10 Best Mission: Impossible Stunts
Please don't die Tom!
The Mission: Impossible films contain some of the most bonkers spectacles in action movie history, and the thing that makes it special? More of it's real than you'd first think.
Take some imagination, a dedicated stunt crew, and one relentlessly bodacious actor called Tom, and you have six movies containing some of the craziest and death-defying scenes possible. The constraints of physics and the limitations of human exertion tend not to deter the Mission: Impossible team, so what we see is pretty much life imitating art.
Of course, we've come to expect Ethan Hunt to wear danger like a pair of dark sunglasses, which means the stunts top one another every time there's a new Mission: Impossible movie. Here's to Cruise and everyone else involved for the lengths they repeatedly go to for entertainment. If they were to pack it up right now and retire, nobody would hold it against them.
Honorable mentions also go out to the exploding helicopter scene, the road bridge battle, and the numerous bike chases. They were all amazing, but the following are simply unbelievable.
10. The CIA Chamber: Mission: Impossible (1996)
In a lot of ways the first Mission: Impossible movie is the most subtle, but there were still some admirable stunts. Let's not overlook the exploding water tank near the start of the movie, which Cruise was tasked with narrowly missing, and the exploding helicopter scene right at the end, where the explosion was fake, but the fan-flung Tom was surprisingly not fake.
The award, however, must go to the iconic CIA chamber scene, which required next to nothing in terms of effects or trickery. It simply involved Ethan Hunt, aka Tom Cruise being lowered via wire into a chamber, where pretty much any biological misdemeanour can trigger a plethora of alarms. The most admirable point is where he is dropped inches above the floor without being allowed to touch it. As is clearly visible in the film itself, the muscular control required is not something to be understated.
It might now be regarded as baby steps given what the later films provided, but it was still a risk and an exertion that most actors still probably wouldn't want to attempt today.