No, it wasn’t a scene from “Mission: Impossible.” Tom Cruise, one of Hollywood’s most well-known movie stars, rappelled down into the Stade de France as H.E.R. played guitar, and the crowd of Olympians went wild as Paris handed over to the next Summer Games, in Los Angeles. He accepted the Olympic flag, shook a lot of hands, jumped on a motorcycle, and drove right out of the stadium and into prerecorded footage.
It’s hard to imagine a more apt melding of the Olympics’ awe-inducing athleticism and Hollywood’s showy sensibility than Cruise, who, at 62, still famously loves to perform as many of his own “Mission: Impossible” stunts as feasible in the film series.