Latest news with #Reckoning
Hypebeast
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hypebeast
Tom Cruise Is Reportedly "Very Serious" About Making a Les Grossman Film
Summary Tropic Thunderfans might just be in for a Impossible – The Final Reckoningdirector Christopher McQuarrie shared thatTom Cruiseis seriously thinking about doing a film on his character Les Grossman. Speaking on Josh Horowitz'sHappy Sad Confusedpodcast, the director shared that Cruise and himself have had real discussions regarding making a standalone Les Grossman movie. McQuarrie said, 'The conversations we've had about Les Grossman are so f**king funny. [Cruise and I are] talking about it, we're having very serious conversations about it, and how best to do it. It ultimately comes down to what that character is.' Les Grossman fans may remember him as the mouthy, antagonistic producer who had quite the temper and infamous for his giant hands. McQuarrie also shared that thinking about the Les Grossman film allowed himself and Cruise to escape the filming of theFinal Reckoning, 'We don't even think about the structure, we play with scenes. Just to be sitting at a breakfast table, not talking about the movie we're making for a minute, is such decompression. And just riffing with Tom playing Les Grossman at the table, it was one of the real joys of making this movie. It was all the stuff we were doing, planning the future while slugging out the present.' It remains to be seen if this film will come true.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Mission: Impossible '—'The Final Reckoning' Review: The Stunts Are Stunning but Why Is Tom Cruise So Serious?
In the course of its 2 hour, 49 minute running time, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning gives you two fleeting moments that suggest that, yes, even Tom Cruise is required to respect and obey the laws of physics. In the first, he's resurfacing from the depths of an arctic sea when, cramping with the bends, he curls into a fetal position, then drifts helplessly through the icy water. Much later in the film, gravity is hurling him in the opposite direction: He plummets down through the sky and vanishes into a veil of cloud. Whoosh. In these few seconds, you get a sense of Cruise as just another isolated, solitary human being, one more speck lost to the obscure mysteries of time and existence. Don't kid yourself. In Reckoning, the surprisingly dour second half of 2023's Dead Reckoning, Cruise — as Ethan Hunt, the super spy he's played for nearly 30 years — has become nothing less than Atlas, eternally braced to prevent the world from sliding down and off his back. (Judging from a few brief, shirtless scenes, the 62-year-old star has done plenty of shoulder shrugs to bear up under all that weight.) Who else (the film's characters repeatedly ask) can possibly stop the terrifying AI engine, the Entity, from gaining control of every nuclear warhead on the planet? Who else can possibly prevent Ethan's nemesis, Gabriel (Esai Morales), in his deluded attempts to master that diabolical gizmo? Only Ethan. Ethan, Ethan, Ethan! Angela Bassett's President Sloane is so anxious for his assistance you wouldn't be surprised if she showed up on his doorstep with a meatloaf. If everyone needs Ethan, however, he doesn't especially need them. In a vigorously bruising fight scene — it involves a treadmill and a knife — he alternately gains and loses the upper hand as he fights off an assailant. But this is on a submarine — how far off can assistance be? All he has to do is shout, 'Help! I'm being attacked in the fitness center! Come quick!' It's not that Ethan is proud. He accepts his (likely final) globe-saving assignment with what appears to be a nagging, troubled humility. Cruise, strikingly, has all but abandoned the confident star power, the gleaming look in the eye that comes close to a wink, that defined his performance in seven previous outings. He still runs with blinding speed, whether crossing a bridge or exiting an airborne vehicle, but just as often he seems to be brooding in shadow, like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. And his hair has grown thatchy. Uncharacteristically, Ethan even comes close to butchering one of his many opponents: The camera spares you the details, but you hear a prolonged pummeling and watch the horrified reaction of Hayley Atwell's Grace before you glimpse a meat cleaver buried in a corpse's chest. (It may remind you of 2005's War of the Worlds, where Cruise, required to put on a show of cold-blooded savagery, moved off camera when it came time to murder Tim Robbins.) As Ethan tries to assure Grace that he had no choice, Cruise hits a strange, ambivalent note that wobbles between desperation and comedy. There's nothing wrong with a