At 62, Tom Cruise is willing to die to get you to the movies ...Middle East

I don’t know if you saw the news, but they found Tom Cruise on the roof of the BFI Imax in London this week. And somehow that seemed like a perfectly logical place for a guy like Tom Cruise to be. After all: he’s climbed the Burj Khalifa, motorbiked off cliffs, skydived in freefall and accomplished God knows what other feats of daredevilry over a long career doing his own stunts. His cinema-scaling hardly seems notable by comparison, done as it was as part of a stunt to celebrate the release of the eighth and final entry in the Mission Impossible franchise, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.

With a relatively flimsy plot featuring a series of nostalgic montages from the previous films, and serving as a second half, of sorts, to the 2023 instalment Dead Reckoning, the film is held together almost entirely by its set pieces and stunts. Cruise reprises his role as Ethan Hunt and reunites with his trusty team – Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and Hayley Atwell among them – to defeat the insidious AI, known as “The Entity”, bent on world domination. But despite the baddie being a clear metaphor for the worrying trend of AI-created art, ultimately we find ourselves waiting until we get to see Cruise jumping from a great height again. And those heights truly were great: during filming, in a bid to outdo himself, Cruise passed out from lack of oxygen while clinging to the side of a Boeing.

But these are the lengths Cruise is willing to go to for his art. From deep-sea diving in frigid conditions to a mid-air knife fight to dangling from a 1930s bi-plane and climbing onto the wing of another, silent-film “wingwalker”-style, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt shows no signs of relenting. The film premieres here at Cannes this week; I recall seeing him in a career-spanning conversation at the festival back in 2022. The French moderator, seemingly aghast at the level of danger he regularly faced, exclaimed during a conversation about Cruise’s stunts: “You’re risking your life, monsieur!”

Director Christopher McQuarrie recently told Empire that he “wants to puke thinking about the stress” of filming with Cruise, who, for example, jumps out of a plane with no parachute, filming himself as he goes – just one of the stunt sequences in the film that he wanted to shoot multiple times to satisfy his perfectionism. This caused McQuarrie to finally, queasily, insist the A-lister call it quits at the 20th take.

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At 62, after decades of wildly different roles of legendary calibre – from super agent Jerry Maguire to the rogue army cop Jack Reacher – you’d think Cruise has earned the right to rest on his laurels. Or at least not die on set because he’s gone to an exotic location to throw himself at the ground from 12,000 feet up. But Cruise still seems to regard doing his own stunts as a kind of sacred duty. And the over-the-top Final Reckoning is testament to the fact that it makes his films all the more thrilling.

Of course, it’s not the only example of Cruise taking it upon himself to singlehandedly rescue the art of film. As a capital-M, capital-S Movie Star, he also has a seemingly tireless devotion to getting films screened in actual cinemas – fighting the tidal wave of “content” to be listlessly half-watched while simultaneously scrolling through TikTok. “Seeing a movie on the big screens can change lives… The cultural impact of movie theaters can’t be matched,” he said at CinemaCon this year.

But the star has been banging the drum for the beauty of moviegoing since his mid-Covid hit Top Gun: Maverick. There, too, he was flying jets and risking life and limb for our entertainment – people can’t help but to look through their fingers when one of the most famous men in the world is putting his life on the line.

Ultimately, it’s all part of the action hero persona – just like his character Ethan Hunt, Cruise just wants to save the world as he knows it. For him, that world is all about the magic of cinema. But he’s savvy, too – he knows that if you want people to turn up, you’d better give them something to turn up for.

‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’ is in cinemas from 23 May. Cannes film festival runs from 13-24 May

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