mission impossible 7 movie reviews

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning: Part One

Last summer, Tom Cruise was given credit for saving the theatrical experience with the widely beloved “ Top Gun: Maverick .” One of our last true movie stars returns over a year later as the blockbuster experience seems to be fading with high-budget Hollywood endeavors like “ The Flash ” and “ Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny ” falling short of expectations. Can he be Hollywood’s savior again? I hope so because “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” is a ridiculously good time. Once again, director Christopher McQuarrie , Cruise, and their team have crafted a deceptively simple thriller, a film that bounces good, bad, and in-between characters off each other for 163 minutes (an admittedly audacious runtime for a film with “Part One” in the title that somehow doesn’t feel long). Some of the overcooked dialogue about the importance of this particular mission gets repetitive, but then McQuarrie and his team will reveal some stunningly conceived action sequence that makes all the spy-speak tolerable. Hollywood is currently questioning the very state of their industry. Leave it to Ethan Hunt to accept the mission.

While this series essentially rebooted in its fourth chapter, changing tone and style significantly, this seventh film very cleverly ties back to the 1996 Brian De Palma original more than any other, almost as if it’s uniting the two halves of the franchise. It’s not an origin story, but it does have the tenor of something like the excellent “Casino Royale” in how it unpacks the very purpose of a beloved character. “Dead Reckoning Part One” is about Ethan Hunt reconciling how he got to this point in his life, and McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen narratively recall De Palma’s film repeatedly. And with its sweaty, canted close-ups, Fraser Taggart ’s cinematography wants you to remember the first movie—how Ethan Hunt became an agent and the price he’s been paying from the beginning.

It’s not just visual nods. “Dead Reckoning” returns former IMF director Eugene Kittridge ( Henry Czerny ) to Ethan’s life with a new mission. Kittridge informs Hunt that there’s essentially a rogue A.I. in the world that superpowers are battling to control. The A.I. can be manipulated with a key split into two halves. One of those halves is about to be sold on the black market, and so Ethan and his team—including returning characters Luther ( Ving Rhames ) and Benji ( Simon Pegg )—have to not just intercept the key but discern its purpose. The key only matters if IMF can figure out where and how to use it.

After a desert shoot-out that ushers Ilsa Faust ( Rebecca Ferguson ) back into the series, the first major set piece in “Dead Reckoning Part One” takes place in the Dubai airport, where Hunt discovers that there are other players in this espionage chess game, including a familiar face in Gabriel ( Esai Morales ), a morally corrupt mercenary who is one of the reasons that Hunt is an agent in the first place. Gabriel is a chaos agent, someone who not only wants to watch the world burn but hopes the fire inflicts as much pain as possible. In many ways, Gabriel is the inverse of Ethan, whose weakness has been his empathy and personal connections—Gabriel has none of those, and he’s basically working for the A.I., trying to get the key so no one can control it.

At the airport, Ethan also crosses paths with a pickpocket named Grace ( Hayley Atwell ), who gets stuck in the middle of all of this world-changing insanity, along with a few agents trying to hunt down the rogue Ethan and are played by a wonderfully exasperated Shea Whigham and Greg Tarzan Davis . A silent assassin, memorably sketched by Pom Klementieff , is also essential to a few action scenes. And Vanessa Kirby returns as the arms dealer White Widow, and, well, if the ensemble has a weakness, it’s Kirby’s kind of lost performance. She has never quite been able to convey “power player” in these films as she should.

But that doesn’t matter because people aren’t here for the White Widow’s backstory. They want to see Tom Cruise run. The image most people associate with “ Mission: Impossible ” is probably Mr. Cruise stretching those legs and swinging those arms. He does that more than once here, but it seems like the momentum of that image was the artistic force behind this entire film. “Dead Reckoning Part One” prioritizes movement—trains, cars, Ethan’s legs. It’s an action film that’s about speed and urgency, something that has been so lost in the era of CGI’s diminished stakes. Runaway trains will always have more inherent visceral power than waves of animated bad guys, and McQuarrie knows how to use it sparingly to make an action film that both feels modern and old-fashioned at the same time. These films don’t over-rely on CGI, ensuring we know that it’s really Mr. Cruise jumping off that motorcycle. When punches connect, bodies fly, and cars crash into each other—we feel it instead of just passively observing it. The action here is so wonderfully choreographed that only “ John Wick: Chapter 4 ” compares for the best in the genre this year.

