(Paris) Stunt fans will be thrilled with the seventh Impossible missionin theaters Wednesday, in which Tom Cruise wets his shirt against an out-of-control artificial intelligence.
Some 27 years after the first film, Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoningshot around the world, is the first in the saga to be released in two “chapters”: the first Wednesday, and the other, already shot, next summer.
The first part alone has a record duration of 2 hours 43 minutes, confirming a trend of inflation in large American productions, as recently John Wick: Chapter 4 and its 2:50 or Avatar: The Way of Waterwhich largely exceeded the 3 h mark.
To the credit of M: I 7, the absence of dead time: from the canals of Venice to the tops of the mountains, via Rome and Abu Dhabi, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) connects chases (including one in an electric Fiat 500) and stunts. And faces, a sign of the times, an artificial intelligence that has become out of control to the point of threatening humanity.
A fan of stunts performed himself and if possible without special effects, the 61-year-old actor takes obvious pleasure with one of the riskiest sequences he has ever shot: a motorcycle jump from a cliff 1200 meters high , free fall then parachute opening 150 meters above the ground. Cruise will ask to do seven takes.
In the film, Ethan Hunt is surrounded by his usual team, hacker Luther (Ving Rhames) and his accomplice Benji (Simon Pegg), joined by a newcomer, Grace.
Vertically
“I trained for five months before I even started shooting,” explained the actress who plays her, Hayley Atwell, in an interview with AFP. “I remember a scene in which we were in a train, in an upright position”.
The climax of the film, the scene is shot in a steam train on a vertiginous viaduct, which has just partially collapsed. Ethan Hunt and Grace cling to the last wagon, suspended above the void.
“We had to go from a train car in a horizontal position to a vertical position in six seconds. I think we must have done it five or six times. And we had to do it again,” she says, explaining that, exhausted, she was only able to get through the scene when Tom Cruise offered her…chocolate!
“I’ve known Tom for 17 years, and I don’t think I can do what he does. He trains so hard, he literally risks his life” for his films, Simon Pegg told AFP. Not to mention the COVID-19 pandemic, which has greatly disrupted the production of Dead Reckoning.
Will the game be worth the candle at the box office? Franchise Impossible mission is one of the most lucrative of the 7e art, which claims more than 3.5 billion dollars in revenue since the first part, in 1996, directed by Brian de Palma.
In France, each episode attracts between two and four million spectators in theaters, and has experienced a resurgence in attendance since the director Christopher McQuarrie, accomplice of Tom Cruise with whom he also officiated last year, in the script, on Top Gun: Mavericktook control.