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What's the coolest stunt Tom Cruise has pulled off over the course of his 29 years of "Mission: Impossible" movies? Would it be the spectacular climb up (and run back down) the side of Dubai's Burj Khalifa skyscraper in the fourth film, "Ghost Protocol"? Or maybe the high-flying motorcycle/parachute leap in the seventh one, "Dead Reckoning"? Or, quite possibly, the lightning-lashed jump-plane bailout very high over Paris in "Fallout," the sixth picture in the (till now, maybe) never-ending series.

If you asked me, I'd say the best of Cruise's many extreme-stunt set pieces -- best because it was the first and remains iconic -- is still the CIA computer vault break-in in the 1996 "Mission: Impossible," the movie that launched the franchise. As shot by the series' inaugural director, Brian De Palma, this sequence quivers with tension -- still job one for a "Mission" flick. Cruise, in his starring role as Ethan Hunt of the Impossible Missions Force, is being hunted as a turncoat killer, and we see him being lowered by cable into a heavily secured archive room to retrieve a crucial bit of intel. The mission is going sort of well, so he's not expecting the cable to suddenly slip, which sends him plummeting downward. Fortunately, at the very last moment, he's yanked to a halt when the cable reengages, leaving him floating facedown just inches above the floor.

De Palma, a veteran suspense master, stages and edits this scene for maximum nail-biting anxiety. What really sets it apart in the "M:I" world, though, is its crisp, clean style, its visual snap. The director positions Cruise in a minimalist white room in his black T-shirt and jeans, dangling in the air, silently terrified, and the image registers instantly as classic. This attention to artful design has engorged a bit in the years since that first picture helped update the Bond film for a new generation. Hunt's subsequent adventures have steadily evolved into something else -- documents of Cruise's determination to do his own stunt work, no matter how life-threatening it might seem. His elaborate dedication to this mission has, for better or worse, become a franchise of its own.

The new "Final Reckoning" is baited in its trailers with yet another knockout stunt sequence. This one involves a pair of vintage biplanes like the ones featured in traveling air-circuses of the 1920s, with Cruise climbing around on the fuselage of one, outside the cockpit, with the wind whipping through his hair and flubbering his face, and hanging on desperately to a wing as the plane rolls over and starts flying upside down -- all of this while a South African landscape rushes by down below.

I can't deny that Cruise is more copiously endowed with courage than, say, me. However, it's difficult to imagine an insurance company that would bond one of Hollywood's biggest stars if he announced an intention to endanger his life for real, without taking extensive technical precautions. I also note the presence in the film's credits of more than 50 stunt people and a virtual battalion of effects specialists. So who knows? However it may have been that director Christopher McQuarrie (back for his fourth "Mission: Impossible" go-round) managed to assemble the biplane sequence, the thrills he built into it feel real enough.

Hunt also spends an extensive amount of time deep in the frigid Bering Sea on a mission to retrieve the source code for the Entity -- the out-of-control AI introduced in the last film, now on the verge of destroying the world. Hunt is opposed in this undertaking by butt-kick girl Paris (Pom Klementieff) and the not-especially-menacing villain Gabriel (played again by Esai Morales as if he were an extra-snooty maitre d' preparing to cut your rejected credit card in half). And he's once more supported by his intrepid IMF team of Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), as well as the wily pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell), who's on hand this time solely to provide whiffs of mild, PG-13 romance.

The story wanders and wobbles toward the end, and as it refuses to conclude, you wonder why the filmmakers couldn't rein the movie in from its punishing runtime of nearly three hours. Each of the first three "Mission: Impossible" films was about one hour shorter than this one. Do hardcore fans care about such things? Well, the last installment of the franchise, which also ran nearly three hours, took a substantial box-office hit. So maybe.

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To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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