There’s also something fascinating thematically here about a movie star battling A.I. and questioning the purpose of his job. Blockbusters have been cautionary tech tales for generations but think about the meta aspect of a spy movie in which the world could collapse if the espionage game is overtaken by a sentient computer that stars an actor who has been at the center of controversy regarding his own deepfakes. There’s also a definite edge to the plotting here that plays into the actor’s age in that Ethan is forced to answer questions about what matters to him regarding his very unusual work/life balance, a reflection of what a performer like Cruise must face as he reaches the end of an action movie rope that’s been much longer than anyone could have even optimistically expected. Cruise may or may not intend that reading—although I suspect he does—but it adds another layer to the action.

Of course, the most important thing is this: “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” is just incredibly fun. It feels half its length and contains enough memorable action sequences for some entire franchises. Will Cruise save the blockbuster experience again? Maybe. And he might do it again next summer too.

In theaters on July 12 th .

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

• Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt
• Hayley Atwell as Grace
• Ving Rhames as Luther Stickell
• Simon Pegg as Benjamin 'Benji' Dunn
• Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust
• Vanessa Kirby as The White Widow
• Henry Czerny as Eugene Kittridge
• Esai Morales as Gabriel
• Pom Klementieff as Paris
• Cary Elwes as Denlinger
• Shea Whigham as Jasper Briggs
• Christopher McQuarrie
• Erik Jendresen
• Eddie Hamilton

Cinematographer

• Fraser Taggart
• Lorne Balfe

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Tom Cruise hangs on for dear life to his 'Mission' to save the movies

Justin Chang

Tom Cruise is back, and doing his own stunts, in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One. Paramount Pictures and Skydance hide caption

Tom Cruise is back, and doing his own stunts, in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.

For some time now, Tom Cruise has been on what feels like a one-man mission to save the movies. Back in 2020, when Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One was shooting in the U.K., Cruise was recorded screaming at crew members who'd violated COVID-19 lockdown protocols, all but claiming that the industry's future rested on their shoulders. Earlier this year, Steven Spielberg publicly praised Cruise for saving Hollywood with the smash success of Top Gun: Maverick .

Now, with the box office still struggling to return to pre-pandemic levels, Cruise has become a kind of evangelist for the theatergoing experience, urging audiences to buy tickets not just to his movie, but also to other big summer titles like Barbie and Oppenheimer .

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'mission: impossible' is back, but will you accept it, or will it self-destruct.

Cruise's save-the-movies spirit goes hand-in-hand with his self-styled reputation as the last of the great Hollywood stars. In this seventh Mission: Impossible movie, the now 61-year-old actor and producer still insists on risking life and limb for our viewing pleasure, doing his own outrageous stunts in action scenes that make only minimal use of CGI. And so we see Cruise's Ethan Hunt, an agent with the Impossible Missions Force, or IMF, tearing up the streets of Rome in a tiny yellow Fiat, riding a motorcycle off a cliff and — in the most astonishing sequence — hanging on for dear life after a deadly train derailment.

The plot that connects these sequences is preposterous, of course, but reasonably easy to follow. In an especially timely twist, the big villain this time around is AI — a self-aware techno-being referred to as the Entity. It's an invisible menace, everywhere and nowhere; it can wipe out data systems, control the flow of information and bring nations to their knees.

'Top Gun: Maverick' is ridiculous. It's also ridiculously entertaining

Hunt and his IMF team are determined to destroy the Entity before it becomes too powerful or falls into the wrong hands. But his old boss, Eugene Kittridge, played by the sinister Henry Czerny, warns Hunt to fall in line with the U.S. government, which wants to control the Entity and the new world order to come.

This is notably the first time we've seen Kittridge since Brian De Palma 's 1996 Mission: Impossible — the first and still, to my mind, the best movie in the series. That said, the director and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie has done a snazzy job with the most recent ones: Rogue Nation , Fallout and now Dead Reckoning Part One .

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Sorry, tom cruise fans — new 'top gun' and 'mission impossible' movies delayed again.

Here, he seems to be paying sly tribute to that 1996 original, even evoking its horrific early setpiece in which Hunt watched helplessly as his IMF teammates were murdered, one by one. That trauma was formative; it explains why, in movie after movie, Hunt has repeatedly put his life on the line for his friends.

If you're kept up with the series, you'll recognize those friends here, including Hunt's fellow operatives played by Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg and Rebecca Ferguson. You may also remember Vanessa Kirby , reprising her Fallout role as a ruthless arms broker and giving, in a single sequence, perhaps the movie's best performance. There are some intriguing new characters, too, including a wily thief, well played by Hayley Atwell, who draws Hunt into an extended game of cat-and-mouse. Pom Klementieff steals a few scenes as a mysterious assassin, as does Esai Morales as a glowering enemy from Hunt's past.

