Already, the keynote stunt has become a legend: the one on the poster, the one he reportedly did – for real – six times in one day before he was satisfied. Tom Cruise’s compact body floats free of the motorbike as it drops to Earth from between his diamond-hard thighs, having launched him with a throaty roar off an unfeasibly high cliff-edge; he sails through the sky, pulls the ripcord on a nifty little parachute, and swoops down towards … the speeding Orient Express, fully intent on the traditional carriage-top punch-up. We gasped in the audience. Someone behind me went: “Oh shi-i-i …” Carly Simon should have come in with a new song: Fair Enough, Somebody Does It Better.
This outrageously enjoyable spectacle has compelled my awestruck assent with its sheer stamina, scale and brio: the seventh in the Mission: Impossible action franchise with Cruise starring as Ethan Hunt, the mysterious, superfit leader of a top-secret intelligence/combat unit called the Impossible Mission Force, brought in by a shadowy US government agency when they want deniable stuff doing. Their initials of course are IMF, and in this film they finally get round to doing the gag about them not being the International Monetary Fund, the one we reviewers have been doing for years.
Seven films! Daniel Craig got sick of 007 after just five. But at 61, Cruise looks better than ever and pretty much wedded to the IMF. Other actors his age might be turning to offbeat character turns, but Cruise was doing those for Paul Thomas Anderson and Michael Mann 20 years ago. The M:I series is his vocation, and Cruise has single-handedly persuaded us that the action genre has a new respectability and purpose: the box-office saviour of the live cinema experience. But I can’t help wondering: does he have an exit strategy for this franchise? Like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, this film is split into two parts, and Cruise does a fair bit of talking here about his friends and what he might sacrifice for them. Should we be worried about the end of Part Two?