performer of Cruise's stature and charisma grappling with darkness and ambiguity in this way — in the past that resulted in one of his best, most misunderstood performances, as a doctor slipping down into a moral underworld in Eyes Wide Shut. But that was a Stanley Kubrick movie. This is a Tom Cruise mega-production with a reported price tag of about $400 million. Imagine if pilot Pete "Maverick" Mitchell had just stared at oil patches on the hangar floor, searching for meaningful patterns. Of course, you don't have to worry that Ethan won't do whatever's necessary, however death-defying, to destroy the Entity. That includes dangling from a plane as it takes off, making his way across the wings with breathtaking agility (and, even more important, grim determination), then fighting the pilot mano a mano. In other words, the big action scenes, when they finally arrive, really deliver, and then some. The movie's centerpiece — a long, silent sequence with Ethan gingerly making his through a submerged submarine — is gruelingly suspenseful, like Sandra Bullock's Gravity but with H20. It's one of the best action scenes in the entire franchise. It's a classic unto itself. The terrifying Entity, on the other hand, remains a dramatic abstraction, whirling around in the digital ether like a pinwheel of is quite good as the president — her performance at least seems to reflect, seriously, the stakes of mutually assured nuclear destruction. Ted Lasso's Hannah Waddingham turns up as a stern admiral with bitter memories of combat — you can understand why Waddingham wouldn't always want to rely on her comic deliciousness, but this is a thankless little role. And, once again, the superb Hayley Atwell, as Grace, doesn't get to do enough. Apart from that prolonged display of horror, she's usually seen approaching Ethan with a warm, hungry-eyed allure, like a jewelry model being introduced to a tray of diamonds. The movie is very nearly stolen by Severance star Tramell Tillman as an American submarine captain who keeps addressing Ethan as 'mister' with a clipped, subtle note of hostility. It's as if he were thinking, "M:I, my eye!" Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning (PG-13) is in theaters May 23. M:I Read the original article on People
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Mission: Impossible '—'The Final Reckoning' Review: The Stunts Are Stunning but Why Is Tom Cruise So Serious?
In the course of its 2 hour, 49 minute running time, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning gives you two fleeting moments that suggest that, yes, even Tom Cruise is required to respect and obey the laws of physics. In the first, he's resurfacing from the depths of an arctic sea when, cramping with the bends, he curls into a fetal position, then drifts helplessly through the icy water. Much later in the film, gravity is hurling him in the opposite direction: He plummets down through the sky and vanishes into a veil of cloud. Whoosh. In these few seconds, you get a sense of Cruise as just another isolated, solitary human being, one more speck lost to the obscure mysteries of time and existence. Don't kid yourself. In Reckoning, the surprisingly dour second half of 2023's Dead Reckoning, Cruise — as Ethan Hunt, the super spy he's played for nearly 30 years — has become nothing less than Atlas, eternally braced to prevent the world from sliding down and off his back. (Judging from a few brief, shirtless scenes, the 62-year-old star has done plenty of shoulder shrugs to bear up under all that weight.) Who else (the film's characters repeatedly ask) can possibly stop the terrifying AI engine, the Entity, from gaining control of every nuclear warhead on the planet? Who else can possibly prevent Ethan's nemesis, Gabriel (Esai Morales), in his deluded attempts to master that diabolical gizmo? Only Ethan. Ethan, Ethan, Ethan! Angela Bassett's President Sloane is so anxious for his assistance you wouldn't be surprised if she showed up on his doorstep with a meatloaf. If everyone needs Ethan, however, he doesn't especially need them. In a vigorously bruising fight scene — it involves a treadmill and a knife — he alternately gains and loses the upper hand as he fights off an assailant. But this is on a submarine — how far off can assistance be? All he has to do is shout, 'Help! I'm being attacked in the fitness center! Come quick!' It's not that Ethan is proud. He accepts his (likely final) globe-saving assignment with what appears to be a nagging, troubled humility. Cruise, strikingly, has all but abandoned the confident star power, the gleaming look in the eye that comes close to a wink, that defined his performance in seven previous outings. He still runs with blinding speed, whether crossing a bridge or exiting an airborne