First Look
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING – Tom Cruise Delivers The Reckoning of All Reckonings!
WAMG’s St. Louis and Los Angeles teams attended the screening of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING on Monday evening. Starring Tom Cruise and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, the last film ended on a literal cliffhanger, having just survived a vast locomotive plunging off a bridge, Ethan Hunt and his fellow IMF team members – Ving Rhames’ Luther, Simon Pegg’s Benji, and converts to the cause, Grace, played by Hayley Atwell – face an uncertain future.
St. Louis writer Jim Batts first reaction out of the early preview was “Tom Cruise and his cast, directed by Christopher McQuarrie, along with a talented behind-the-camera crew, once again take movie audiences on a spectacular around-the-globe “thrill-ride”, combining a “ripped-from-the-headlines” plot with some of the most amazing action stunt sequences ever committed to film. From a sunken submarine search to a breathtaking bi-plane battle, this fantastic film is a superior entry in the nearly thirty-year-old franchise.”
LA writer Melissa Thompson said, “it was heart-stopping throughout and such a sentimental trip with all the montages and flashbacks. We saw every movie that came before this one!”
St. Louis writer Cate Marquis’ reaction after the screening was “The latest MISSION IMPOSSIBLE delivers everything fans could want, bigger, wilder, longer, in perfect step with the franchise’s “take it up a notch” every time tradition. Plenty of the kind of wild visual effects action sequence extravaganzas with pulse-pounding score, as Tom Cruise continues to thumb his nose at the laws of physics, and so others too.”
Our lives are the sum of our choices. Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.
Just consider what they have done so far. From scaling the Burj Khalifa in Ghost Protocol, the Mission movie that Cruise first enlisted McQuarrie’s writing expertise on in 2011, to seeing Cruise gripped to the outside of a plane inflight in Rogue Nation – McQuarrie’s first Mission as a director – and then jumping out of one at 25,000 feet in Fallout, they have delivered a succession of movie milestones the likes of which haven’t been seen since Buster Keaton scrambled about on the front of a moving train in The General. And that was in 1926.
“These are the cinematic ghosts we’re always chasing,” McQuarrie says. “Tom is always looking at the likes of Buster Keaton, but also Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin. People who made action films that were also dramas, comedies, tragedies and triumphs, that set the bar and formed the basis from which modern cinema was born.” And none of them drove a motorcycle off a cliff, which Cruise did in Dead Reckoning.
That’s why Mission: Impossible has in many ways become the series that has come to define not just Cruise’s career but his commitment to the artform it exists within. A commitment not only to his audience and a character they have come to love, but to his singular expertise in front of and behind the camera. A commitment to the motion picture experience.
Just look how he is promoting the film below.
The film also stars Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny, Holt McCallany, Janet McTeer, Nick Offerman, Hannah Waddingham, Tramell Tillman and Angela Bassett, Shea Whigham, Greg Tarzan Davis, Charles Parnell, Mark Gatiss, with Rolf Saxon, Lucy Tulugarjuk.
The score is by Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey.
See MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING opens in theaters on May 23rd.
Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence and action, bloody images, and brief language.
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