Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning Trailer Teases Stunt to End All Stunts

In the latest trailer for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, high-level military and intelligence officials discuss the threat of the rogue AI the Entity, the various disasters happening around the world, and the need for Ethan Hunt to bring peace. More importantly, it contains footage of Hunt dangling from a biplane. And that’s the […] The post Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning Trailer Teases Stunt to End All Stunts appeared first on Den of Geek.

Apr 7, 2025 - 18:15

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning Trailer Teases Stunt to End All Stunts

In the latest trailer for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, high-level military and intelligence officials discuss the threat of the rogue AI the Entity, the various disasters happening around the world, and the need for Ethan Hunt to bring peace.

More importantly, it contains footage of Hunt dangling from a biplane. And that’s the reason we’re really watching, to see Tom Cruise put himself into mortal danger. What began as a star-driven continuation of a well-liked, if not particularly well-remembered television series has transformed into a celebration of old-school filmmaking with spectacular stunts.

That’s an interesting development for the franchise. While the first movie (1996) has a notable stunt when Hunt dangles from wires (heavily featured in Dead Reckoning trailers), it ends with an unconvincing CG composed scene of him hurling from an exploding chopper and barely dodging a blade. When Mission: Impossible II (2000) opens with Hunt free climbing a desert mountain, one can sense Cruise’s demand for more realistic visuals kicking in. He continues that desire with the third entry (2006), in which Hunt scales a Vatican wall and later swings from one Shanghai skyscraper to another.

All of these stunts are show-stoppers, but none quite match the Burj Khalifa sequence from Rogue Nation (2015). It’s not just that the stunt puts Cruise on a recognizable landmark, which carries an inherent sense of awe. It’s that he’s working with Brad Bird, a director whose animation background allows him to emphasize the scale of the event, without getting caught in the self-conscious flashiness that marked the franchise’s previous three helmers.

Christopher McQuarrie, who has directed every entry since 2015’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, may not have the same bonafides as Bird, but he’s followed the animator’s lead, clearly conveying to the audience the size of the obstacle that Hunt faces, the difficulty Cruise has in performing the stunt, and moments of humor to keep things feeling human and, therefore, vulnerable.

Take the sky-diving stunt from McQuarrie’s second outing in the franchise, Fallout (2018). Before the stunt begins, the movie stops to explain the stakes, with Hunt describing the process of the stunt to Walker (Henry Cavill), and to us viewers. The camera operators working with Cruise jump out first, and their cameras help us viewers understand the spacial relationships, even as Hunt falls through the air. We know how far away Hunt and Walker are from the plane, how far away they are from one another, and (thanks also to an incessant warning voice) how far away they are from the ground. So when Hunt makes it over to Walker, reattaches the oxygen hose, and releases the parachute just in time, we feel thrilled because we understood the stakes all the way through.

Of course, the Final Reckoning trailer doesn’t include all of that detail. It opens and closes with clips of Ethan hanging off of biplanes. The dialogue in the middle mostly consists of established characters, mostly Henry Czerny’s Kittiridge and Ving Rhames‘s Luther, and new characters — including those played by Nick Offerman, Holt McCallany, Ted Lasso‘s Hannah Waddingham, and Severance‘s Tramell Tillman — intoning cryptic statements about Hunt’s importance.

Yet, there is a bit of a story to the plane stunts as presented in the trailer. The very fact that we start with Hunt on a red plane and then watch him hanging onto a yellow plane, one about to go into a barrel roll, tells us that he’s going to go from one to the other at some point.

Why? Doesn’t really matter. How? Well, that’s why we go to the theater.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning launches into theaters on May 23, 2025.

The post Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning Trailer Teases Stunt to End All Stunts appeared first on Den of Geek.