vehicle, but just as often he seems to be brooding in shadow, like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. And his hair has grown thatchy. Uncharacteristically, Ethan even comes close to butchering one of his many opponents: The camera spares you the details, but you hear a prolonged pummeling and watch the horrified reaction of Hayley Atwell's Grace before you glimpse a meat cleaver buried in a corpse's chest. (It may remind you of 2005's War of the Worlds, where Cruise, required to put on a show of cold-blooded savagery, moved off camera when it came time to murder Tim Robbins.) As Ethan tries to assure Grace that he had no choice, Cruise hits a strange, ambivalent note that wobbles between desperation and comedy. There's nothing wrong with a performer of Cruise's stature and charisma grappling with darkness and ambiguity in this way — in the past that resulted in one of his best, most misunderstood performances, as a doctor slipping down into a moral underworld in Eyes Wide Shut. But that was a Stanley Kubrick movie. This is a Tom Cruise mega-production with a reported price tag of about $400 million. Imagine if pilot Pete "Maverick" Mitchell had just stared at oil patches on the hangar floor, searching for meaningful patterns. Of course, you don't have to worry that Ethan won't do whatever's necessary, however death-defying, to destroy the Entity. That includes dangling from a plane as it takes off, making his way across the wings with breathtaking agility (and, even more important, grim determination), then fighting the pilot mano a mano. In other words, the big action scenes, when they finally arrive, really deliver, and then some. The movie's centerpiece — a long, silent sequence with Ethan gingerly making his through a submerged submarine — is gruelingly suspenseful, like Sandra Bullock's Gravity but with H20. It's one of the best action scenes in the entire franchise. It's a classic unto itself. The terrifying Entity, on the other hand, remains a dramatic abstraction, whirling around in the digital ether like a pinwheel of is quite good as the president — her performance at least seems to reflect, seriously, the stakes of mutually assured nuclear destruction. Ted Lasso's Hannah Waddingham turns up as a stern admiral with bitter memories of combat — you can understand why Waddingham wouldn't always want to rely on her comic deliciousness, but this is a thankless little role. And, once again, the superb Hayley Atwell, as Grace, doesn't get to do enough. Apart from that prolonged display of horror, she's usually seen approaching Ethan with a warm, hungry-eyed allure, like a jewelry model being introduced to a tray of diamonds. The movie is very nearly stolen by Severance star Tramell Tillman as an American submarine captain who keeps addressing Ethan as 'mister' with a clipped, subtle note of hostility. It's as if he were thinking, "M:I, my eye!" Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning (PG-13) is in theaters May 23. M:I Read the original article on People
Engadget
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Engadget
Mission: Impossible should never have gone full sci-fi
The Mission: Impossible film franchise has always dabbled in the, well, impossible . We've seen Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt climb his way up the Burj Khalifa, have a motorcycle joust to prevent the spread of a bioweapon and hang off the side of an airplane. Even the most grounded entry, Brian DePalma's 1996 Mission: Impossible , featured Cruise leaping off of an exploding helicopter onto a train in the Chunnel. But with the previous film, Dead Reckoning , and this year's follow-up Final Reckoning , the series has jumped completely into science-fiction territory with an AI villain called The Entity. It has the power to control anything that touches the internet, manipulate digital information to suit its needs and potentially wipe out humanity through a global nuclear annihilation. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Stopping the Entity is a mission Ethan Hunt has no choice but to accept. But as a fan of this series from the start — hell, I even like John Woo's gloriously operatic Mission: Impossible 2 — I can't help but see the move into true sci-fi as a huge mistake. It makes both Reckoning films far too plot-heavy and impenetrable ( Final Reckoning clocks in at three hours!), and they also just don't have much to say about AI beyond a Terminator -esque extinction scenario. But perhaps worst of all, the shift towards sci-fi inadvertently (or perhaps purposefully) turns Ethan Hunt into some sort of Messiah. Apparently, only Scientology's greatest son can save us. The best M:I films are the ones that don't get bogged down in the intricacies of plot mechanics. That's a