Cruise control locked in for the long run

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This article was published 31/05/2025 (505 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, now playing at a multiplex near you, is the latest entry in a franchise that started way back in 1996. While these blockbuster flicks are ostensibly about the high-stakes missions of crack espionage operative Ethan Hunt, at the most profound and elemental level, the eight M:I movies are about Tom Cruise running.

Of course, he also climbs, dives, parachutes, rides motorcycles, clings to airplane wings, pilots helicopters and jumps off cliffs, but the simplest, purest expression of Cruise’s superstar persona, of his cinematic embodiment of relentless physical intensity, has to be those iconic, repeated, seemingly contractually obligated running sequences.

You can find supercuts of “Tom Cruise Running” on YouTube, the longest now clocking in at almost 19 minutes.

There are videos devoted to charting the evolution of his running style from 1981’s Taps (arms all anyhow, knees a bit slack) to his current preferred approach (compressed, precise, palms slicing the air like knives).

There’s a hardcore fan on Reddit who has listed, described and ranked 295 Tom Cruise Running scenes, from casual jogs to life-and-death sprints.

There are online forums where runners and trainers and kinesiologists weigh in, analyzing his form. “He’s actually very inefficient and expends a lot of energy with his short choppy stride and tense upper body,” carps one observer, while others praises his “high cadence,” “core stability” and “good knee lift.”

There are deep statistical dives into how Cruise’s running time correlates to critical response and ticket sales. Rotten Tomatoes recently got out the pedometer and crunched the numbers to determine that the more Tom Cruise runs in a movie, the higher its RT score and the bigger its box office take.

There are some Tom Cruise Running buffs who like his duck-and-weave stuff — when he’s dodging bullets, explosions, aliens, oncoming cars — viewing it as more expressive, more varied, more unpredictable. But purists tend to prefer the laser-like straight-line sprints, with the furious propulsion of the legs contrasting so effectively with the strange suspended stillness of the upper body.

This is certainly the most characteristic and cinematic expression of the Cruise mystique — when he’s running with hyper-focused force through some international locale, intense, unstoppable and alone, in an unalloyed distillation of physical will.

Cruise gets one of these sequences — of course he does — in this latest M:I movie, racing through an eerily empty London street on his way to save the entire planet. And while we can talk about how Tom runs in 2025 — his form still looks terrific — maybe we should also talk about why.

Often billed as “The Last Movie Star,” the 62-year-old Cruise seems to be trying to outrun time.

This notion is borne out by the data journalism. Rotten Tomatoes, reporting that Cruise has covered “over 32,444 feet on screen throughout his 44 years,” adds that the older he gets, the more he runs. “He covered almost the same amount of ground in 2006’s Mission: Impossible III (3,212 feet) as he did in the entirety of the 1980s (12 movies, 3,299 feet run), and five of his top 10 running films were released after 2010 — the year he turned 48.”

That tracks. As an actor, Cruise will never be known for intellectual introspection or layered emotional work. He’s a star because of his physical, kinetic energy and charisma, his discipline and dedication, his loony insistence on doing his own daring, even dangerous stunts.

And because his brand is his body, Cruise has become, in recent years, even more intent on proving it’s still functioning at peak levels. The Final Reckoning has triphibian action set-pieces, testing Cruise’s speed, strength and endurance on land, air and water. On top of the running scenes, there’s a biplane dogfight over a South African mountain range and a frigid, silent, dark diving scene in the Bering Strait. There’s also an obligatory underwear fight sequence, just to strip things down to essentials.

As Cruise runs more and more, his Ethan Hunt character has also changed, morphing from super-spy to superhero to — ultimately — a kind of demigod. In this latest instalment, Ethan Hunt is the only one who can save humankind. He suffers, dies and is resurrected for all of us. He is positioned as more than a man — he is a messianic figure, a manifestation of destiny, a force of nature.

The Final Reckoning, which spends so much time on callbacks, recaps and fan-service montages, also feels like an elegiac adieu to this almost three-decade-old franchise, which started when Cruise was 33.

Actors respond to this kind of hinge-point in their careers in different ways. Sometimes they shift from leading-man roles to craggy character parts. Sometimes they subvert their onetime action-man legacies with comic spoofs or poignant counterpoints.

I don’t see Tom Cruise doing any of these things. And maybe that’s the way it should be.

When I consider his post Mission: Impossible filmography, I imagine him running, running, always running, toward a distant horizon line.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca