There’s no way any self-respecting Mission: Impossible fan thought for one second that Tom Cruise was going to conclude the franchise he risked his life for on multiple occasions without one last stunt that would leave audiences’ jaws at the bottom of their popcorn buckets. In the climatic sequence of The Final Reckoning, Hunt has to catch murderous middleman Gabriel (Esai Morales) before he uses the source code module and poison pill to control The Entity, and before The Entity rains hellfire on the Earth by launching every nuclear missile in existence. One problem: Gabriel is already thousands of feet in the air in a biplane. That’s when Hunt goes full Ethan Hunt.
With no parachute in the film (or in real life), Hunt clung onto every part of the biplane piloted by Gabriel’s accomplice to get control of it. He was on the wing, near the wheels, fighting in a cockpit the size of a file cabinet. That alone would’ve made this a Top 10 Mission: Impossible stunt. But it’s when Hunt decided to climb on top of the biplane in midair with Gabriel’s biplane above him—SO THAT HE CAN CLIMB ONTO GABRIEL’S BIPLANE IN MID-AIR!—that this becomes cemented as the greatest Mission: Impossible stunt of all time.
Gabriel was twisting and turning that biplane trying everything he could to shake Hunt off. At one point, the biplane was upside down with Hunt dangling from it. Again, he had no parachute. I didn’t think a human could possibly top the helicopter chase from Mission: Impossible – Fallout. Leave it to the king of crazy to shut me up.
Tom, if you’re reading this, thank you for being an absolute lunatic so we can all have these 10 minutes of thrilling action. Also, thank you for not dying. That would’ve sucked.