That's a lot of characters, double-crosses, chases, fights, escapes and explosions to keep track of. But even with a running time that pushes north of two-and-a-half hours — and this is just Part One — the movie never loses its grip. McQuarrie, a screenwriter first and foremost, paces the narrative beautifully, building and releasing tension at regular intervals.

Compared with the visual effects-heavy bombast of most Hollywood blockbusters, Dead Reckoning Part One feels like a marvel of old-school craftsmanship, just with niftier gadgets. Even Hunt wears his devil-may-care recklessness with surprising lightness and grace, spending much of the movie's third act on the sidelines and even playing some of his most daring escapades for laughs. Not that the actor doesn't take his mission seriously. I don't know if Tom Cruise can save the movies, but somehow, I never get tired of watching him try.

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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

Ethan Hunt and his IMF team must track down a dangerous weapon before it falls into the wrong hands. Ethan Hunt and his IMF team must track down a dangerous weapon before it falls into the wrong hands. Ethan Hunt and his IMF team must track down a dangerous weapon before it falls into the wrong hands.

• Christopher McQuarrie
• Bruce Geller
• Erik Jendresen
• Hayley Atwell
• Ving Rhames
• 1.4K User reviews
• 365 Critic reviews
• 81 Metascore
• 18 wins & 67 nominations total

Top cast 99+

• Luther Stickell

• The White Widow

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• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia The frequent delays caused by COVID-19 ballooned the budget to $291 million, making it the most expensive Mission: Impossible film (surpassing Fallout, $178 million), the most expensive film of Tom Cruise 's career (again surpassing Fallout), and the most expensive film ever produced by Paramount (surpassing Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) , $217 million). The insurance company Chubb originally gave Paramount only £4.4 million (about $5.4 million) for the delays, arguing that the cast and crew could still fulfill their duties to the production despite being infected with COVID-19. Paramount sued Chubb in 2021, and the two companies settled in 2022. In 2023, Chubb gave Paramount a £57 million (about $71 million) payout for the COVID-caused delays, reducing the film's budget to about $220 million, which still makes it the most expensive film for Cruise, Paramount, and the franchise.
• Goofs Steam trains, especially moving at high speeds, need to be continuously provided with fuel, in this case coal. With the engineers killed and the controls opened all the way, the locomotive would have gradually slowed down and come to a halt as the pressure in the boiler dropped. That train would never have reached the bridge for that distance with no coal provided. Since the early 1900s, when firebox coal consumption exceeded the efforts of two men, the trains have used mechanical stokers. The coal would continue feeding without one missing coal shoveler.

Ethan Hunt : [speaking in italian] Thank you officers. Please. You can wait ouside. Thank you.

[the police leave the area]

Grace : You. You did this.

Ethan Hunt : I called the police. I didn't tell them about your colorful past.

[throwing a file folder]

Ethan Hunt : That's on you. You put-pocleted that the key on another passenger before you were arrested. You exchanged details and arranged to meet later on. Right now somewhere out there hasn't the slighest clue they're holding on to that key for you. An unwitting courier. The perfect accomplice

[describing the person Grace has used as a mule to carry an item]

Ethan Hunt : I'm guessing a man... middle aged? A man waiting his whole life to be noticed by a woman like you. An orphan. Higly intelligent. Inherntly resourceful. Growing up in the poverty left you longing for the finer things. Other's people's things. Someone saw your potential and helped you hone your skills. Skills that gave you the life thought you wanted. Tailored clothes, fine dining, luxury hotels. Skills that kept you one step ahead of the law, until now.

Grace : You can't blame a girl for trying to make a dishonest living.

Ethan Hunt : You had no idea what you stealing. Otherwise you never would stolen it.

Grace : Tell you what. You get me out of here, and I'll take you straight to the key.

Ethan Hunt : I have a better idea. You're gonna tell me everything. Then I'll think about getting out of here. Now start with who hired you. And don't lie to me, because I'll know.

Grace : I have no idea who hired me. Contact with the client was almost entirely electronic.

Ethan Hunt : Email?

Grace : Texts.

Ethan Hunt : Encrypted?

Grace : Naturally.

Ethan Hunt : Almost?

Grace : Pardon?

Ethan Hunt : You said contact with client was "almost" entirely electronic.

Grace : There was a dead drop in a cafe in Luxembourg. An envelope.

Ethan Hunt : What was in the envelope?

