It was the celebrity endorsement marketers dream about.
Before harnessing up to film stunts for the next "Mission: Impossible" on the face of the world's tallest tower, Tom Cruise bounded onto stage in the skyscraper's plush new Armani Hotel to promote shooting in Dubai. With cameras rolling, he thanked the emirate's ruling sheik and praised the city as "very cinematic," deeming it "beautiful" four times in under a minute.
Publicity stunt it may have been. But the filmmakers' decision to set a large part of the movie here also reflects the headway Dubai has made on its own tough mission: to again charm investors and repair its reputation a year on from its market-rattling financial crisis. It's a task that could take years to complete.
The pint-sized Persian Gulf emirate sent tremors through the world economy a year ago this week when it effectively acknowledged it couldn't repay billions of dollars as promised. Lenders who had relied on government backing for conglomerate Dubai World and a web of other state-linked companies found no such guarantees, leaving them scrambling for details from a city-state as famously tightlipped as it was opaque about the health of its globe-trotting businesses.
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