The reviews are in and the consensus is clear: Daniel Craig must be gulping. Mission: Impossible – Fallout isn’t just the box office sensation of the summer, but an action movie that batters the genre senseless. Its biggest victim, say the critics, is quite the scalp: it out-Bonds James Bond. In Tom Cruise – or technically his character, the undercover agent Ethan Hunt – we have a hero every bit as smart, suave and good at walloping.

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The consensus, however, is wrong – blinded by the flash of gunfire and a well-cut suit. Miles of high moral ground separates these men. Bond is a cocktail slaughterer; Hunt a sober saviour. Bond – even in Craig’s grumpy-boots incarnation – hoovers up women and lethal weapons. Hunt exhibits an almost beatific distaste for both. Even if his bosses insist, he cannot countenance unnecessary killing. Quips are not in his vocabulary. He all but recoils from the parade of ladies who dribble with desire in the face of his brilliance. He’s got a broken heart, you see, and bigger fish to fry.

There is to Hunt, as there is to Cruise, a curious, almost otherworldly blankness. For someone so theoretically interesting, he’s wildly, weirdly dull. Here is an icon, recognisable the world over, whose defining personality trait is goodness: albeit goodness so powerful it could be his undoing. “The end you’ve always feared is coming,” taunts his bearded nemesis in Fallout, a man called Solomon. “And the blood will be on your hands. The fallout of all your good intentions.”

Cruise’s sights are not set on Bond’s crown. How high they may actually go is perhaps best evidenced by his eagerness to martyr himself. In the course of playing Bond, Craig has cracked two teeth and sustained a dicky knee. For Fallout, Cruise leapt out of a plane at 25,000 feet 106 times. He piloted a helicopter through a tight mountain range. He crashed a motorbike at high speed without a helmet. He leapt between London rooftops, breaking his leg, yet still hauling himself to the roof.

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For previous instalments, he held his breath underwater for nearly seven minutes; had a knife waggled a quarter of an inch from his eyeball; hung from cliffs hundreds of metres high somewhere called Dead Horse Point; clutched on to an Airbus A400 as it took off; and scaled a skyscraper using suction cups.

We know this because the publicity for the films – which Cruise also produces – largely involves reminding you that making it nearly finished him off. Not just the publicity. Increasingly, the plot seems to hinge on getting the message through: this man is ready to die for our cinema. That he hasn’t yet seems incredible. A real mission impossible. In other words, a miracle.

This is not the first article to mention 'Tom Cruise' and 'Jesus Christ' in the same sentence

Much of Cruise’s recent career can be seen as some sort of divine dress rehearsal, forever teasing his own death and resurrection. In Edge of Tomorrow, he’s killed and comes back to life 160 times. In The Mummy, it’s just the once, but in remarkable style. As Jack Reacher, he’s the ultimate avenging angel, roaming the country in search of wrongdoings to root out and innocents to save, like a ripped, whack-a-mole Cadfael.

This is not the first article to mention “Tom Cruise” and “Jesus Christ” in the same sentence. Eleven years ago, reports emerged that the Church of Scientology had, understandably enough, anointed their highest-profile member as their official messiah. “Tom has been told he is Scientology’s Christ-like figure,” ran one story. “Like Christ, he has been criticised for his views. But future generations will realise he was right.”

Fallout is great fun. But recalling this back-story can give one pause amid the popcorn. The B-roll footage that sticks with me is not those multi-camera angles of Cruise snapping his ankle, but the notorious Scientology promo he shot (and failed to have suppressed), which mysteriously shares a soundtrack with Mission: Impossible. In this, Cruise explains that a Scientologist “has the ability to create new and better realities” and, in the event of a traffic accident, “is the only one who can really help”.

“I need more help,” he evangelises at the end, with just the sniff of a threat. “Get those spectators either in the playing field or out of the arena.”

For sheer, goggling spectacle, this beats any of the scenes in Fallout. But for real edge-of-your-seat scares, there’s the promo’s coda. Cruise, intones a voiceover, has introduced Scientology’s founder, L Ron Hubbard, “to over one billion people of Earth. And that’s only the first wave he’s unleashed. Which is why the story of Tom Cruise: Scientologist has only just begun.”

Audiences: you have been warned.

• Catherine Shoard is a Guardian columnist