Grace : A ticket to Abu Dhabi. And... a picture of you. My instructions were to follow you at the airport. You'd be taling a mark. Said mark would have a key and four million in criptocurrency. That drive was useless, by the way. It was empty. The only hope I have of getting paid is to deliver your half of the key.

Ethan Hunt : And you were instructed to deliever it to...

Grace : Venice. Party at Ducake Palace, Tomorrow. Midnight Venice.

Ethan Hunt : [looking at the door] You expecting someone?

Grace : Your friends from the airport. Saw them in the halleay a few minutes ago.

Ethan Hunt : You could have said something sooner.

Grace : Well, they we're chaising you, not me.

• Crazy credits Disclaimer as one of the last entries in the end credits scroll: "The Producers wish to express that in no way, shape or form were the Rome Spanish Steps used to drive a moving vehicle down. This segment of the film was re-created with a set built on a Studio backlot."
• Connections Featured in WatchMojo: Top 10 Most Anticipated Franchises Returning in 2023 (2023)
• Soundtracks The Mission: Impossible Theme Written by Lalo Schifrin

User reviews 1.4K

• Jul 7, 2023
• How long is Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One? Powered by Alexa
• July 12, 2023 (United States)
• United States
• Official site
• Misión: Imposible - Sentencia Mortal Parte 1
• Helsetkopen, Møre og Romsdal, Norway (motorcycle jump)
• Paramount Pictures
• Skydance Media
• TC Productions
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• $291,000,000 (estimated)
• $172,135,383
• $54,688,347
• Jul 16, 2023
• $570,619,838

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• Runtime 2 hours 43 minutes
• Dolby Atmos
• Dolby Digital

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Review: Tom Cruise is out to save the movies. Is ‘Mission: Impossible 7’ enough?

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It begins with a plunge into the icy deep, where a submarine is menaced by an invisible threat — a scene that induces shivery memories of “The Hunt for Red October” and “Das Boot” (and also triggers inevitable thoughts of a certain ill-fated submersible ). Then it shifts to a hot orange desert, billed as Arabia though it might as well be Arrakis , where a dust-storm pursuit gives way to some tricky sleight-of-sand. Ludicrously entertaining and even more ludicrously titled, “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” doesn’t just rack up the miles in style. Like so many globe-trotting thrillers and big-screen tourist brochures, it’s also a gleaming advertisement for Hollywood itself, a celebration and a reminder of how profoundly the movies have shaped our views of the world.

The task of saving that world once again falls to Ethan Hunt, a.k.a. Tom Cruise — and if the world can’t be saved, well, maybe at least the movies can. Or can they? Even if not, just try and stop Cruise, now 61, from taking the weight of the entire industry on his shoulders. His gargantuan cine-savior complex was apparent back in 2020, when he railed against COVID protocol violators on the U.K. set of “Dead Reckoning Part One,” captured in an audio recording that did not exactly self-destruct in five seconds. If the rant was overblown, this actor-producer is hardly alone in having bought into his own mythos: Earlier this year, Cruise was praised by none other than Steven Spielberg for having single-handedly “saved Hollywood’s ass” with the stunning success of “Top Gun: Maverick.”

Now, on the eve of this seventh “M:I” caper’s release, Cruise is playing the familiar role of the exhibitors’ evangelist, urging audiences on social media to seek out some of the summer’s biggest titles ( “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer”) in theaters. The cross-studio solidarity is touching; it also reflects some of the industry’s deep existential anxieties around moviemaking and moviegoing. No single picture, no matter how successful, is going to lay those anxieties to rest, though “Dead Reckoning Part One,” with its queasily apocalyptic stakes and enjoyably kinked-up plot, at least seems to be in conversation with some of the underlying issues. Is it a coincidence that this time around, the movie’s big bad villain is artificial intelligence?

That would be something called the “Entity” — no, not the horror-movie incubus that menaced Barbara Hershey back in 1982, but rather a frighteningly self-aware robo-weapon powerful enough to bring data systems, economies and entire nations to their knees. Ethan and his loyal Impossible Mission Force gizmo experts, Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), are tasked with neutralizing this threat before it falls into the hands of the wrong country — which, as the movie cynically asserts, pretty much means any country. Fortunately, the Entity hasn’t reached Skynet levels of techno-malevolence yet; presumably that’s still to come in “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part Two,” due out in theaters next year. For now, AI proves a frustratingly elusive phantom, one that acts primarily through a powerful human emissary, more devilish than angelic, named Gabriel (Esai Morales).

Flashbacks shed light on Gabriel and Ethan’s ugly, not always compelling history, which involves a confrontation, a betrayal and, surprise surprise, a beautiful dead woman. She’s a throwback to the many beautiful dead women from Ethan’s past, including three of his doomed IMF colleagues (played by Kristin Scott Thomas, Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė and Emmanuelle Béart) from the Brian De Palma-directed first “Mission: Impossible” feature (1996). Christopher McQuarrie, who directed the series’ two previous movies ( “Rogue Nation” and “Fallout” ) as well as both halves of “Dead Reckoning,” has a more restrained, less operatic visual style than De Palma (which could be said of most filmmakers). But in many respects he’s paying tribute to that 1996 caper, not only by staging a doozy of a runaway-train sequence, but also by reintroducing Ethan’s old IMF nemesis Eugene Kittridge, played once again by a banally sinister Henry Czerny.

Kittridge’s return can’t help but serve as a marker of how far Ethan, Cruise himself and this ever-durable series have come over nearly 30 years. It also suggests that the IMF, the utterly vital, eternally disavowable, brutally underloved bastard child of American intelligence, may not survive this latest and severest test of its abilities and resources. The “Dead” in the movie’s title certainly doesn’t bode well for anyone on-screen; neither does Ethan’s unnerving habit of reminding his closest colleagues that their survival means more to him than his own life. The sentiment may be cheesy, to the point where you half expect Ethan to pull off his latex mask and reveal Vin Diesel underneath. But it also reminds you that the “Mission: Impossible” movie franchise began with Ethan being framed for his teammates’ coolly premeditated murders, a formative trauma that he has never fully shaken off.

For the record:

10:50 a.m. July 5, 2023 An earlier version of this review said Tom Cruise’s character maneuvered a yellow Beetle through the streets of Rome in one scene. It was a yellow Fiat.

It’s enough to make you fear for Ethan’s closest allies, among them Luther, Benji and the always-on-the-run Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), all of whom are put in varying degrees of escalating danger as the typically serpentine narrative leaps from one spectacular piece of on-location fight choreography to the next. Notably, Ethan also finds himself a new sparring partner named Grace (a terrific Hayley Atwell), a wily thief who first pops up during an undercover operation at the Abu Dhabi airport before taking Ethan on a harrowing, sometimes hilarious ride (by yellow Fiat) through the streets of Rome. That Italian escapade soon leads to another in spooky nighttime Venice, where, in tight alleys and on haunted canals, the combat takes on a murderous close-quarters intimacy.

The quality of the action here is, for the most part, more fluid and satisfying than jaw-dropping; there’s nothing here to rival De Palma’s snazziest set pieces, or Ethan’s vertiginous climb up the walls of the Burj Khalifa in “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” (2011), or his men’s room demolition derby in 2018’s “Fallout.” But McQuarrie’s typically fastidious writing (undertaken this time with Erik Jendresen) makes up for whatever his direction may lack in sheer verve. And he does pull off one major cinematic coup: a triumphantly visceral, spatially disorienting, pull-out-the-stops ripsnorter of a climax that seems designed to ensure that no one dares set a movie aboard the Orient Express ever again, for fear of inviting unfavorable comparisons.

There’s more to the story, of course, which, though relatively fleeting at 163 minutes, feels generously overstuffed for a first-parter. I haven’t yet mentioned Pom Klementieff’s role as Paris, a lethally lithe newcomer of mysterious motives, killer threads and very few words. Or Vanessa Kirby, who, reprising her “Fallout” role as a ruthless arms dealer, has only to sit in a train car with a smartphone to deliver the movie’s single most impressive performance.

Maybe that’s unfair to Cruise, who once again suffers for our pleasure like no one else, hurling himself and his motorcycle from great heights, fighting in claustrophobically tight spaces and, yes, running and running and running some more. For all that, he knows how to temper his usual superhuman self-seriousness with lightness and wit. He’s even gracious enough to cede some of the spotlight to his co-stars this time around, spending a fair chunk of the movie’s endgame amusingly on the sidelines. He returns for the big-bang finish, of course, in a spirit of goofy optimism and eternal vigilance. “Dead Reckoning Part One” ends on his watch, but the movies will not.

‘Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One’

Rating: PG-13, for intense sequences of violence and action, some language and suggestive material

Running time: 2 hours, 43 minutes

Playing: Starts July 12 in general release

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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‘mission: impossible — dead reckoning part one’ review: tom cruise amps up the electrifying action but story is strictly secondary.

