Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One film review — Tom Cruise scales the heights of movie heroism

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Do you remember the last instalment? Tom Cruise saving the day just as all seemed lost? I’m not talking about an actual movie scene, you understand, but the parlous state of the industry last May when Top Gun: Maverick came out in cinemas long shuttered by Covid. Despite that film proving a box office triumph, the business still feels a little dicey a year on. And so, once more, it falls to Cruise to intervene. 

This time, the vehicle is the state-of-the-art diversion Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One. Part Two is reportedly still being shot. At 61, there may be limited chances remaining for Cruise to pull it out of the bag.

Maybe an omen of the stakes involved lies behind the darkly tinted prologue. (The film began shooting in 2020.) There are mentions of a coming resource war, the Russian military credited with more grimly sophisticated tech than the actual Russian military might possess. There’s also a place for a droll riff on Cruise’s rogue agent Ethan Hunt belonging to the IMF (Impossible Mission Force); a gag for economists that never fails to deliver. 

But director and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie is clearly keen to create real-world ballast for the pure delirium ahead. The true villain isn’t Moscow, it turns out, but a modish artificial intelligence, or something like it, able to wipe and warp all human knowledge. And so we embark on the grand last stand of the analogue.

In our time of ageing male leads, the theme of the old not being quite done yet is familiar. (It turned up in Top Gun: Maverick too). But the execution here is — as the kids say — next level. “Truth as we know it” is soon frantically being made physical again on a sea of typewriters. Long-term, the only solution will be Cruise and the franchise’s returning rep company (Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Rebecca Ferguson), strapped back into a blue-chip blockbuster careering through Abu Dhabi, Venice, and more. 

What better to set the retro mood than an early sequence of airport terminal high jinks, also introducing newcomer Hayley Atwell, cast as a chic artful dodger? So far, so par for the course, if done with aplomb. Like the flashes of close-up magic that dot the film, the point seems to be a reminder of the charm of the real. But then the movie changes tack. Old tricks aren’t simply done well. They’re reinvented. 

In a film that asks to be judged by its spectacle, a car chase through Rome takes up the rest of the first act. At first, it seems just another slick spin on convention. (There go the alfresco café tables.) But hold that thought, and hold tight. While the camerawork is hardcore, unexpected elements shift the tone completely. A key protagonist is unable actually to drive; a tiny, custard-yellow Fiat takes the spotlight; technology and competence fail in all corners.

While still cranking the adrenalin, the scene ends up asking itself a totally different question than the one it started with. “How do you make a car chase thrill in 2023?” becomes: “How much mad, semi-abstract mayhem could you cause with cars as props instead?”

“What is happening?” Atwell screams, putting it more bluntly. The answer is the most intricate, hysterical action set-piece since the glorious Mad Max: Fury Road. It embodies the secret sauce of the film: hard-to-please imaginative discipline, intent on reminding us what excellent fun a movie of this scale can be.

George Miller’s 2015 masterpiece comes to mind more than once. Like Miller, McQuarrie crafts a wild multiplex frolic that also calls back to the source code of silent cinema. It isn’t just how much Cruise resembles Buster Keaton in slapstick moments. Another crackerjack sequence will end in wordless hush in a movie that brims with runaway trains, flashing blades and even an allusion to Nosferatu. 

All of this is graceful, and none of it, you suspect, accidental. But McQuarrie also has a sly way with the eternal kink in the action movie genre: the dialogue. Having cut his teeth writing treats such as The Usual Suspects, here he advances the plot in tonally perfect dollops of exposition, playfully brought to the brink of nonsense. (“The entity has become sentient,” a character frowns.) But the movie only plays for laughs up to a point. Crucially, McQuarrie is dead serious about the wit and care necessary for an escapism that can match our interesting times.

To that end, the star is ideal. Seven films into the franchise, it is clearly impossible to picture Ethan Hunt played by anybody else. But it’s just as hard to see anyone but Cruise doing so much to keep the whole business of high-end, mass-appeal cinema afloat. A little craggy now in close-up, he still radiates vim in long-shot, sprinting across the mothership curve of Abu Dhabi airport or down Venetian alleys, fuelled by his zeal for our big-screen entertainment. “Trust me, I won’t let you fall,” he says. And untold cinema operators mouth a damp-eyed “Thank you.”

★★★★★

In cinemas from July 12