The cars, bikes and train of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
The Mission: Impossible film series has achieved its sustained success and audience pull thanks to one series of events: the most audacious stunts performed for real by its star, one Tom Cruise. These have included dangling on a wire high above a pressure-sensitive floor, a free solo climb up a cliff in Utah, scaling the Burj Al Khalifa 123 floors up, and hanging on the outside of an Airbus A400 freighter plane as it takes off.
The seventh and latest film in the series, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, has revealed its big stunt piece way before the film’s release. This was by design, as the stunt was performed on Day 1 of filming. As the director Christopher McQuarrie put it, if the jump didn’t go well, then, the rest of the film would have to be substantially rewritten—to put it mildly.
A sequence in the film sees Tom Cruise chasing a runaway train while riding a motorcycle. Simon Pegg’s Benji Dunn directs him on a path to catch up with the steam locomotive. This is where other films will see the star or stunt person jump the bike onto the speeding train, or perhaps use the bike to chase the train and jump on it. But this is Mission: Impossible, so instead, Tom Cruise has to speed up a mountain, jump the bike off a cliff, then, transition to a base jump and parachute to safety.
To prepare for the stunt, the movie crew built a motocross course in England, complete with 25-meter dirt table tops that he could use to jump a motorbike. Here, Tom Cruise practiced with more than 13,000 jumps. He, then, repeatedly practiced the jump on a quarry to get the speed and angle of the jump just right. With no speedometer on the bike, Mr. Cruise had to judge his speed based on the sound and feel of the bike.
With the mechanics and visuals of the stunt jump practiced and locked in, it was time to film the actual jump off a cliff. To film the sequence, Mr. Cruise, in September 2020, propelled a motorcycle at speed off a cliff in Hellesylt, Norway, then, parachuted to safety. In a behind-the-scenes video, Cruise revealed that it was essential that he had to properly position his body to safely separate from the bike mid-jump and have enough time and space to deploy a parachute surrounded by sheer cliffs. Mr. Cruise ended up doing the jump, not once, but six times to get the shot right. The bike used here was custom-built by professional stunt performer and vehicle specialist Kieran Clark, based on a Honda motocross motorcycle. As a making-of video, the bike jump is, in itself, an entertaining short film. Within the film, it’s a breathtaking action sequence.
Of course, that isn’t the sole action sequence of the movie. Another key event sees Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and Hayley Atwell’s Grace trying to avoid capture by multiple armed groups—and they, of course, have to do it on motor vehicles. This sequence was captured on the streets of Rome. Deployed here are a pair of BMW vehicles in police livery: a 3-Series sedan and a G 310 GS motorcycle. Then, comes the main part of the chase, where Tom and Hayley use a BMW M5, sans doors—so you can clearly see the actors driving the car. They are chased by Pom Klementieff, in a burly, customized armored car based on a Hummer H2. To add a level of difficulty (and comedy), Tom and Hayley are handcuffed, so each has to steer and drift the car one-handed.
The heroes, then, have to switch to an Italian car (When in Rome…), a classic Fiat 500. The yellow 500 is portrayed as one especially customized as an Impossible Missions Force vehicle, so it has steer-by-wire and a huge reserve of electric horsepower, enough to spin the car around in tight circles. You can’t help but smile as the chase powers through Roman landmarks like the Colosseum and the Spanish Steps. One reviewer commented that the chase sequence actually makes geographic sense.
The train that Ethan was chasing on the bike turns out to be the Orient Express—or at least, vintage train carriages of similar style and provenance. With the villains disabling its controls, the locomotive barrels through the Romsdalen valley in Norway (doubling for the Austrian Alps) as the plot’s various machinations combine in an explosive finale. With three new dames on board: Atwell, Klementieff, and series mainstay Rebecca Ferguson, and the eye-popping sequences on the trains, cars, and bikes, this is one Mission worth seeing again and again—on the big screen, as Tom Cruise would recommend.