Hayley Atwell joins returning cast Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson and Vanessa Kirby in Christopher McQuarrie’s high-octane opening salvo of the two-part Ethan Hunt thriller.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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It says a lot about Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One , the first chapter in the $3.5 billion franchise’s two-part seventh installment, that detailed footage of one of the film’s most spectacular stunts was released in full online last December. The extended clip showcased the meticulous planning and execution of a sequence in which Tom Cruise as superspy Ethan Hunt drives a motorcycle off a cliff and plunges 4,000 feet into a ravine, separating from the bike and BASE jumping the final 500 feet to the ground.

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The movie’s sustained adrenaline charge is both its strength and its shortcoming. Comparing part one of Dead Reckoning with Brian De Palma’s terrific 1996 opener, which upgraded the CIA’s covert Impossible Missions Force from its 1960s television origins to the big screen, is an illuminating insight into how audience expectations have changed in the past 27 years — or perhaps more accurately, how the major studios have reshaped audience expectations.

Working with screenwriters David Koepp and Robert Towne, De Palma assembled the nuts and bolts of an admittedly convoluted story with patience and care. He allowed his characters space to breathe while building to stylishly choreographed action sequences that bristled with the director’s customary Hitchcockian flair.

Notable among them was a nail-biting CIA heist operation in which Cruise’s Hunt was lowered into a state-of-the-art Langley security vault to copy a highly prized classified document. It set the tone for a series driven by jaw-dropping stunts, redefining the actor’s career at the same time.

His Ethan has become more careworn, jaded, emotionally bruised; he’s acquired the gravitas that comes with loss. And the passionate, hands-on commitment with which the actor approaches each stunt, emphasizing practical execution over effects, has only intensified through the years. No one can accuse Cruise of being a performer who fails to deliver what his audience wants. Which includes running. So much running.

In that sense, Dead Reckoning Part One works like gangbusters. If something has been discarded in the storytelling craft along the way, it’s unlikely that the core fanbase will mind. But McQuarrie, who co-wrote the screenplay with Erik Jendresen (an Emmy winner for Band of Brothers ), invests so much in the almost nonstop set-pieces that the connective narrative tissue becomes virtually disposable.

Sometimes it feels as if he’s boiled down the most thrilling elements, not only of the Mission: Impossible series, but of the Bond and Bourne movies, and threaded them into a sizzle reel. There’s less sense here of a story that demanded to be told in two parts — this one running two-and-three-quarter hours — than of McQuarrie and Cruise having a bunch more jaw-dropping stunts they plan to pull off and new travel-porn locations on which to unleash mayhem.

The A.I. development harnesses the power to make everything from people to vessels of war undetectable, to turn allies into enemies, commandeer defense systems and manipulate the world’s finance markets. It has become a monster with a mind of its own that knows everything about everyone and can be controlled only with a cruciform key made of two bejeweled parts lost in the Russian submarine disaster that opens the movie.

As the motivation for a globe-hopping hunt to find the two halves of the key and slot them together to tame the A.I. renegade before Gabriel can get his paws on it, it’s a serviceable plot. But it’s elaborated in numbing scenes lumped in among the fun stuff, with Ethan and his associates trudging through leaden exposition dumps, intoning gravely about “The Entity,” as it’s come to be known. Ominous statements are batted about like, “Whoever controls the Entity controls the truth,” which I guess is tangible enough as a threat to world order.

But when we get to see the digital mega-brain at work, looking like a giant fibrous, pulsating cyber sphincter, the whole thing becomes a bit silly. And if after the first half-hour or so you’re still following the plotting intricacies of how the parts of the key got to wherever they are, whether they’re real or fake, who has them and how the IMF crew plans to get them back, congratulations.

Besides, the strong cast, high-gloss production values and constant wow factor of the action offer plenty of distraction from the storytelling deficiencies. And the fact that Gabriel aims to wound Ethan by harming the people he cares about gives the film a few genuine emotional moments, even if McQuarrie seldom lingers long over them.

In a nice full-circle touch, Henry Czerny is back as Kittridge, Ethan’s prickly CIA boss. Seen previously in the De Palma film, he brings with him a personal history with Ethan and a deep knowledge of the agent’s past that add tension when Hunt once again goes rogue in the new mission. Returning from Fallout is slinky arms dealer Alanna, known as the White Widow ( Vanessa Kirby ), the daughter of Redgrave’s Max, representing another link back to the first film.

In her strongest screen role, Rebecca Ferguson continues bringing smarts, sharp moves and personal — if not sexual — chemistry with Cruise to her character from Rogue Nation and Fallout , MI6 agent Ilsa Faust. She’s first encountered here holed up in the Arabian desert with a $50 million bounty on her head. Ethan’s loyal core backup remains trusty field agent Benji ( Simon Pegg ), supplying the wisecracks and whipping up those masks; and expert hacker Luther ( Ving Rhames ), who somehow gets through awkward mouthfuls like, “Ethan, you’re playing four-dimensional chess with an algorithm!”

