The 12 Best Moments In Mission: Impossible 7 That Aren't A Crazy Tom Cruise Stunt
Contains spoilers for "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One."
It never fails. The moment we hear about a new "Mission: Impossible" movie, word gets out about what big crazy stunt Tom Cruise is looking to do this time. From free-climbing with no harness to hanging off a plane, it's always the set piece that gets announced before the actual plot.
The same goes for "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One." Even if you know nothing of the story, chances are you know Tom Cruise rides a motorcycle off the side of a mountain in it. Cruise says that he does these sorts of things not just because he likes being physical, but also because it's important to the story.
In that spirit of importance to the story, let's celebrate every other element of the movie. Yes, the stunts are important, but if there's no story around them, they can't be important to it. Besides, we already have the the "Jackass" movies for that. Let everyone else talk about Tom Cruise's action beats, because they will. What about the rest of the movie? The huge cast? Their convoluted storylines and interactions? These movies are based on a TV show about a team, after all.
Here, with a big ol' spoiler warning, are the best moments in "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One" that don't involve Cruise taking a huge physical risk.
12. The Plot Gets Explained to Cary Elwes
"You're telling me this thing has a mind of its own?" growls CIA director Denlinger (Cary Elwes), after being told that an AI has gained sentience. When it's explained to him that yes, it's a rogue AI that can hack into anything, he intones, "An enemy that's everywhere ... and nowhere." (Raise your hand if you remember Liam Neeson saying that about himself in Sam Raimi's "Darkman.") If this were an "Austin Powers" movie, Elwes would be Basil Exposition.
There's a point to all of this, and it's the same reason the movie's title doesn't have a big number "7" on the poster. Sequels with high numbers can be daunting to new viewers, who assume they'll be lost in the story. Eliminating the number makes the movie seem more of a stand-alone, and finding a way to explain the premise and plot of the entire franchise is easier if a major character isn't up to speed yet.
So it's up to Elwes to look incredulous and repeat everything he's just heard as he learns about the IMF (Impossible Mission Force), clarifies that they are not the International Monetary Fund, and realizes with horror that the world's future is in the hands of a team who may or may not choose to accept the mission. It's also a quick way to acknowledge upfront that yes, the idea is a bit absurd, we all know it's absurd, now let's move along.
11. Put-Pocket
Looking to find out who's going to try to intercept the lost key that will (probably) help lead the team to the AI, known as the Entity, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team figure out it's Grace (Hayley Atwell), a thief with a long rap sheet and a skill for picking pockets. She's beautiful and impressive, but nobody in these movies gets to be more beautiful and impressive than Hunt, who picks her pocket, then shows of his sleight-of-hand skills by seemingly conjuring the key from nothing. It's one thing to do a crazy stunt, but Cruise seems to have learned magic tricks as well.
"Let's see what kind of put-pocket you are," he tells Grace, seemingly coining a new term for a pickpocket who has to put back her purloined prize without the mark noticing. She's pretty good, as it turns out. This, of course, means that later in the movie, Ethan is going to have to demonstrate that he's even better at that as well. We'll get to that in a bit.
10. AI Plays the Riddler
Simon Pegg's character, in case you forgot, is named Benji Dunn. His name is important to the plot of "Dead Reckoning," because when an apparent bomb encased in codes and riddles tells him "U R Dunn," you need to understand it's both a death threat and a recognition that the AI knows exactly who has come to defuse the weapon. Combining elements of a personality/lie detector test and questions worthy of Batman foe the Riddler, it forces Benji to find answers to everything. And that's all while trying not to worry Ethan or distract him from his primary mission by letting him know a nuclear bomb might be about to kill them all.
With riddles like "What gets bigger the more you take away?" and personal inquiries like asking what the most important thing is to him, the AI toys with Benji as the seconds tick down. He gets everything right — even the final code that comes with no clues — only to find there's actually no bomb inside at all. It was just a distraction. Still, the sequence is a good exercise in building tension while it lasts.
