The Peculiar Joy of Watching Tom Cruise Jump From the Sky

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The most entertaining part of what we will call the Tom Cruise Movement of the Paris Olympics Closing Ceremony wasn’t so much the stunts. The live jump into the Stade de France was unremarkable for an event that had performers dropping from great heights all evening, and the prerecorded leap out of an airplane into Los Angeles didn’t quite have the razzle-dazzle of what he’s done in movies like Mission: Impossible — Fallout. Rather, it was the live moment — orchestrated, certainly — that immediately followed his arrival in the stadium, as Cruise walked through a gauntlet of Olympic athletes eager to hug, high-five, and take selfies with him. The actor is an old hand at red carpets by now, but he seemed genuinely surprised and charmed by this outpouring of love. How appropriate for the times we live in that people who achieve incredible feats of power and speed in real life would be so starstruck by someone who does them onscreen. It made some kind of thematic sense too. Cruise was there to carry the flag from Paris to Los Angeles, and this was an intriguing (and very Hollywood) reminder from the organizers of the upcoming 2028 Summer Olympics that while superhuman athletic achievement is nice and everything, celebrity trumps all.

I must admit, I found this whole spectacle strangely moving. It wasn’t so long ago that Cruise’s career seemed to be in free fall. We don’t need to spend much time on the sordid details — the notorious couch jump, the Matt Lauer interview, the Brooke Shields contretemps, the secretive and messy divorces, the Scientology of it all — but back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, it really did seem like American moviegoers (as well as critics, who had always kept him at a bit of a distance) had had enough of Cruise. Internationally, he remained a big draw, but Stateside he was becoming poison. If he hadn’t held onto some form of domestic box-office viability through the Mission: Impossible movies … who knows? He might be starring in on-demand action flicks and Exorcist pictures now.

That’s where stunts come in. This might be hard to remember, but Cruise hasn’t always been a stunt guy. He hadn’t even been an action guy. Sure, he enjoyed riding motorcycles and flying planes and all that stuff, but before the premiere of the first Mission: Impossible in 1996, there was a real question as to whether he could carry an action movie that didn’t feature fighter jets. There was a lot of buzz around him doing his own climbing during the opening sequence of Mission: Impossible 2, but that was just his character Ethan Hunt relaxing, and free climbing was one of Cruise’s favorite sports.

The Watch Tom Do Stunts thing really kicked into high gear in 2011, with Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol and its now-immortal sequence atop and around and alongside and occasionally inside the Burj Khalifa. Importantly, this film came out shortly after a yearslong string of PR disasters for the actor, starting with his chaotic press tour for War of the Worlds. Stunts allowed Cruise to claw his way back into audiences’ good graces. These feats demanded attention because they had become increasingly elaborate and deadly: Tom Cruise hanging on the outside of a plane as it takes off. Tom Cruise running vertically down the tallest building in the world. Tom Cruise hanging off a helicopter then free-falling down the tow line. There was a quality of self-punishment to these actions. They came at just the right time and in just the right manner for this seemingly fallen movie star: They allowed him to suffer onscreen for our entertainment, and slowly win back the good will he had lost.

For those of us who witnessed this bizarre, one-of-a-kind, decades-long roller-coaster ride, it’s been enthralling to watch. And it’s hard not to see symbolism, be it real or imagined, everywhere in Sunday night’s event with Tom Cruise as the avatar of an international flag handoff. It kicked off in France with the adoration of athletes from the world over, a kind of acknowledgement of how Cruise remained popular overseas even as American audiences turned away from him. But then he biked down the streets of Paris, got on that plane, and sky-dived into Los Angeles, the sequence (at least the Cruise part) ending on one final, sublime crane shot of him standing atop the Hollywood sign. The last true movie star was back home.