Cruise control on a thrilling ride
Real stunts deliver an excitement that CGI can’t
This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
The brief for the greatest job of Lalo Schifrin’s career was admirably short: he was to compose a TV theme, music to go alongside the image of a burning fuse. Told the title of the show, he wrote a joke into the music: the meter is long-long-short-short, Morse for the letters “M, I”.
Almost everything has changed about Mission: Impossible since the first TV episode aired in 1966, but the theme has remained. As it plays over the titles of the latest film, Final Reckoning, it’s impossible not to smile. The TV series focused on heists and deception, rubber masks and plans that seemed to go wrong before finally going right. There was little in the way of gunplay, with the mysterious Impossible Mission Force focusing on smarts instead.
The first film, directed by Brian de Palma way back in 1996, followed that model, introducing Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, a young agent disavowed by his agency after a job goes wrong.
The second, directed by John Woo, was all guns, a dead end. From the third, the series found its stride, with a mix of heists and ever more dramatic stunts as an ageless Cruise parachuted, swam and motorbiked his way to saving the world.
In the third film Hunt had a wife and a life, but the character has been progressively shorn of such encumbrances. He now doesn’t eat and barely sleeps. Cruise was once a romantic lead, but his characters are now sexless. In this film the famous smile is barely seen, and he wears only one rubber mask. Instead there is stunt and more stunt.
What’s it about? Oh, there’s an artificial intelligence taking over nuclear arsenals to wipe out the world. But it’s best not to think about the setups too hard. You don’t treat a rollercoaster as a way to get somewhere new.
This one weighs in at just under three hours, but it fair zips by. The delightful supporting cast get a decent crop of gags to deliver. But, as the titles tell us, this is “A Tom Cruise Production, Starring Tom Cruise”. The job of everyone else is to look on doubtfully or admiringly as Cruise finds exciting new ways to almost get killed in glamorous locations.
The promise of the poster is that he will dangle from a biplane, and by golly he does. Watched on a huge IMAX screen, it is undeniably thrilling.
The impossible missions have totalled just eight films over 30 years. Over at the Marvel factory, they regard this level of output as shameful sloth: this year has seen them release two films in the space of three months.
A decade ago Marvel films were events. Now they feel like a duty. Only professional reasons took me to either. My children, who could once have explained the backstory of every figure on the screen, now can’t be bothered to come with me.
Thunderbolts* is an attempt to set up a new superhero gang to replace the Avengers, who did so much business for the studio a decade ago. The result is a solid three-star entertainment, with the usual bullet-dodging and overcoming of demons inner and outer.
But this is the 36th Marvel film. We have seen New York nearly destroyed by computer graphics quite a few times now. The studio must know this. The film has a series of lines that are either knowing nods at the problem, or coded pleas for help from writers locked in an underground vault.
Florence Pugh plays a super-assassin weary of her adventures. “Maybe I’m just bored,” she says, speaking for an audience that is no longer impressed by her ability to fight off a dozen gunmen with her bare hands. David Harbour plays her father, overweight, dreaming of the days when he was a superhero whose adventures thrilled the world.
The Mission: Impossible films have become a vehicle for Cruise’s stunts, and the focus on real stunts delivers an excitement that CGI can’t. What are the Marvel films a vehicle for? In the early days they were political thrillers and comedies. These days, most of them involve actors in silly costumes standing in front of green screens delivering lines to set up a greater film that we’re promised is a couple of years away. At some stage, someone will pull the plug, and it’s unlikely to be elegant.
For fans of films where the explosions are emotional, rather than physical, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (released in June) is a charming tale of pride, prejudice, sensibility and finally persuasion. Agathe, played by Camille Rutherford, works in Shakespeare & Company, the Parisian English-language bookstore, and dreams of becoming a writer and finding true love.
Her best friend Felix works alongside her, passing his evenings in online hook-ups that Agathe dismisses as “Uber-sex”. After he enrols her for a writing competition, she’s invited to a writer’s retreat in England.
She spends this in exactly the way I’ve always imagined writers do, staring out of the window and panicking because she hasn’t put anything on the page. If Ethan Hunt and the Thunderbolts yearn to save the world, Agathe simply wants emotional and creative fulfilment. That’s a smaller canvas, but it’s a more interesting one. The Austen references are well-judged, the characters well-drawn and the jokes well-delivered. It’s a gentle tale for those whose tastes are more Colin Firth-emerging-from-a-pond than Bridgerton.
