How a forgotten Kurt Russell movie beat ‘Mission: Impossible’ at its own game by three decades
Whether it’s Tom Cruise scaling the Burj Khalifa in Ghost Protocol or breaking the Guinness World Record for ‘the most burning parachute jumps by an individual’ on the set of The Final Reckoning, the Mission: Impossible series has broken new ground again and again, with spectacular results.
One of the most suspenseful of these sequences takes place towards the end of 2023’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, in which Cruise and Hayley Atwell’s characters are stuck in a train that is dangling off the edge of a mangled bridge, and they have to race through carriages while sliding downward, sometimes climbing hand-over-hand to get to the next one. By the end, they are clinging from fixtures on the walls and the ceiling with the open end of the carriage revealing the vast chasm below.
It’s hair-raising stuff, and exactly the sort of adrenaline rush that has made the series popular, despite containing dialogues that sound like they were generated by the first iteration of ChatGPT.
However, nearly 30 years before Dead Reckoning, a mid-budget Kurt Russell movie did a nearly identical sequence with a lot less CGI and a lot higher emotional stakes: allow me to introduce you to Breakdown, a 1997 thriller about a suburban couple who get stranded on a highway in the middle of the desert when their car breaks down.
There are many things that make this film superior to the Mission: Impossible franchise, where, for one thing, it preys on very pedestrian fears. After hitching a ride with a seemingly friendly truck driver to call for assistance, Russell’s wife, played by Kathleen Quinlan, is abducted and brutalised. With no one he can trust and stuck in the middle of nowhere, he is forced to hunt down her captors and try to rescue her, sans AI overlords or megalomaniacs seeking global annihilation.
At the end of the film, Russell and Quinlan escape the deathtrap of the truck driver’s home, but find themselves in a breakneck car chase, with the trucker, played by JT Walsh, bearing down on them in his behemoth of a vehicle, smashing their car into the side of a bridge running across a dizzying gorge. Russell leaps from his vehicle into the truck and begins sparring with Walsh, only for the front of the truck to plunge over the side of the bridge and dangle like a fish on a hook, hundreds of metres from the rocky ground and certain death.
The ensuing fist-fight/hand-over-hand climb up through the inside of the truck is as tense and terrifying as the Dead Reckoning scene, but with two key differences. The first is that there is no detectable CGI, the physical exhaustion, sweat, and peril palpable, probably because the scene was really effing hard to realise. There is no need to create a computer-generated background or flying train detritus, as the simplicity is what makes it nail-biting; in fact, the lack of noise (visually and otherwise) makes it feel like a horror movie, where every creak of the truck is tantamount to a jump-scare.
The second difference is that you actually care about the characters. Neither Russell’s character nor Quinlan’s repeatedly survives certain death the way Mission: Impossible protagonists do, and instead are so battered and traumatised by the past 24 hours that you believe that the stress alone might kill them.
Breakdown might not have broken any stunt records or dominated at the box office, and for whatever reason, it is rarely mentioned these days, but it stands the test of time as one of the leanest, meanest, most stressful thrillers of the ‘90s. And while I’m not going to argue that Mission: Impossible cribbed that entire sequence from it, I do think it’s worth going back and comparing them, for the results speak for themselves.
