Some series have legs and some, like Mission: Impossible, the adventure spy franchise helmed by action star Tom Cruise, have calves of steel. The long-running franchise will be almost 30 years old by the time the second chapter of its new two-parter hits screens in 2024. So perhaps it’s inevitable that some scenarios make their way back onto the screen for chapter seven.
But that’s okay, this action sequence looks more like a call back to the series’ original movie, filmed way back in 1996, than blatant recycling.
The first film had a host of memorable sequences including the film’s memorable heist sequence where Cruise’s Ethan Hunt suspends himself by wires to copy a file locked away in an NSA vault. But the true set-piece of the movie is the final action scene which features Hunt fighting Jon Voight’s Jim Phelps atop a TGV bullet train.
And now, twenty-six years later, it appears that we’re going to get a new train sequence but in a low-tech take. The first trailer for Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One shows Hunt getting into yet another train fight, but this time he’s going retro. The film’s trailer shows Cruise and his cadre of allies (and perhaps foes) fighting in a luxury Orient Express type train and, Tom Cruise being Tom Cruise, the fighting moves from the luxurious vintage interiors to the very top of the moving train as Hunt takes on the film’s new antagonist played by Esai Morales.
It may not feature an exploding helicopter sequence as in the first film, but you can bet that the sequence will go appropriately and excitingly off the rails — quite literally. And while the train might not be going quite the same speed as the original bullet train, Cruise certainly doesn’t show any signs that Ethan Hunt is slowing down for the franchise’s seventh (and eighth) installment.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is scheduled for release on July 14, 2023.