The clock was ticking on Thursday, May 22, as Tom Cruise stopped in Deep Ellum for a sampler plate of beef ribs, brisket, sausage and turkey at Pecan Lodge before sliding into a shiny black vehicle and heading to an early evening screening of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning at the Webb Chapel Cinemark, but by 7:40 p.m., he was bounding down the staircase of the AMC NorthPark to greet fans, only to dash back up to a fourth-floor red carpet, which he walked with Pro Football Hall of Famer Emmitt Smith and a phalanx of Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, and by 8:06 p.m., he waltzed to the front of the theater’s IMAX, looking fresh-faced and fashionable, and how he did this — in rush-hour traffic, dodging gawkers and social media hounds the whole way — is a feat to dazzle his alter-ego Ethan Hunt.
“Hello,” said Tom Cruise, holding up one hand, the I-come-in-peace gesture. He marveled at the film’s towering promotional image of a yellow WWII-era biplane projected behind him. “That’s a big screen.”
He stood with director Christopher McQuarrie, a dapper gentleman who had entered the AMC much earlier, to a bit less enthusiasm. “Who’s that?” asked the guy beside me in the polite crush of about 200 spectators waiting for a different star’s arrival.
The news that Tom Cruise — the Tom Cruise, “the Man,” Emmitt Smith called him in a brief introduction — would be coming to Dallas as part of a globe-trotting promotional tour for the eighth and (allegedly!) final installment of Mission: Impossible had been lighting up social media for days. The location was never publicly announced, but internet sleuths had followed the trail to NorthPark.
“I’ve been here since 1:30,” said a woman who’d driven from Wills Point. She bought two tickets for a chance to wait in the lobby in case The Man showed.
The NorthPark scene was a series of velvet ropes: The ticket counter on the second floor near Urban Outfitters had to be crossed to ride the escalator to the theater’s third-floor lobby, where a less exclusive red carpet was set up for influencers and North Texas personalities. (The fourth-floor red carpet was roped off. No fans allowed.)
The onlookers craned their heads to watch minor celebrities arrive, including Miss Texas Taylor Davis, Chris Sapphire from The Circle, America’s Sweethearts star and Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader Reece Weaver, whose black mini-dress had an Audrey Hepburn flair that normies ired as she stood in line with her husband.
Near the concessions, I was chatting with former Grey’s Anatomy star Isaiah Washington, recent Dallas transplant, when a roar erupted, and he clapped a hand on my shoulder.
“Tom’s here,” he said.
Hollywood vs. the internet
The whooping and shrieking lasted for minutes, even though Cruise’s appearance had been the blink of an eye. He was upstairs now, working the other red carpet, though fans still pointed iPhones up the stairwell, hoping for another glimpse. Patient ushers tried to corral ticket holders to their seats, as stoic cops negotiated the fans, presumably having attended some other, less star-studded movie.
The 7:50 p.m. screening had not been listed on the AMC website, likely because it was filled with folks who’d been given tickets. Mark Cuban shuffled to his seat not far from Courtney Kerr Noonan, who once had a reality show called Courtney Loves Dallas. The vibe inside the IMAX theater was calmer than the throng outside. When Emmitt Smith strutted before the audience in a sharp black jacket, white shirt opened at the collar, he razzed us for being too tame.
“You guys are here to watch this great movie, and you’re quiet? Make some more noise!”
It was an unremarked-upon standoff — the actor who had come to save Hollywood and the horde of internet-famous celebrities posing one of the many risks to that once-dominant monoculture. I found myself wishing the woman from Wills Point had been ushered inside, especially after I counted 13 walkouts before the film was over. Several chairs near my seat in the back row remained empty as the director and star warmed up the audience.
“Nothing makes us happier than a big full movie theater with everybody coming to see movies on the big screen,” said McQuarrie, as Cruise clapped in approval.
“It’s just such a real honor to be able to entertain ya,” Cruise said, in his regular-guy, I-just-make-movies voice. He gestured once more to the screen, which — as I looked closer — featured Cruise dangling off the side of the plane. “Everyone worked very hard for your pleasure, so I hope you have a big smile afterwards.”
And with that, the perhaps final Mission: Impossible began.
The last movie star
Tom Cruise is the last movie star. I know others remain — Leo, Brad, George — but none has his staying power, his perennial box-office domination, leapfrogging from summer blockbusters to Oscar bait to action franchises to kinky psycho-sexual dramas (well, Eyes Wide Shut) like a man navigating the moving cars of a enger train.