9. Gabriel's Big Villain Bit
How do you know that Gabriel (Esai Morales) is one bad dude? If it wasn't enough to have a whole sequence where it becomes clear that AI is digitally erasing him from security cameras in real time, he makes sure to do the villain thing to prove it. Upon showing up in the office of the Italian officer who detained Grace, Gabriel proves he knows everything about him, including all the times he's broken the law. And like Tobin Bell in the "Saw" movies, makes it pretty damn clear that he's the sort of villain who knows everybody so well he can predict their every move. He names the man's wife, and mentions that he knows the key he seeks may be around her neck, but that will go really badly for her if so.
But words are just talk. Gabriel proceeds to stab the dude's hand, and when he tries to call for help to his secretary, the poor guy gets met with a killer line. "Your secretary's no longer with us." Our main villain, however, has arrived.
8. Surprise Car
As Ethan and Grace escape potential captors at the police station in Rome, Ethan follows signals to get to a "safe car" that's by implication stashed away just in case a global agent might need it for a getaway at some point. With Grace, he comes across a large group of cars from which he expects to summon the best and brightest. He gets one out of two.
It's bright, all right — the car that answers the call is as boldly yellow as Bumblebee in the "Transformers" movies. But the best? For an agent who routinely feels the need for speed (we assume, based on the actor's other similar roles and love of motorcycles), the Fiat 500 looks like a massive disappointment. It's tiny, and doesn't seem all that powerful. Still, many have said the same about the five-foot-seven-inch Tom Cruise, and he routinely proves them wrong.
At first, though, it seems like every button on the hi-tech dashboard just affects the windshield wipers. Great intuitive design there, IMF.
7. Never Been to Venice
The second "Mission: Impossible" movie was a romance, by way of an amped-up John Woo take on Alfred Hitchcock's "Notorious." The third was a family love story, with Ethan Hunt retiring and getting married, yet inevitably dragged back into all the action again. Since then, he's been increasingly more chaste, despite being presented with many beautiful costars, and looking like Tom Cruise.
So it's refreshingly humanizing when Ethan and former MI6 agent Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson) share a moment of emotional intimacy shortly before things get crazier. On a gondola in Venice, she confesses she's never been there before. "Neither have I," he responds, as he squeezes her hand, and suggests that perhaps he's never been here before emotionally with someone in his line of work either. Cruise so resolutely portrays himself as an indestructible stunt machine in this series that it's disarming to see him take a moment to be vulnerable and open.
As we learn soon after, of course, this moment mainly sets up some attachment just so Ilsa's death shortly thereafter will traumatize Ethan. That's a cynical calculation by the script, but doesn't make the moment as played any less tender.
6. Ilsa vs. Gabriel
In one of the coolest fights of the franchise not to directly involve Tom Cruise, Ilsa and Gabriel square off on a bridge in Venice. She wields a sword; he has a knife. Ilsa has survived two previous movies, so we know she's pretty badass. By this point, though, Gabriel is clearly the designated top heel in the film at hand. So of course he's going to win, but she puts up a fight that ever-so-briefly suggests things might not end predictably.
Unfortunately, this fight is constantly interrupted by what seem to be the contractually obligated scenes of Cruise running. Unlike in a lot of Cruise's one-on-one fights, the editing allows us to see Ferguson and Morales really doing the choreography, and it's excellent. Try to ignore the fact that producer Cruise had to include himself in cutaways so nobody could possibly forget who the lead is.
5. Accept Ethan as Your Personal Savior
Before the final mission of the movie, Ethan has to secure Grace's help. He brings her to meet with his team, which at this point is just Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji. Here's where he offers her what he calls "The Choice." She's been pulled into a situation with global consequences, and as a result, will probably never have a normal life again. If she even tries, somebody will probably attempt to kill her. But if she joins the team, she can make the world a better place and stay several steps ahead. Not only that, but members of the team can count on Ethan Hunt to personally die for them.
"Your life will always matter more to me than my own," he tells her. When she responds incredulously that he doesn't even know her, he answers, "What difference does that make?" As he does, the score suggests he really is the savior she needs right now.
There's an unmistakable cult-y vibe to the whole thing, but unlike religions that require leaps of faith, the IMF can actually provide proof you're going to be killed if you don't join them. Still, peer pressure much? On the other hand, who's going to say no to Tom Cruise as selfless Messiah?
4. Gabriel's Dracula Moment
By the time the train sequence kicks off the third act of the movie, we already know Gabriel is a pretty bad guy. Yet he's in that role because he's essentially the servant of the Entity, the sentient AI that wants to be independent. He is to the Entity what Renfield is to Dracula, as epitomized in the recent Nicolas Cage film.
In case you didn't get that, the movie comes with a visual metaphor that makes it obvious. Once on the train, Pom Klementieff's action-hungry Paris opens up a crate, to reveal Gabriel in what seems like a state of suspended animation. He wears a helmet over his head that seems to allow him direct access to the Entity and keep him in a sleep state. As Paris liberates him, however, he sits up like an undead Nosferatu, and removes the mask. If he's not the prince of darkness, he is at least its number-one servant, and this visual metaphor leaves that role unmistakable.
3. White Widow Hangover
Typically, in an action movie of any stripe, it's no problem to knock out a foe ... and equally unproblematic for them to recover from what, in real life, would be a mini-coma. "Mission: Impossible" may be a franchise full of fantasy elements, but in at least one instance, "Dead Reckoning" depicts the after effects more correctly than usual.
Using the magic latex face masks, Grace must infiltrate a key meeting disguised as Alanna Mitsopolis (Vanessa Kirby), the "White Widow." She knocks out the real Widow, then proceeds to impersonate her. That's all well and good until Alanna recovers ... and then collapses again. She's then revived again, only to collapse once more. As in reality, one does not just recover from being forcibly made unconscious.
Finally, she gets to her feet, staggers out of her train cabin in a rage, and belatedly makes it to her meeting with IMF director Kittridge (Henry Czerny), only to fall over yet again, this time perfectly caught by him. That's when they know they've been had. Kirby, who plays both Alanna and Grace-as-Alanna, does some physical shtick here that's tough to pull off and easy to underrate.
2. The Chipmunks Moment
After all that fighting on the train, and all of Ethan Hunt's crazy daredevil stuff, Gabriel's safely off the train. And not just safely off, but away clean with the key that everyone wants ... or so he initially thinks. The heroics of the Impossible Mission Force were apparently all for naught, and now the AI that he serves will rule the world. Right?
Remember Ethan's sleight of hand from earlier in the movie? Grace may be good, but Ethan always has to be the best at everything. As it turns out, he's pulled a switcheroo, leaving Gabriel with a cigarette lighter instead of the cross key. The result is a cross Gabriel. The way he shows it is especially hilarious. Like Alvin and the Chipmunks' exasperated buddy Dave, he raises his head to the sky and yells "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-THAAAAAAAAAN!" Jason Lee couldn't have done it better if Alvin accidentally blew up his house.
1. The final disclaimer
Tom Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie have gone to such extreme lengths to make it clear just how many of the "Mission: Impossible" stunts are, if not entirely real, at least as close to it as the law allows. As such, suspension of disbelief about the events of the movie may not be a problem so much as absolute, literal belief that it got made. This is presumably why, at the end of the end credits, an important disclaimer explains that Cruise and Hayley Atwell were not, in actual fact, driving around Rome's Spanish Steps like lunatics, plowing into pedestrians, and generally disregarding the safety and sanctity of Rome's great architecture. Instead, the disclaimer clarifies, this sequence was simulated in a studio.
For those keeping score, endangering Tom Cruise is still fine. Endangering the historical sites, a little less so. Or to put it more simply, in a way we're nearly all familiar with: "Don't try this at Rome."