| How to entertain yourself this weekend. |
I held my breath for six straight minutes while typing this. —Alex Pappademas, culture editor |
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Since its big-screen debut in 1996, the Mission: Impossible franchise has distinguished itself from other spy-movie franchises because it has one thing its competitors don't: Tom Cruise—and more specifically, Tom Cruise risking life and limb to entertain us by performing insane stunts. With each subsequent Ethan Hunt adventure, we get more stories (like this one, from the pages of GQ) about Tom Cruise doing something extremely risky in order to enthrall an audience, whether he's holding his breath underwater for six minutes or scaling the exterior of the world's tallest building.
In the series' seventh installment, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Hunt states to a character that their life “will always be more important to me than my own,” which feels like a declaration of Cruise’s guiding philosophy when it comes to stunt work. Recall Matt Damon's story about a dinner conversation he had with Cruise about a stunt in Ghost Protocol and the safety coordinator who deemed the stunt too dangerous for Cruise to execute; the punch line of that story is Cruise telling Damon “So, I get a new safety guy.”
Cruise fulfills his mission statement in the latest and purportedly final Mission: Impossible film, Mission: Impossible — Final Reckoning, by first hanging off the wing of a biplane and then jumping from it to another, nearby plane—establishing a new benchmark for both blockbuster-film stunt performance and actorly self-endangerment. As the franchise races into the sunset on a speeding bullet train, we’ve ranked the craziest stunts from the Mission series by degree of danger, from least to most. —William Goodman
11. Tom Shatters a Giant Fish Tank (Mission: Impossible, 1996)
Danger Level: Mild
An exploding fish tank feels like small potatoes in the larger scope of the Mission series, but Cruise has said the stunt was indeed “very crazy.” Talking to Graham Norton in 2018, Cruise recalled that he and the stunt coordinator couldn’t get on the same page about the timing of the explosion, resulting in a Who’s On First-like back and forth about whether the “go” was on the count of three or the count of one. Considering the sequence involved a detonation, glass, and plenty of water, the potential for danger was high, but hardly life-threatening.
To read the rest of this list—and find out which of Tom’s Mission stunts out-crazies every other crazy thing he’s done for these films—click here.
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