Among the various figures trailing them — both U.S. Intelligence agents and Gabriel’s hit squad — the most memorable is an ice-cold killer known as Paris (Pom Klementieff), a deadly force behind the wheel of an armored truck and a ready-made action figure with her bleach-blond mop, pleated plaid mini and snug leather jacket.

Paris is in hot pursuit in one of the stand-out set-pieces, on the tail of Ethan and Grace amusingly squeezed into a yellow Fiat 500 on a wild ride through the cobbled streets of Rome that conveniently takes in almost every major tourist attraction before capping it off with a doozy of a sequence on the Spanish Steps. A swanky party at the Palazzo Ducale in Venice yields more suspense on the city’s bridges and in its canals. And the early desert action segues to a tense race against the clock at Abu Dhabi Airport, the undulating roof of the new Midfield Terminal giving Cruise a challenging new course to sprint.

In terms of sheer entertainment, the movie has plenty to offer. Editor Eddie Hamilton keeps his foot on the accelerator with breathless pacing, and cinematographer Fraser Taggart’s dynamic camerawork keeps the visuals fluid and exciting. Much of the propulsion is also due to Lorne Balfe’s pounding score, incorporating a thunderous remix of the classic Lalo Schifrin TV theme music.

For a series now well into its third decade — and continuing next summer with Dead Reckoning Part Two — Mission: Impossible has remained remarkably consistent, with ups and downs but never an outright dud. Some of us might lament the madly busy overplotting at the expense of more nuanced character and story development, but that’s endemic to Hollywood studio output these days, not just to this franchise. And as one of the few relatively grownup big-budget alternatives to comic-book superhero domination, I’ll take it.

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Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part 1 review: Tom Cruise hunts for franchise's action crown

Cruise outdoes even his own daredevil achievements in the latest entry in the franchise.

Maureen Lee Lenker is a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly with over seven years of experience in the entertainment industry. An award-winning journalist, she's written for Turner Classic Movies, Ms. Magazine , The Hollywood Reporter , and more. She's worked at EW for six years covering film, TV, theater, music, and books. The author of EW's quarterly romance review column, "Hot Stuff," Maureen holds Master's degrees from both the University of Southern California and the University of Oxford. Her debut novel, It Happened One Fight , is now available. Follow her for all things related to classic Hollywood, musicals, the romance genre, and Bruce Springsteen.

For over a decade now, Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie 's mission has been to up the ante on action movies. Following the smash success of 2022's Top Gun: Maverick (which McQuarrie co-wrote), the two are back together as star and director in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One , the latest in their Mission: Impossible team-ups that began with 2015's Rogue Nation . While the title (in theaters July 12) might feel unwieldy, the film itself is anything but, its nearly three-hour running time passing as quickly as it takes a message to self-destruct.

Cruise is back as Ethan Hunt, the leader of the Impossible Mission Force, in the first of what is being billed as a potential two-part farewell to the character. When a sentient AI force nicknamed "the Entity" is at risk of falling into the wrong hands, Hunt is tasked with retrieving a two-part key essential to controlling (or destroying) it. With his reliable team, Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji ( Simon Pegg ), and now-mainstay Ilsa Faust ( Rebecca Ferguson ), Hunt sets out to track down the key and destroy it. A too-smart-for-her-own-good pickpocket, Grace ( Hayley Atwell ), adds chaos to the mix, as Ethan pursues a shadowy foe from his past, Gabriel ( Esai Morales ).

The golden key is a solid movie McGuffin, with the ramifications of "the Entity" feeling eerily timely in a world where the role of AI in our lives is a hot button subject (particularly among those currently on strike in the film industry ). But as always, it's the action sequences, Cruise's death-wish level stunts, and chemistry of the core ensemble that will keep audiences strapped in for the adrenaline ride.

After the high-water mark of 2018's Mission: Impossible — Fallout , it seemed nigh impossible for Cruise and McQuarrie to outdo themselves. While Dead Reckoning is not a better film in totality, its action and thrills are next level. A car chase through a foreign city has become a signature centerpiece of the films, and this time it's in Rome, complete with a tumble down the city's iconic Spanish Steps and the terrifically funny inclusion of a Fiat (itself a winking nod to the Mini-Cooper chase of the original The Italian Job ).

