MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: FALLOUT

Tom Cruise has been a mainstay of the A-list for more than thirty years now. In that time, he’s worked with almost every major filmmaker. Steven Spielberg, Francis Coppola, Brian De Palma, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Ridley & Tony Scott, Oliver Stone, Paul Thomas Anderson, to name but a few. What this extended three-decade film school has afforded Cruise, is valuable lessons on screenwriting, editing and film structure/construction in general.  

Cruise took the reins of United Artists film studios back in 2006. That foray into studio management with his then-producing partner Paula Wagner (they were co-owners in a deal struck with MGM Studios) was largely unsuccessful.  Post 2005, after the 'Oprah couch jump' and subsequent split from Katie Holmes, he took his foot off the gas in regards to dramatic roles and focused more on genre: action and science-fiction (Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow). Whether that’s because he believed that the ability of an audience to ‘buy’ him in a dramatic turn may have been detrimentally affected by the too-public persona wobbles (anyone remember Cruise opining over Brooke Shields taking anti-depressants?) is anyone's guess. That in itself is a very real phenomena, especially when actors become too well known due to negative public actions (cough 'Russell Crowe' Cough). When Cruise was unceremoniously dumped by Paramount Studio's owner (and real life Mr. Burns, Sumner Redstone) it was on the heels of a public statement from the ancient corporate cadaver (who was bitter at the less-than-stellar box office from Mission Impossible III, attributing it to Cruise's Scientology): "We don't think that someone who effectuates creative suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot...His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount.")

Despite that fairly public embarrassment, Cruise ended up gravitating towards independent financing through Private Equity funds and Skydance, a production company owned by David Ellison, son of Oracle software magnate, Larry Ellison. 

Since then, Cruise has been focused on doing comedies (such as his brilliant turn as studio chief Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder) and primarily, on out-and-out action becoming something like Steve McQueen and Evel Knievel rolled into one. In a kind of strange reworking of a method actors process, he turns his action film-making into a personal challenge that only he can overcome.

Having worked with The Usual Suspects screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie on every one of his films shooting scripts since Valkyrie, Cruise insisted McQuarrie take the director’s chair on Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, with the success of that collaboration leading to this follow up.

In Mission Impossible: Fallout, Ethan Hunt and the IMF team (Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and Rebecca Ferguson all return) join forces with CIA assassin August Walker (Henry Cavill) to prevent a group of terrorists known as 'the Apostles' from using three plutonium cores for a nuclear attack on the Vatican, Jerusalem and Mecca. Of course there are MacGuffin's, Double MacGuffin's and Triple MacGuffin's galore. Things do tend to get very complicated, very quickly but Hunt and his desperate need to save those closest to him at all costs, gets tested to the limit.

McQuarrie and Cruise fly by the seat of their pants in production on the Mission Impossible films, embracing the chaos: the script is non-existent and scenes are written based around the locations and what needs to happen within the set pieces and stunts. Does it all come together? Hell yeah. There's a phenomenal HALO (High Altitude Low Open) jump that was pieced together from 106, 25,000 foot jumps conducted by Cruise and a cameraman, over a month in Dubai. A helicopter sequence, featuring Cruise in the pilots seat - alone - seeing him step-dive and corkscrew the craft, something that terrified even the hardened stunt crew. Cruise had never flown a helicopter and went to Airbus to learn. He qualified insanely fast, being trained by two different pilots working in a shift rotation, 16 hours a day, every day, for six weeks.  This kind of laser focused, death-wish fuelled insanity, affords the film a level of spectacle that the other films in the franchise have not really managed to attain (save for the burj khalifa dangling stunt at the end of MI4: Ghost Protocol). Well worth checking out.