10 Greatest Ever Tom Cruise Running Scenes

10. Mission: Impossible II

Mission: Impossible II may have marked the critical nadir for the franchise, but it was still the highest-grossing movie of 2000, racking up an impressive $546.4m. It remains one hell of a stylish movie, as you would expect from action maestro John Woo, but has dated badly and now serves as a time capsule of where the genre was around the turn of the millennium.

The movie features plenty of the action movie cliches that had taken over the genre post-Matrix and all of its director's well-known artistic flourishes, encapsulated in the fact that Tom Cruise ticks virtually all of the early-2000's boxes while running.

Slow motion? Sparks flying? Martial arts? Wire fu? Doves (well, pigeons in this case)? A leather jacket? Cruise does it all without breaking his stride, becoming a running advertisement for what action movies essentially were at the time in the process.