114.5.24(六) Samedi 24 mai 2025
For nearly three decades, Tom Cruise has been
running, soaring, slugging and white-knuckling it through the “Mission:
Impossible” series. It’s been fun, on and off, but it’s no wonder he looks so
beaten up on the poster for the latest edition, “The Final Reckoning.” Cruise –who
turns 63 this year –long seemed impervious to ordinary time, with a boyishness
that lasted well into middle age. His early stardom had already granted him a
kind of immortality. Yet as the lines on his face discreetly deepened, and he
kept pushing himself to lunatic extremes in this series, it seemed as if he
were challenging physical death itself.
Logic isn’t the reason movies like this exist
or why we go to them, and one of the sustaining pleasures of the “Mission: Impossible”
series has been its commitment to its own outrageousness. Cruise’s stunts have
always been among the most outlandish and most memorable attractions in the
series, which was spun off from the 1960s television show of the same title.
He stepped into the role by escaping a wall
of water and descending spiderlike into a luminously white, high-security
vault, hanging by an unnervingly thin rope. The entire thing popped with cool
stunts, striking locations, exotic doings and the sheer spectacle of Cruise’s
intense physical performance.
There’s vanity in Cruise’s commitment to
extremes, and perhaps mania—who knows? Whatever makes him tick and inspires him
to keep pushing and testing his limits is an open question, if presumably less
relevant to viewers than whether the movies are actually worth seeing.
Male-driven action movies often have a
savior complex, with heroes who are beaten and brutalized only at last to rise
vengefully triumphant. “Final Reckoning” leans hard into that familiar theme—the
team faces betrayal, the fate of everyone on Earth is in Ethan’s hands—which gives
the movie a quasi-religious dimension.
That’s weird, no doubt, but there’s
something plaintive about Ethan’s fight this time because it echoes the urgent
struggles of workers in the entertainment industry (and everywhere else) to prevent
their replacement by artificial intelligence. For years, Cruise has put on a
very good show pretending to nearly die for our pleasure; now, though, his body
really does seem on the line. (Manohla Dargis)
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