Tom Cruise is truly a guilty pleasure and a paradox. He should have at least been nominated for an Academy Award for “Risky Business” in 1983.  It was his landmark film. Since then he’s been in some very good films
and some stinkers too (The Mummy” (2017). Otherwise he’s never got an award bigger than being nominated for a Golden Globe.Nominated for an Oscar three times, won zero. His “Mission Impossible” franchise is good enough to be entertaining but he’s really now known for doing incredible stunts and getting away with most of them at his age, including breaking his ankle on an impossible building-to-building jump.

Accordingly, in this latest edition, he does some really wild and
dangerous stunts, including the aforementioned jump that shattered his
ankle; he ran on it to get past the camera. Wildly riding a motorcycle
weaving through the streets of Paris (yes, that’s him) then hitting the
fender of a car head-on with a motorcycle, sailing over the hood and
bouncing/rolling on-camera. I knew that hurt. Free climbing a
straight-up cliff wall. High altitude-low opening aircraft jump for
which Cruise trained for a year. Climbing a rope to a helicopter belly
at thousands of feet.

It’s a guilty pleasure because the stunts, action and beautiful locales
are worth the price of a 3 D ticket. Each of these stunts you can
instantly recognize Tom. It’s pretty amazing at age 56. The action
scenes are really incredible, difficult to imagine how they did them
(computers, of course) especially the helicopter scenes which are just
insane. The locations where these stunts take place are amazingly
picturesque and shot on real locations. While the movie’s final portion
is set in the Kashmir region in India, which is primarily situated in
the Himalayas, its on-location filming took place entirely in New
Zealand and Norway, both of which feature more dramatic mountainous
backdrops. mThe cars are BMW M-series, I think the M5 (F90) which had
not been seen on public roads. Cruise’s ride in a fabulous BMW R nineT,
a custom machine with everything, and great looks too.

So, in the end, this is not only a serious thriller with massive effects
and beautiful locale, it’s a Tom Cruise masterpiece. It’s a little long
and some of the ploy raveling and unraveling very quickly is hard to
follow but it’s definitely a delight. See it in 3 D. 22 years of Mission
Impossible.

I give it four and a half classic BMW scramblers. Must see