If you ever want to feel like you’re not doing enough with your life, just remember that Tom Cruise—at over 60—is still flinging himself out of planes, off cliffs, and underwater like a human GoPro. The Mission: Impossible franchise isn’t just about espionage and masks anymore. It’s about Cruise one-upping himself (and your life insurance policy) every. single. time.
With Final Reckoning delivering two of the most pulse-pounding stunts yet—a submarine escape that’ll leave you breathless and a biplane ballet that would make a barnstormer weep—we figured it’s the perfect time to rank the craziest stunts Cruise has ever actually done.
8. Underwater Vault Dive – Rogue Nation
Holding your breath for six minutes while fighting a robot arm and dodging a turbine? Cool cool cool. Cruise trained with a freediving expert to make this sequence legit, and yes—it’s all him. The stunt feels more James Cameron than Mission, and that’s why we love it.
7. The Knife Drop – Mission: Impossible II
It’s old-school Cruise: real knife, real face, and real tension. That knife was stopping just millimeters from his eyeball? They actually measured it. A classic stunt in the pre-mega-scale Cruise days, but still brutal.
6. Helicopter Chase – Fallout
Flying a helicopter is hard. Doing it while chasing another chopper through mountain canyons and filming yourself is Cruise-level insane. He trained for months to become a certified pilot just for this scene. Because of course he did.
5. Scaling the Burj Khalifa – Ghost Protocol
Just Tom Cruise dangling off the tallest building in the world like it’s a jungle gym. With only a few cables and some suction gloves, this sequence redefined “high stakes.” It’s the stunt that made audiences gasp—and parents everywhere clutch their pearls.
4. Motorcycle Cliff Jump – Dead Reckoning Part One
Cruise rides a dirt bike off a cliff, lets go mid-air, and BASE jumps into a canyon. He did it six times. The stunt is beautiful, absurd, and makes you question if the man has a death wish or just a really bored guardian angel.
3. Train Top Fistfight & Bridge Collapse – Dead Reckoning
The brawl on the runaway train is good old-fashioned movie magic—but the moment that train hits a blown bridge and each car dangles and crashes with Ethan Hunt barely surviving? That’s cinema. And yes, much of that sequence was done practically. Cruise even helped engineer a special train to destroy. Because science.
2. Biplane Ballet – Final Reckoning
Tom Cruise hanging off the wing of a WWI-era biplane mid-barrel-roll while it spirals through the sky? Check. Was it him? Of course it was. With no green screen. Just good ol’ fashioned aviation insanity and a pilot harness (maybe). It’s like Top Gun but for daredevils on mushrooms.
1. Halo Jump – Fallout
This is it. The crown jewel. A real 25,000-foot high-altitude, low-open (HALO) jump captured in a single take with an IMAX lens strapped to another skydiver’s face. Cruise trained for a year and jumped over 100 times to nail it. It’s the most visceral, cinematic skydive ever put on film. Period.
Honorable Mentions:
- Running like a man possessed in every movie.
- Hanging onto a moving plane (Rogue Nation).
- That little thing called doing his own stunts since 1996.
The Mission: Impossible franchise isn’t about missions anymore—it’s about how far Tom Cruise can push the limits of human endurance, physics, and audience anxiety. As long as he’s game to climb, fall, fly, or dive, we’ll keep showing up with popcorn and a defibrillator.
What’s next? Space? A volcano? A time machine? If anyone’s gonna pull it off, it’s probably Tom Cruise.
The Geek is a working screenwriter, director and screenwriting instructor.
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