At 62 — technically the age you can start drawing Social Security — Cruise is more than four decades into this gig, not bad for a kid from Syracuse, N.Y. There is a monastic quality to his work as one of Hollywood’s finest, an iron-clad discipline of “no comment” and cold plunges and hyperbaric oxygen therapy to outrun Father Time. He is not a sex symbol, unlike Leo and his rotating cast of 20-something models, or Brad and his bare chest.
Tom Cruise is an enigma, a throwback to the way Hollywood used to be. Yes, he had a streak evangelizing for Scientology (also an enigma), but he shut that down years ago, not long after he nearly broke his career jumping on Oprah’s couch. More recently, he’s been all-business, which is to say the business of entertainment. In an age when everyone has an opinion, Tom Cruise stays mum.
“Tom Cruise Shuts Down Tariffs Talk at ‘Mission: Impossible’ Press Event: ‘We’d Rather Answer Questions About the Movie,’” read a headline in The Hollywood Reporter about an event in Seoul.
“I need y’all to realize THIS is how he eats popcorn,” wrote a on Twitter/X, adding a video taken during the star’s appearance at the BFI IMAX in London, where he stood near the audience — dark suit, white shirt unbuttoned, that magnificent mane of brown hair — tossing tiny fistfuls of the salty snack into his mouth, over and over again, with such dainty proficiency he looked like a GIF.
“He eats popcorn like Jigsaw from SAW just gave him 2 minutes to finish the tub of popcorn or else Ana de Armas dies,” read one comment.
Who is the real Tom Cruise? Does anyone know? He was a machine built for cinema’s late-golden years: the symmetrical face, the compact body, the cocky charm, the stunts performed by him. So the prospect of the actual Tom Cruise — bounding up a mall staircase tread by suburban moms and bored teens, standing before an audience slurping sodas and cocktails — was mind-boggling.
What was he doing in the audience? He belongs on-screen.
The fatherless man-boy turned father
Tom Cruise had come to save the movies. Not simply the entertainment industry, which needed the help, but the experience of live cinema-going, uninterrupted by ads or pesky phone calls. Mission: Impossible was shot for IMAX, a perk not yet available in app form. The whirlwind multicity promotional tour was an argument not merely for seeing movies but going to them.
The existential threat of AI and the distraction of smartphones has been a foe Hollywood can’t seem to defeat. During the pandemic, Top Gun: Maverick so saved the industry’s bacon that Steven Spielberg publicly thanked Cruise. The seventh Mission: Impossible installment had the misfortune of falling into our 2023 Barbenheimer summer, but Dead Reckoning Part One raked in more than $500 million globally, a monster hit. Tom Cruise loves movies, and the magic of movie theaters, and he is our movie father — even though he actually hasn’t played that many dads.
As an actor, Cruise specialized in being fatherless, much like he was in real life, after his mom fled from the father Cruise called “a bully and a coward.” In Top Gun and The Color of Money and Rain Man and Jerry Maguire, he played a man-boy striving to overcome this parental deficit, whether it was an estranged father or an absent father or a father gone too soon. Like Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter, he was forced into the world without the gentle but firm presence of a good strong dad. He is now a dad himself, with three kids, though we don’t hear much about them, because he wisely shut that particular door.
For those of us who grew up in thrall to the silver screen, sneaking into R-rated movies at the cineplex, kicking our Converses onto the seat in front of us, plastic tub of Diet Coke in arm’s reach, Milk Duds and Twizzlers and Reese’s Pieces smuggled in from the 7-Eleven (sorry, AMC) — Tom Cruise is very much a cinematic father figure.
Go to the movies, our movie father is telling us. Boom, we’re here.
‘This was your calling’
Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning is nearly three hours of Cirque du Soleil stunts and dazzling shots in a variety of locales. Underwater, overhead, inside a ring of fire.
This movie is not for me, a hopelessly verbal woman with a tendency to doze during protracted action sequences. A partial transcript of my notes reads:
“Russian submarine. Angela Bassett is the president. Fate of the human race. Inuit fisherman. Hyperbaric decompression chamber. Bering Sea. The Entity. This fighter-plane action sequence is making me motion sick.”
“Wasn’t that amazing?” exclaimed one woman, after the film ended. America is a great place. We all get to choose.
I won’t tell you how the movie ends. But at one point, Tom Cruise falls through space, and he keeps falling, falling, disappearing into cloud cover, his parachute burning up on with — I’m no meteorologist, but the Earth’s atmosphere? I thought, This is why we need Tom Cruise. Action heroes do the impossible, unbound by the limits of physics and biology and politics and rush-hour traffic and the very sordid mess of being human.
“This was your calling, your destiny,” says a character’s voice-over near the end of the film. “The world still needs you.” The guy was talking about Ethan Hunt, super spy, savior of the universe.
He could have been talking about Tom Cruise.