s Tom Cruise. And if there’s a franchise Tom Cruise is known for, that is Mission: Impossible. The latest installment, coming to theaters this July, is no exception of that, and buzz has been for a few years that Cruise and the team have, once again, outdone themselves with the biggest stunts in the saga yet.
One of them, featuring Cruise jumping off a cliff while riding a motorcycle and billed as the “biggest stunt in cinema history”, was revealed in the trailers and a jaw-dropping behind-the-scenes reel, but Empire Magazine just put the spotlight on another one. It involves a hand-to-hand fight between Cruise’s hero and Esai Morales’ villain, on top of a high-speed moving train (see image above). Speaking to Empire on the set back in 2021, writer-director Christopher McQuarrie described the process as this:
“We’re making a movie that involves sequence that they just don’t shoot practically anymore, and haven’t in a long, long time. The sequence that we’re shooting right now is no exception. And like most things on Mission: Impossible, if we had known what the challenges were when we started, we would never have done it.”
And yet, that is not the most important part of the film. As McQuarrie explains, having a huge stunt that will sell a lot of tickets on opening weekend is nothing without a great story on which the shoulders of the movie can rest:
“There’s a whole class of action movies centred around awe. For me, awe is a condiment, not a course. I have an actor who will drive a motorcycle off a cliff. Now the hard part is, I gotta make the audience care about that.”
A new trailer for Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One must be days away at this point — think that the only real promo we’ve had for the movie came out almost a year ago, and despite behind-the-scenes looks and Paramount Pictures showing off 20 minutes of the film at CinemaCon, we haven’t seen much from the film.
The film will debut in theaters on July 14, with Part Two currently in post-production and aiming for a June 28, 2024, release.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
