Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is set to have a few big, exciting action set-pieces, each featuring Tom Cruise performing a death-defying stunt for real, without using CG. Naturally, the movie’s marketing is going to lean in on this aspect, as it has in the past. We’ve already seen the making of one of the movie’s flagship stunt pieces in which Cruise drives a bike off a cliff. Now, Paramount Pictures has dropped another featurette spotlighting the Rome car chase scene that’s been glimpsed in both its trailers and TV Spots.
The sequence in question sees Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and Hayley Atwell’s Grace handcuffed to each other as they drive a mini van through the streets of Rome. The featurette provides a bit more context on the said sequence. Hunt and Grace are being chased by multiple people, including Pom Klementieff’s character, fittingly named Paris. They start off in a car that gradually loses both its doors, before being handcuffed and having to switch to an IMF authorized vehicle that turns out to be the yellow cooper.
As is customary in these sequences, the focus is more on Cruise and Atwell actually handcuffed and doing the stunt for real. Cameras were mounted atop the cars they were driving to capture their reactions. From the wide shots, you can see Cruise and Atwell inside the vehicles, without (m)any safety harnesses. The sequence also has shots in the Arc De Triompe, with Cruise driving against traffic, that will surely evoke comparisons to similar stunts performed by Keanu Reeves in John Wick: Chapter 4.
Explaining their rationale for shooting in Rome, McQuarrie explains in the featurette:
We came to Rome to shoot a chase scene. Something with a lot more ambition and unpredictability that we haven’t had in previous chases. We let the city tell us the kind of chase it was going to be. Traffic in the city is notorious and the cobblestone streets make the driving unpredictable.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is set for release on July 12, 2023. The featurette was originally revealed by Fandango, and with its debut, tickets for the movie are now on sale.