trend that truly kicked off with the JJ Abrams-directed Mission: Impossible 3 , which relied on a standard MacGuffin (the "Rabbit's Foot") and a powerhouse Philip Seymour Hoffman villain performance to send Ethan and his team gallivanting around the world. With Ghost Protocol , director Brad Bird used his experience in animation and love of silent film to turn Cruise into a modern-day Buster Keaton, hopping from one elaborate set-piece to another. The series found a new life when writer/director Christopher McQuarrie hopped aboard for Rogue Nation, which introduced Rebecca Ferguson's enigmatic Ilsa Faust. McQuarrie has previously likened his approach to the franchise as something like action film jazz, wherein he and Cruise would develop some set piece ideas and build a narrative around that. At the same time, they also sought to develop Hunt's inner-life and team dynamics more than previous films. Plot, once again, was mostly a vehicle to reach those spectacular action set pieces and character-defining moments (which were often one and the same). McQuarrie mostly repeated his formula for success with 2018's Mission: Impossible - Fallout , which was notable for featuring a real-time high altitude skydiving sequence. But with 2023's Dead Reckoning, he faced the limits of trying to improvise a movie as it was being shot. Production was significantly delayed by the pandemic, and the film also had to go through several reshoots. Perhaps not surprisingly, it also became increasingly more complex and plot-heavy. That movie couldn't just treat The Entity's AI like another plot MacGuffin, instead it practically became an anchor for the film's momentum. We had to learn what the Entity was, why it could be bad and also introduce new characters who were devoted to its ambitions. The final film feels like a hodgepodge of ideas trying to string together a few notable action sequences, like that aforementioned motorcycle jump. The prolonged production also led to the departure of Ilsa Faust, who was immediately replaced by Hayley Atwell's Grace, an expert thief who's so thinly sketched she doesn't even get a last name. I had hoped that McQuarrie, Cruise and co-writer Erik Jendresen would learn from the sloppiness of the last film and refocus on the characters and action we love in The Final Reckoning , but unfortunately things get even more convoluted. We're presented with a world where the Entity has already taken over most information systems, can easily reshape digital reality at will and is in the process of taking over nuclear weapons systems around the world. There is no hope but Ethan Hunt, who must seek out the Entity's source code in a sunken Russian submarine and try to stop it from annihilating humanity (while also trying to survive the apocalypse in an underground data bunker). And if that all sounds tiring as you read it, it's even harder to swallow as you sit through the film's three-hour runtime. Once the film actually starts moving around the half-way point, it delivers some of the most complex set pieces we've seen yet. Hunt's dive into Arctic waters feels as claustrophobic as some of the best scenes from The Abyss , and it's still thrilling to see Cruise hang onto bi-planes during the climactic chase. I just wish it actually did something interesting with the AI at the center of the story, instead of giving us a basic-ass Terminator/Wargames scenario. We're told that the Entity has inspired a cult-like following, and that it can completely reshape the idea of truth, but we don't actually see how it affects people around the world. That's a particular shame since the Mission: Impossible series' has always been about genuine human effort, you'd think McQuarrie and crew would actually have more to say about the impact of AI. Fans want to see practical stunt work being accomplished by a movie star who's desperate for attention. Now with real-world AI threatening to dumb down the act of creativity and recycle existing content, turning the film's AI into a simplistic villain just seems like a total waste. The Final Reckoning also wastes far too much time extolling Ethan Hunt's virtues as humanity's savior. No government can be trusted, no elected leaders — just one man who never follows orders. The one man who has given up love and bled for an ungrateful world. Even the people whose lives he has ostensibly ruined can't help but love him. The Mission: Impossible franchise has always been a vanity project for Cruise, but he also balanced out his ego by working with talented directors who pushed him and the series in new directions. Now, in his fourth film with McQuarrie, and possibly his last as the main character, Cruise can't help but remind us how much he's suffered. And it's as dull as yet another world-ending AI villain.
