John Woo’s 2000 film “Mission: Impossible 2” is handily the worst film in the “Mission: Impossible” film series. Its drama is turgid and unconvincing, the romance between Tom Cruise and Thandiwe Newton is only briefly convincing, and the villain, played by Dougray Scott, is generic to the point of being noncorporeal. Woo’s ordinarily vivacious and balletic gun violence is supplanted by instantly-dated, “You Wouldn’t Steal a Handbag”-style hyper-edited violence, something that feels like a remnant of a now-forgotten era of MTV. The film tried to turn Ethan Hunt from a steely company man into a flippant, sexy, American James Bond. It didn’t really work.
The most memorable part of the movie is, like in most of the “Mission: Impossible” movies, the stunts that Cruise performed himself. Woo’s film opens with super-spy Ethan Hunt (Cruise) enjoying a rare vacation by himself. He is seen rock climbing on the various rock faces found in Dead Horse Point State Park in Moab, Utah. Because Ethan Hunt — and, to an extent, Tom Cruise — is addicted to danger, he is making the climbs sans ropes, free solo. Cruise insisted on doing the climbing himself, as he was going through a rock climbing phase at the time. There was no safety net constructed for the Moab scenes, although Cruise was equipped with a safety harness.
In a recent interview with Empire Magazine, though, Cruise revealed that he had an injury while shooting that sequence. While making a particularly daring leap from one rock face to the next, “high to low,” as he said, he revealed that he landed on a broken foot, injured in another personal incident. This was in addition to tearing his shoulder, an injury he has talked about in the past. He also almost got stabbed in the eye during the shoot. “Mission: Impossible 2” was hell on Cruise’s body.
Tom Cruise was rock climbing on a broken foot
Paramount
It’s worth recalling that John Woo hating filming the cliff stunts. He was dragged up into the mountains by one of the world’s biggest movie stars, and admitted that he was a nervous wreck the whole time. And rightly so, as he knew his career would be over if he was running a camera as Tom Cruise plunged to his death. Cruise didn’t die, as we can now infer from his currently living state, but he did get horribly banged up. The shoulder injury was bad enough, but now, thanks to the Empire interview, we know about his foot as well. As Cruise tells it:
“What people don’t know is that there’s a section where I’m jumping high to low, but my foot was broken. And I never mentioned it to anyone. Some of these injuries, what’s the point? You just keep going. So I’m jumping, and my foot wasn’t right. John Woo was like, ‘We’ve got the shot.’ I was like, ‘No, we want it in one shot, I gotta keep doing it.’ And that’s the shot that’s in the movie. But it was so much fun working with John, doing that sequence, because I knew it was our campaign.”
Cruise is referring to the film’s marketing campaign. And, indeed, the shots of Cruise climbing the Moab rocks were used prominently in the “Mission: Impossible 2” trailers. The dangerousness of the stunts would turn out to be a pattern for the “Mission: Impossible” film series which now regularly features real-life stunts that Cruise insists on performing himself. Most recently, for “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning,” Cruise drove a motorcycle off a cliff and deployed a parachute to save himself.
The next film in the series, “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” is due in theaters on May 23, 2025. We know from early reports that Cruise will spend some time in that film dangling off of an airborne biplane.
