Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (12A, 2 hrs 43 mins)
Tom Cruise turned 61 three days ago, which is too old to be hurtling through a window of the Orient Express still wearing a parachute, after leaping off the top of an Austrian mountain.
Oh, and the train is zooming towards a booby-trapped bridge, with the driver dead and a ‘cruciform’ key on board that could destroy the world as we know it.
Only Tom, or rather Ethan Hunt, the megastar’s alter ego since 1996, has both the nous and the muscle to deal with such a parlous situation.
It is years since Hunt overtook James Bond to be arguably the world’s most famous secret agent. Dead Reckoning Part One is the seventh Mission: Impossible movie and the stunts just keep getting better and better. There are some real corkers in this film: at the Spanish Steps in Rome and the Doge’s Palace in Venice, but above all when things kick off on the Orient Express.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (12A, 2 hrs 43 mins)
Femme fatale: Vanessa Kirby as the White Widow with Cruise as Ethan Hunt
Agatha Christie will be peering over her celestial pince-nez in approval. Murder on the grand old train was never so spectacular.
So heaven knows what Part Two, due next summer, has in store. Both instalments are directed by Christopher McQuarrie, Cruise’s regular collaborator, who has overseen two previous Mission: Impossible films and whose writing credits include last year’s hit Top Gun: Maverick as well as the 2014 sci-fi triumph Edge of Tomorrow. Theirs is a creative marriage made in action-hero heaven.
As always, the plot is engagingly preposterous, crafted purely so that one exhilarating fight or chase sequence might loosely explain the next. But it does tap into current preoccupations with a few ominous references to artificial intelligence. A mysterious AI force known only as the ‘Entity’ — ‘godless, stateless, amoral’ — is threatening to render useless all the world’s major computer systems, among them those keeping the US Federal Reserve afloat, not to mention Nasa, the American power grid, every central bank and for all we know, Tesco and the Co-op.
To gain control of this dastardly scheme you need a key, which unhelpfully is in two halves. Coincidentally, last week’s big release, Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny, also split its holy grail into two. It’s this summer’s action-movie cliché. But here it facilitates a much better film.
Dead Reckoning Part One is the seventh Mission: Impossible movie and the stunts just keep getting better and better
Also invested in the search are Hunt’s cronies from the Impossible Missions Force, Luther (Ving Rhames), left, and Benji (Simon Pegg), right
There is a new character in town, a resourceful English thief, Grace, splendidly played by Hayley Atwell
Among those seeking the key — for various reasons ranging from benign to wicked — are Hunt, his former accomplice Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), dangerous old adversary Gabriel (Esai Morales) and a classic femme fatale, a sexy arms dealer known as the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), reprising her role from the last film, 2018’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout, to which this is very notionally a sequel). Also invested in the search are Hunt’s cronies from the Impossible Missions Force, Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg). But there is a new character in town, a resourceful English thief, Grace, splendidly played by Hayley Atwell.
She gets to don one of the ingenious disguises that have been such a feature of the series from the start. And the early signs are that her chemistry with Hunt will serve the story extremely well.
Yet this film doesn’t just look to the future. It also offers some respectful nods to the cinematic past, from previous Mission: Impossible features to other great action pictures and even, from almost a century ago, to Buster Keaton’s 1926 classic The General.
It is all tremendously enjoyable, a summer blockbuster worthy of the name.
- Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One opens in cinemas on Monday
