On Camera, Narrow Escape For Pillion As Bike Crashes Into Stream

If you thought only Tom Cruise could push the limits with his stunts in Mission: Impossible films, strap up because you are in for a ride. A Vietnamese man left social media flabbergasted with his brilliantly timed jump to escape a bike crash. And the move was straight out of a Hollywood action flick.
In a video shared on X, three men are seen riding a motorcycle, which approaches a bridge at high speed. At the crossroads, a van appears from the other side, and the rider loses control of the vehicle. To avoid hitting the van, he decides to plunge the bike into the stream flowing underneath the bridge.
Since the two-wheeler nearly brushed the bridge's fence, the third man jumped just in the nick of time. He held on to the iron fence, pulling off a miraculous save, reminding people on the internet of something they had only seen in the movies.
He's definitely Tom Cruise's stunt double! pic.twitter.com/PV6Ldeo6VH
— The Figen (@TheFigen_) May 31, 2025
Many in the comments section praised his presence of mind.
One of the users said the man in the video "pulled a Mission: Impossible move", while the one seated in the middle was "still buffering".
That guy pulled a Mission Impossible move while the dude in the middle is still buffering ???? pic.twitter.com/BGdW9Q2qG3
— Nikkhil (@nikkhil23) June 1, 2025
"Bro doesn't have reflexes. Reflexes have him," said another.
Bro doesn't have reflexes. Reflexes have him.
— Sunderdeep - Volklub (@volklub) May 31, 2025
"He was really smooth. Didn't want to get his feet wet," read another comment.
— The Pied Piper for X (@piedpiperofx2) May 31, 2025
In February, a video of a skydiver suffering a mid-air seizure during a free fall went viral. The clip showed the skydiver losing control and spiralling uncontrollably while unconscious. But moments later, a fellow skydiver-instructor manoeuvred through the air to reach him. The rescuer then stabilised the skydiver's descent and deployed their parachute just in time, averting a fatal disaster.

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Hindustan Times

2 hours ago

• Hindustan Times

Tom Cruise to receive honorary Oscar: Is a competitive win still possible?

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Time of India

4 hours ago

• Time of India

US strikes Iran: How Tom Cruise's Top Gun: Maverick eerily predicted Donald Trump's Operation Midnight Hammer

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Beer without guilt. Bros being bros in the golden light of American masculinity. Maverick didn't just bring back a movie—it brought back a memory. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Eat 1 Teaspoon Every Night, See What Happens A Week Later [Video] getfittoday Undo Of the good old days, before drone warfare, before greyzone psyops, before movies needed three disclaimers and a trigger warning. A time when war was sexy, the rules were simple, and the only labels that mattered were 'friendly' and 'bogey on your six.' Second, it was real. Practical stunts. Real G-forces. No Marvel mush or green-screen gibberish. You felt every dive, every roll, every breath in a cockpit that looked more like a coffin. In an age of CGI fatigue, Maverick reminded viewers what cinema used to feel like—sweaty palms and pounding heartbeats, set to the scream of a jet engine. 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Glen Powell's Hangman was Iceman 2.0: arrogant, tanned, and ready to drop a snide remark along with his payload. Jennifer Connelly was there too, ageless and cool, running a bar where no one talks politics. No lectures. No apologies. Just call signs, dogfights, and sweat-drenched montages scored to the sound of American confidence. Reagan Redux: Top Gun Was Always Propaganda Top Gun (1986) Official Trailer - Tom Cruise Movie The 1986 Top Gun wasn't just a movie—it was Cold War propaganda with better hair. The Pentagon handed over carriers, jets, and script suggestions. Hollywood returned the favour by air-dropping a generation of recruits into Navy flight school. It was recruitment wrapped in romance and set to guitar riffs. Maverick followed the same flight path. The military offered full support. The Navy looked like gods. But this time, there was a twist: the enemy was unnamed. No Soviet MiGs. No al-Qaeda. Just a faceless rogue nation with a uranium facility in the mountains. The target? An underground enrichment site. The mission? Destroy it before it becomes operational. The threat? Not to America—but to our unnamed "allies in the region." Nobody said Iran. Nobody said Israel. And yet everybody knew. That narrative sleight of hand—so brazen in its vagueness—would soon feel less like creative license and more like strategic foreshadowing. Scene for Scene: Trump's Iran Strike Mirrors the Film In June 2025, President Trump—new term, same instincts—ordered a real-world operation that bore eerie resemblance to Maverick. Seven B-2 bombers took off from the US under the cloak of midnight. The mission: Operation Midnight Hammer. The target: Iran's Fordow uranium enrichment facility, buried in the mountains near Qom. A site designed to withstand everything short of Armageddon. A site built for this very moment. In Maverick, the enemy is never named, but the target is clear: a uranium plant in a GPS-jammed valley, surrounded by surface-to-air missiles and fifth-gen fighters. In real life, Fordow sits in a mountainous fortress, shielded by SAM batteries, jamming tech, and hardened bunkers. In the film: three weeks become ten days become go-time. In reality: intel warned that Iran's enrichment programme was just days from a critical threshold. And in both cases, the justification was identical: not America-first, but ally-defence. In Maverick, it's the vague protection of "our friends in the region." In 2025, Trump didn't even bother with euphemism—Israel was the subtext and subtext became text. It wasn't a shot-for-shot remake. But it was close enough to make even Cruise raise an eyebrow behind his aviators. Whose War Is It Anyway? What made Maverick eerie in hindsight was how little it bothered to justify the mission. No American hostages. No nukes pointed at New York. Just an unspoken understanding that someone else's red line was worth flying into. And that's what the Right is now debating. Why should American pilots risk their lives for foreign bunkers? Why should billion-dollar aircraft be dispatched to send messages on behalf of another democracy? Maverick doesn't ask "why." It only asks: "Can it be done?" That question, in 2025, is no longer rhetorical. The Real Finale: A Flag, a Flyby… and a Fade to Black Maverick ends like every great American military fantasy: mission accomplished, uranium plant obliterated, and Tom Cruise strutting across the tarmac with his abs and aircraft intact. The jets land. The music swells. The flag flutters in cinematic slow motion. It could have been lifted straight from the closing scene of Operation Midnight Hammer. But imagine for a second that Maverick didn't make it. That he was shot down in that snowy canyon, dying for a target that never threatened his home, buried in a country he couldn't name, on a mission no one would claim. Would the audience still cheer? Would they even remember who the war was for? This is the question now circling Washington like an unarmed drone—silent, discomfiting, and impossible to shoot down. When the justification for war is wrapped in vagueness, when the enemy is unnamed, and when "defending our allies" becomes the only plotline—how long before audiences, and voters, stop watching the show? After all, wasn't this the very premise Trump once campaigned against? That MAGA would not behave like Bush-era neocons salivating for another war? That America's sons and daughters would no longer be deployed as global hall monitors in faraway deserts? Only last month in Saudi Arabia, Trump, trying to draw a red line between himself and Dubya, declared: 'In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built. ' As David Remnick pointed out in a recent piece in New Yorker , Trump once echoed Bannon and Tucker Carlson when he said: 'In recent years, far too many American Presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it's our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins.' Top Gun: Maverick (2022) Dagger Attack Scene And yet, here we are—seven stealth bombers later. A highly classified mission. A decoy formation. A multi-theatre deployment. A strike not to defend American cities, but to send a message on behalf of regional allies. It may have looked like surgical precision from the skies—but on the ground, it's a policy contradiction wrapped in cinematic déjà vu. Even the bill Trump signed to fund the strike—what he called a 'big, beautiful defence package'—flies in the face of MAGA's small-government gospel. This wasn't lean governance. It was big-budget interventionism, scored by swelling violins and paid for with a trillion-dollar cheque. It ignited a backlash from his base—and a very public falling out with Elon Musk, who accused Trump of abandoning fiscal discipline for Pentagon theatrics. Because it didn't start with a movie. It started with a massacre. On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters paraglided into southern Israel, launching the deadliest attack in the country's history. That single morning shattered illusions across the region. It led to a brutal war in Gaza. It provoked the Houthis to enter the fray. It drew Hezbollah closer to the edge. And it hardened Israel's posture, setting off a chain reaction that eventually led the US to launch Operation Midnight Hammer. From beach football to bunker busters, from afterburners to actual airstrikes—Top Gun began as propaganda. Maverick upgraded it into spectacle. And Trump's Operation Midnight Hammer may be the moment the reel became real. The movie always had the jets. Reality just pressed play. And if that doesn't make you pause—even if you're wearing aviators—just remember: Not even Tom Cruise can outrun a B-2 bomber. Though, to be fair, he'd probably try. On foot. While dangling off a missile. Smiling. As for the true MAGA believers—those who rallied behind promises of no more endless wars and a return to fiscal sanity—they're left asking the same question Maverick once did: Whose mission was this anyway?

