Like its star, Mission: Impossible refuses to get old. As other franchises rise and fall, and Bond takes a breather, this one-time Cold War telly potboiler only gets more nimble and energised. They can – and probably will – keep making them for as long as Tom Cruise can sprint, leap or look slightly quizzical around mysterious women. With the steady hand of Christopher McQuarrie at the tiller, its seventh entry doesn’t disappoint.
McQuarrie has always been a sophisticated screenwriter (he won an Oscar for The Usual Suspects), but he’s become an action director of real chops, too. Propelled by Lorne Balfe’s beefy score, Dead Reckoning is operatic and muscular, with locations (Rome and Venice, especially) that park IMF tanks on James Bond’s lawn and set pieces so huge, high-paced and helter-skelter, you worry the film might pull something.
It helps to have Cruise doing it all for himself – no stunt doubles and not much green screen here – as well as a swirling camera to strap you in for the ride. Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames’s enjoyably quick-riffing agents, Benji and Luther, are back to pull the ‘you’re not about to do that?!’ faces.
The opening 20 minutes are a big ol’ brain dump. Introduced is a sunken Russian sub housing a malevolent, self-aware A.I. called ‘The Entity’, a two-part key that offers the film its McGuffin, a harrowing loss from Ethan’s past and the return of snaky Mission: Impossible OG Kittridge (Henry Czerny). Ethan is again instructed to ‘pick a side’, never a straightforward task when there’s so many to choose from. One breakneck car chase culminates in a gun battle involving four – FOUR – different parties, zipping bullets around. One is a team of keystone US agents so far behind the eight-ball, they’re practically in Mission: Impossible – Fallout. The stakes are high but Dead Reckoning never forgets to have fun or send up its own less plausible elements (there’s a great gag that involves strenuous efforts to ‘unmask’ people who aren’t wearing masks).
Blockbuster escapism doesn’t get much better
The new additions fit in seamlessly. The excellent Hayley Atwell channels Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief as a light-fingered felon called, well, Grace who is drawn into the IMF’s perilous world, although McQuarrie struggles to extract much Hitchcockian sizzle from the intimate moments. Chivalrous in a sexless way, Cruise’s Hunt is more at ease tear-arsing through Rome in a supercharged Fiat 500 like a maniac Mr Bean than getting up close with Grace or his old flame Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson).
Happily, the charismatic Esai Morales’s villain, Gabriel, is here to up the sauce, with Guardians of the Galaxy’s Pom Klementieff as his gleefully psychotic henchperson (think Christopher Walken and Grace Jones in A View to a Kill).
Suave, genteel and ruthless, Gabriel acts as the living embodiment of the A.I. – ‘ChapGPT’, if you will – with a godlike ability to predict the immediate future. It’s a confident movie that lets its antagonist tell you what’s about to happen, but few franchises are this well-grooved. Blockbuster escapism doesn’t get much better.
In cinemas worldwide Jul