Impossible – The Final Reckoning

From speeding trains to flying motorcycles, Tom Cruise has continuously tried to one-up himself with each successive Mission: Impossible movie, sometimes breaking bones in the process. So what could he possibly do in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning to raise the bar? Well, hanging off the side of an airplane again isn’t the only thing, apparently. The aging Hollywood icon is now promising an underwater stunt unlike any fans have seen before.

“From Legend in 1985 to Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, I have been studying and filming underwater sequences for over 40 years,” Cruise posted on X on Monday. “We have always tried to push our filmmaking to the next level. In this movie McQ and I saw an opportunity to create an underwater sequence unlike any other. We are excited to share it with you.”

He also posted a short behind-the-scenes clip of the movie’s production that includes scenes of him swimming through what seems to be the downed submarine housing the AI called The Entity which is threatening the world from 2023’s Dead Reckoning. It looks like Christopher McQuarrie, who directed Rogue Nation and Fallout as well, had entire portions of the sub’s interior recreated for the scenes. Hopefully, in addition to whatever new ways Cruise finds to make his insurance agents squirm, the sequence doesn’t lean on post-production special effects to make an impact.

This isn’t Mission: Impossible’s first major water stunt. Rogue Nation saw Cruise hold his breath for 6 minutes in a scene where his character, Ethan Hunt, had to unlock a hatch while swirling around a giant server-cooling tank. And that scene only came about after Cruise filmed Edge of Tomorrow, for which McQuarrie helped write the script, which ends with his character diving underwater beneath the Louvre Pyramid in Paris to kill a giant alien.

The Final Reckoning hits theaters in just a few weeks on May 23, and brings with it a lot of questions beyond whether Cruise and the franchise still have new tricks up their sleeves. For one, there’s the question of how the movie will make good on the many callbacks to earlier entries in the franchise teased in the trailers, and what it will tell us about how Hunt came to join the IMF in the first place, a plot thread hinted at in Dead Reckoning. The biggest question of all, though, is whether this will be Cruise’s last Mission: Impossible movie. Given his obsession with movies, Hollywood, and his own legacy at the box office, I somehow doubt it. At least as long as Final Reckoning does better than its predecessor.

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