Mission: Impossible 7's Practical Train Fight Was Infinitely Harder Than Predicted To Film

Tom Cruise's 27-year run as Ethan Hunt is at long last drawing to a calamitous close with the undoubtedly action-packed "Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning." This final installment has been broken up into two chapters, and judging from the almost-year-old trailer, the first part is going to bring the series back to its train-hopping, Henry Czerny-squirming roots.

Not much is known about the plot of the film, but "Mission: Impossible" movies are the equivalent of a Wallace Beery wrestling picture: Tom Cruise. Wildly dangerous practical stunts. Whaddya need, a roadmap?

As far as this movie is concerned, we've seen Cruise riding a motorcycle off a cliff (which, let's be honest, is child's play compared to his HALO jump in "Mission: Impossible – Fallout,"), but it looks like Cruise's brawl atop a Britannia Class choo-choo is going to be the heart-stopping highlight of the movie. According to writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, this sequence was a bear to film.

The Indestructible Mr. Cruise

In an interview with Empire Magazine on the set of the production, Christopher McQuarrie boasted that they were "making a movie that involves sequence [sic] that they just don't shoot practically anymore, and haven't in a long, long time."

McQuarrie was talking to the publication while shooting the train set piece on the set of "Dead Reckoning Part One," and he lamented having ever taken it on. "[L]ike most things on 'Mission: Impossible,' if we had known what the challenges were when we started, we would never have done it," he said.

We've only seen glimpses of the scene in the teaser, but we do know that the locomotive eventually goes sailing off a detonated bridge. That's some gnarly stuff, and, if done practically, this would place the sequence on the level of the very real train wrecks captured in David Lean's "The Bridge on the River Kwai," John Frankenheimer's "The Train" and Steven Soderbergh's "Che: The Argentine."

McQuarrie takes tremendous pride in the practicality of the "Mission: Impossible" movies, but he wants viewers to understand that these eye-popping sequences are not spectacle for spectacle's sake. As he told Empire:

"There's a whole class of action movies centred around awe. For me, awe is a condiment, not a course. I have an actor who will drive a motorcycle off a cliff. Now the hard part is, I gotta make the audience care about that."

Who Cares About Ethan Hunt?

Christopher McQuarrie's comment is an interesting one because I'm not sure I've ever cared about Ethan Hunt. The casting of the always delightful Michelle Monaghan as his fiancée in the bloodless "Mission: Impossible III" grounded the character a bit, but the subsequent movies have emphasized, as McQuarrie said, "awe." They're propulsive, and they occasionally feature great actors tearing into ripe material, but, at their core, these movies are about Tom Cruise cheating death. Not Ethan Hunt. Tom Cruise. 

And since I don't particularly like Tom Cruise based on everything I've read about him (based in large part on Lawrence Wright's exceptional "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief"), I walk out of "Mission: Impossible" movies feeling a tad numb. They're monuments to a selfish movie star's galaxy-sized ego. How is that fun?

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