News18

2 days ago

• News18

Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt To Reunite On Screen After 31 Years? Here's What We Know

Last Updated: Brad Pitt said he is open to working with Tom Cruise again, but has one condition. Brad Pitt is open to working with Tom Cruise again, as long as he doesn't have to do any big stunts. The 61-year-old actor hasn't appeared on-screen with the Mission: Impossible star, 62, since 1994's Interview with the Vampire, and Pitt has now revealed he would collaborate with Cruise again, on the condition that his feet stay firmly on the ground. Speaking with E! News, Pitt said: 'Well, I'm not gonna hang my a** off airplanes and s*** like that. So when he does something again that's on the ground [then yes]." Pitt will next be seen in F1 – the high-octane racing movie from Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski. In F1, Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a retired racer who returns to the track with new blood Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) in a bid to become the best Formula One driver in the world. While Pitt wants to avoid doing any major stunts in a Tom Cruise movie, the Once Upon A Time In Hollywood actor had driven at 180-miles-per-hour in real Formula One cars for F1. Speaking at a Q+A event in March, Kosinski said: '[Pitt] just had that natural feel for grip in the car, and what we're doing on this film is dangerous. So yeah, you have to be fearless, and when you see Brad driving, that's not acting." He added: 'He's really concentrating on keeping that car on the track and out of the wall during all those scenes. So that's something that you just can't fake, I think. I hope the audience feels that when they watch the movie." The filmmaker added that Pitt had undergone 'months of training" to prepare for the racing scenes, which also involved learning the art of the sport under the tutelage of seven-time Formula One world champion Sir Lewis Hamilton. Kosinski explained: 'Brad and Damson are both driving in this film and in order to get them into these race cars, it required months, literally months of training. But the first day was really fun. It was me, Brad and Lewis Hamilton at the track together, all of us jumping in cars and driving each other around in sports cars, which was one of those things, I'll never forget having Lewis Hamilton as your driving instructor. But what we learned and what Lewis was really interested was seeing did Brad knew how to drive right? Because if Brad can't drive, this whole film wasn't going to work." The director said Hamilton found Pitt to be a 'very talented, naturally gifted driver" when they first sped around the track together. Kosinski said: 'And what Lewis was very happy to discover was that Brad had a lot of just natural ability right from the start. And I don't know where he got that or if he was born with it, and he rides motorcycles, which I think has something to do with it, but he's just a very talented, naturally gifted driver, which for Lewis after that first meeting gave him a lot of confidence that we might have a shot at pulling this off." First Published: