Impossible – Dead Car Chase – Miscellaneous

Courtesy of Paramount

Ethan Hunt clearly didn’t want to die of natural causes.

The IMF agent is back in action in “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1,” and based on footage provided by Paramount to CinemaCon on Thursday, his alter ego Tom Cruise once again puts it in service of keeping audiences on the edge of their seats. In the past, Cruz has hung on the sides of skyscrapers and airplanes. This time, Cruz is riding a motorcycle off a cliff…you know, like one does to save the world.

And in a 20-minute sequence shown to Las Vegas movie theater owners Thursday, he and Hayley Atwell, playing a mysterious agent, evade many different adversaries while driving at breakneck speed through the streets and alleys of Rome — even the Spanish. The steps appear. To make things even more tense, Cruz and Atwell are tied up during most of the chase, causing them to hop on motorcycles, police cars, and junkyard hit cars and dispose of them.

The drawn-out scene looks like Cruise’s effort to headline such iconic pursuits as those in “The French Connection” and “Bullitt,” all while the Colosseum looms on the horizon. The audience at Caesars Palace seemed to dig what was on offer, gasping, clapping, laughing (yes, it’s often funny) along with every hairpin turn.

Cruz did not attend CinemaCon in person, as he had in previous installments. He’s been busy working on Dead Reckoning Part Two (and risking God knows any form of physical harm). After the presentation, Paramount executives gathered on speakers in the theater foyer at Caesars Palace to reassure Cruise that the sequence had been a hit with audiences. They also made sure to let him know that they had let the audience know that the 20 minutes they showed weren’t the first part of the movie.

Christopher McQuarrie, who directed the previous two “Mission: Impossible” films, returns, as does ensemble members Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Ving Rhames and Vanessa Kirby. This is to say nothing of the menacing presence of Henry Czerny, the mysterious government agent who hunted Hunt and his crew in the opening 1996 Mission: Impossible.

The studio opened “Mission: Impossible – Reckoning Part 1” on July 14. During Paramount’s CinemaCon presentation, the studio also showed off trailers and footage from “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” and “Transformers: Rise of the Monsters.” CinemaCon is the exhibition industry’s annual trade show that kicks off this week in Las Vegas. Attendees saw presentations from all the major studios, including Warner Bros. And Sony, Disney, and Universal.