Summary
- Pom Klementieff trained extensively for her role in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, learning various fighting techniques and doing interval training to ensure she was physically prepared for the intense action scenes.
- Tom Cruise’s dedication to realism and danger in the fight scenes is evident in the movie. He wants the action to feel grounded and not just flashy, ensuring that the fights are gritty and scary.
- The fight scenes in Dead Reckoning Part One have been praised as some of the best in the Mission: Impossible franchise. The well-choreographed sequences, involving Klementieff’s character Paris and other characters, contribute to the film’s positive reviews.
Warning: SPOILERS lie ahead for Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One
Even as the stunts have increased in intensity, Pom Klementieff shares how Tom Cruise’s dedication extended to Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One‘s fight scenes. Klementieff stars in the latest installment of the action franchise as Paris, an assassin working for the movie’s main villain, Gabriel, who frequently goes toe to toe with Cruise’s Ethan Hunt. The end of the movie sees Gabriel cut ties with Paris, assuming she would betray him and give Hunt the information he needs to put a stop to the Entity, which she does in response to Gabriel’s betrayal.
Prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike, JoBlo caught up with Pom Klementieff to discuss Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One. In discussing her work with Tom Cruise, the Paris actor shared her praise for the franchise star/producer’s dedication to the movie’s action, namely his intense fight scene direction, to the extent of even editing scenes in his head during production. See what Klementieff details below:
I trained for months and months with Wade Eastwood, who’s the stunt coordinator, with the whole stunt team on kicking and punching. I also did some katana training, and training with a stick (for her big fight with Cruise). I also trained with Sam Eastwood on interval training, including some sprints uphill to make sure that I was explosive and that I could go hard and still have stamina. I also did some Pilates training. (You do that) to make sure that your core is strong, that your ankles are strong because, you know, it’s very important in an action movie, especially in a shoot that is long for your whole body to be strong and to be balanced. I was training for years before with a martial artist called Jessen Noviello, who taught me how to punch, how to kick and how to do that for a movie as well. Because when you box or when you fight in real life, it’s not the same as when you do it for a movie. You have to change the angles of the kicks or of the punches, depending on where the camera is, and all the angles and how to sell the hit. What is harder sometimes is how to receive a hit. We love stylized fights too, and we wanted to add some high kicks and things like that because I’ve been training that for years. But Tom always wants the action to be grounded in reality and not to be just flourishes. He wants it to feel real and to feel dangerous, you know, so that’s what we went for in the alleyway fight and for something that was, you know, gritty and scary. At some point, there’s like some shots that I’m almost a creature from a horror movie. It’s amazing to work with him. He’s so skilled. He’s so generous. He’s so inspiring and professional. It’s just amazing to work with him. So I learned a lot, and I had so much fun doing it too because he’s also very funny and very nice. We had a great time, and he’s incredibly good at what he does. It’s how his brain works. He’s editing the shots, like what he needs and what is left to shoot and which angle. So he’s doing everything at the same time, fighting, acting, producing, and editing in his head. It’s just, wow. Incredible.
Editor’s Note: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, and the movie covered here would not exist without the labor of the writers and actors in both unions.
How Dead Reckoning Part One Improved Mission: Impossible’s Action
Across its seven movies, the Mission: Impossible franchise has become synonymous with large-scale stunts done by Cruise, going from the vault heist of the original movie to climbing an in-flight helicopter and subsequently piloting it himself for a chase scene in Fallout. Much of Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One‘s marketing has centered on Cruise’s daring cliff jump from a motorcycle that transitions into a low-altitude parachute onto a moving train, as well as a fast-paced car chase through the streets of Rome.
Packed in the midst of these death-defying stunts were thrilling fight scenes that critics have hailed to be some of the best in the franchise. Mission: Impossible — Fallout saw Christopher McQuarrie step up the franchise’s hand-to-hand combat scenes with the celebrated bathroom fight between Ethan, Henry Cavill’s Walker and Liang Yang’s John Lark decoy, complete with the arm reload motion from the former Superman actor.
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One continued this improvement with a variety of well-choreographed fight scenes that proved to be the best yet for the franchise, including multiple close-quarters combat sequences involving Klementieff’s Paris, both against Ethan and other goons. Esai Morales’ Gabriel also takes part in multiple pulse-pounding fights that, paired with McQuarrie and Cruise’s visions, make it easy to understand why it’s one of Cruise’s best-reviewed movies in his extensive filmography.
Source: JoBlo
Key Release Date
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two
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