Tom Cruise spends about 30% of the final Mission: Impossible movie in his knickers. It being a very long film, that’s a lot of time spent looking at his body, glossy and gnarled and expensive as a walnut armoire, possibly in high-definition Imax and, even if not, certainly as big as a bus.
In The Final Reckoning, Cruise unbuttons to wallop goons (twice), wriggle from the Arctic seabed towards the waves, hop on a treadmill and take a long hot shower in front of the crew of a strikingly camp US military submarine.
Now 62, Cruise is obviously still Hollywood’s most committed icon of cinema. Committed to the craft and the big screen, to scrupulous professionalism and jumping off stuff, to smiling in selfies and distributing cakes.
But above all, committed to remaining the world’s biggest movie star. And the purity of this egomania proves his undoing, as well as his special genius, in this most messianic of vanity trips.
The Final Reckoning is a film where the opening credits start, for the avoidance of doubt, with the words: “A Tom Cruise production”, before nearly three hours of people asking him for instructions, looking worried when he does something they’re too scared to, giving him lascivious CPR and telling him they like his hair.
The most common refrain is the suggestion Cruise is the only person who can save humanity, to which he demurs, eyes lightly pained at such fallacy – before saving humanity.
Yes, he’s got a loyal team but they’re so much his inferiors as to be groupies rather than colleagues (though Simon Pegg does get his own topless moment this time round). The bad guys meanwhile are either nebulous (evil AI) or sweatily pathetic (American flunkies who question President Angela Bassett when she leans towards popping all her eggs in Cruise’s basket).
His chief nemesis is the least compelling of them all: Gabriel (Esai Morales), of blurry motive, forgettable face and Burton’s tailoring, who shrieks in pain (the closest Cruise comes is the stoical grunt) and cackles things such as: “Tell me I win!”
Weighting the deck is one thing, but making your antagonist basically a preschooler feels a pity. How much chewier this might be, how much bigger Cruise’s victory, if there were formidable enemies, not just limp stooges planted round a really high-budget obstacle course.
The stunts are wonderful. Playing Mikado sticks with torpedoes in a deep sea shipwreck is indeed what cinema is for. The biplane climax was worth Cruise risking death. Yet these sequences do not move things forward other than to confirm him as the closest thing we have to an immortal on Earth – an idea further encouraged by the film’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, who yesterday told reporters of his star’s derring-do: “No one on earth can do that but Tom.”
Early in his Affirmations, among interesting thoughts about not getting sleepy and having a hypnotic effect on other people, Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard writes: “You will live to be 200 years old. You will always look young.” Two years ago, Cruise said he wanted to keep going at least into his 80s, citing the example of Harrison Ford. I hope he does; if you want to see what $400m looks like on screen and feel enjoyably sick, The Final Reckoning is a good way to go.
But I hope that at some point over the next 20 years we get to see Cruise as human. Unless of course he does actually make it to 200, in which case, as you were.
