'Mission: Impossible' spoilers! 'Final Reckoning' director on 'gnarly' Tom Cruise stunt
Spoiler alert! We're discussing important plot points and the ending of “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” (in theaters now), so beware if you haven’t seen it yet.
Tom Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible” superspy Ethan Hunt finally gets the happyish ending he’s long deserved, though he loses a friend and almost dies himself multiple times before it comes to fruition.
In the eighth (and potentially last) franchise installment “The Final Reckoning,” it’s up to Ethan and his team to stop a rogue AI known as The Entity from causing a global nuclear apocalypse. Our hero also discovers that he’s indirectly responsible, learning that the mysterious Rabbit’s Foot he obtained for the government in “Mission: Impossible III” turned out to be the source code that evolved into The Entity.
Ethan’s mission this round: Head to the arctic and get The Entity’s source code from a sunken Russian submarine. Of course, that’s just one part of the complicated derring-do that he and his team have to pull off to save the world.
Let’s dig into the most important spoilers, from the death-defying finale to the Cruise stunt that worried director Christopher McQuarrie sick.
What happens in the ending of ‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’?
Ethan’s pal and computer specialist Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) creates a “poison pill” malware to use against The Entity, but the AI’s human helper Gabriel (Esai Morales) steals it and locks Luther in the tunnels of London with a nuclear bomb. (Luther is able to stop the bomb from annihilating the city but unable to keep it from partially exploding, killing him in the process.)
To beat The Entity, Ethan and his peeps end up in South Africa, where Ethan (who earlier obtained the AI’s source code from the Russian sub) has a final showdown with Gabriel in biplanes. Ultimately, he has to put the poison pill in the source code at the exact same time that in a doomsday vault, Grace (Hayley Atwell) traps The Entity in a data drive. And in the movie’s final scene, the good guys silently meet at night in Trafalgar Square where Grace gives Ethan the drive and he walks off into the crowd, perhaps toward his next mission or maybe a needed vacation.
“What I love about the way it ends is the way it ends,” says McQuarrie, who’s talked about doing that sort of satisfying finale all the way back to 2015’s “Rogue Nation.” “We've always wanted to end a ‘Mission’ that way, but you can't make these movies do things they don't want to do. ‘Mission’ has a mind of its own.”
What’s the craziest stunt Tom Cruise does in the new ‘Mission: Impossible’ movie?
If you thought that motorbike jump Cruise did in 2023's “Dead Reckoning” was nuts, well, Tom says, “Hold my popcorn” with this one. After Gabriel meets a gory fate at the business end of a biplane rudder, Ethan does his poison pill move and jumps but free-falls and flails frightfully for quite a bit of time before an emergency parachute saves him. Cruise had a camera mounted to him for that stunt, and he did it 19 times in total, scaring McQuarrie so much he wanted to throw up.
“That was gnarly. I would say without question, that was the most nervous I ever was,” McQuarrie admits. “Every other stunt you're seeing Tom do in this movie, I'm either in front of him or I'm behind him with the camera. With that particular stunt, I'm stuck on the ground. Just watching things unfold, there's no way to intervene and you're just watching it happen and you're a little bit helpless in that regard.
“You're essentially just waiting for it to be over and for the footage to arrive. You can't even watch it while it's happening.”
Does this ‘Mission: Impossible’ have a post-credits scene?
Nope, but it almost did! McQuarrie reveals that he originally planned for a “coda” on the movie. They were preparing to film it but nixed the sequence midway through production after the director showed Cruise what ended up being the last 10 minutes of “Final Reckoning.”
“I came to Tom and I said, Look, normally I would want you to see the whole movie before I showed this to you, but we're about to shoot this coda in a couple of days and just look at this bit,’ ” McQuarrie says. “He said, ‘You know what, you can cancel Saturday's work because this is the end of the movie. This is it.’ ”
So what would have happened in that coda? McQuarrie’s not telling. “I’m not going to say because it could end up in another movie,” he says with smile.