TOM CRUISE DEFIES ALL

Hollywood's last big star rides the Mission: Impossible rollercoaster again

- MANOHLA DARGIS

For nearly three decades, Tom Cruise has been running, soaring, slugging and white-knuckling it through the Mission: Impossible series. It's been fun, on and off, but it's no wonder he looks so beaten up on the poster for the latest edition, The Final Reckoning.

Cruise — who turns 63 this year — long seemed impervious to ordinary time, with a boyishness that lasted well into middle age. His early stardom had already granted him a kind of immortality. Yet as the lines on his face discreetly deepened, and he kept pushing himself to lunatic extremes in this series, it seemed as if he were challenging physical death itself.

Cruise is at it again in The Final Reckoning — the enjoyably unhinged follow-up to Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) — plunging into deep waters, hanging off an airborne plane and insistently defying the odds as well as his own mortality.

It's unclear why the title changed between the two parts. It might have been a marketing decision; dead is a bummer, of course, and the word implied that Cruise's Ethan Hunt, an American operative extraordinaire, was heading towards the sort of bleak sign-off that capped Daniel Craig's run as James Bond.

Whatever the case, the change suits Cruise's Ethan, whose abilities have grown so progressively super since the series began in 1996 they seem quasi-mystical.

Dead Reckoning ended with Ethan and his team trying to stop an artificial intelligence called the Entity that's set on destroying Earth. (Why? Why not?) The Al's plan is the ultimate power grab, although it also seems like overkill, given that humanity is already hurtling towards self-destruction.