One might wonder — how many ways can you reimagine a car chase? But the Mission: Impossible franchise seems to have no shortage of inventiveness in that department. From the types of vehicles used to the added wrinkle of handcuffed drivers to the locale itself, the chase sequence in Dead Reckoning will keep audiences on the edge of their seats. McQuarrie puts us in the cars with our heroes, catching us equally off-guard as they are when a sudden obstacle appears. There's some much-needed injections of levity among the thrills, as McQuarrie wisely understands the value of undercutting tension to give the audience a breath so he can more effectively ratchet it back up.

Cruise is never more likable than he is as Ethan Hunt, a highly skilled agent whose greatest weakness is his love for his found family, the fellow members of his IMF team. McQuarrie is adept at balancing the character's (and the actor's) ability to hurl himself into danger, while also never failing to remind us of his humanity. (To whoever put Cruise in glasses, a vest, and rolled-up sleeves in an Italian library, my thirst for stern academics salutes you — the man has never looked hotter.)

In the last decade, Cruise has made a point of executing stunts himself, forgoing the use of visual effects whenever possible. Dead Reckoning features what Cruise calls his riskiest stunt yet and the culmination of his years of motorcycle riding onscreen. In the climax, Ethan pursues a train, attempting to climb aboard while it's in motion. This necessitates that he ride a motorcycle off an extremely high cliff to free fall until he pulls his parachute. To say it's anything short of miraculous would be a lie. It's quite literally jaw-dropping. It's hard to know whether to gape or to grab one's face in abject terror as we watch the moment unfold. Only Cruise would try something so perilous for the sake of our entertainment — and it's hard not to be impressed by the foolhardiness and bravery of such a move.

Besides the Roman car chase and death-defying cliff jump, Dead Reckoning abounds with taut, nimbly drawn sequences — from a Lawrence of Arabia- esque sand dune shootout to an airport cat-and-mouse game to hand-to-hand combat amidst the canals of Venice. It all comes to a head in the film's climax aboard the Orient Express that blends the suspense of North by Northwest with audacious action, namely a largely practical effects-laden crash and subsequent escape attempt. McQuarrie set out to pay tribute to the likes of Buster Keaton and David Lean with the crash sequence, and he achieves his goal and then some.

As is now the norm with this franchise, Dead Reckoning both offers new faces and brings back some familiar ones too. Vanessa Kirby returns with her odd combination of skittishness and ice-pick precision as the White Widow, as does Ferguson as Ilsa Faust, one of the best female characters in an action franchise ever. Here, Ilsa gets a Venice-set sword fight that is breathtaking in its skill and balletic grace, enhanced by Fraser Taggart's cinematography that somehow consistently blends visceral danger with travelog.

Perhaps most welcome is Henry Czerny as the government's Eugene Kittridge, a role he has not returned to since 1996's original Mission: Impossible. His dry repartee with Ethan hasn't lost a step in the years between, as he wrestles with trusting Ethan's skills and his own position within U.S. intelligence. He's somehow both oily and noble, his loyalties and values brilliantly opaque.

Both Shea Whigham and Pom Klementieff are superb additions. Whigham has a reputation for elevating everything he touches, and that's no exception here as he provides abundant humor and a moral foil for Ethan as Jasper Briggs, a government agent intent on taking Ethan into custody at any cost. Klementieff features as assassin Paris, who largely exists with wordless menace and snarling bravado. She has the versatility and expressiveness of a silent film star, her presence no less engaging and frightening for her scant dialogue.

But the real jewel in the crown of this ensemble is Atwell, who plays the mercenary Grace with a doe-eyed confusion that belies her deep intelligence. Grace, as she quickly learns, is in way over her head with the IMF. But isn't that the name of the game? They're not the Impossible Mission Force for nothing. In some ways, Dead Reckoning seems to be setting up Grace as a potential successor to Ethan, and Atwell imbues her with her best Peggy Carter sass and know-how. She's scrappy and resourceful if out of her depth, and it's her narrative arc and Ethan's directive about choices that provide the thematic heart of the film.

Ethan Hunt, and the members of his team, have always been told that their missions are contingent on whether or not they choose to accept them. Choice, then, is vital in the fight between good and evil and the shifting scales of world domination that make up the global stakes of the franchise. Dead Reckoning, though given the label "Part One," is thankfully a complete film unto itself — but it also sets up the purported "culmination" of the series (or at least, Hunt's role within it) that is to come in Part Two next year.

The fact that McQuarrie and Cruise routinely set and then raise the bar for the gold standard of action movies is the lure of the franchise — but it's the characters, their foibles, their wit, and their deep humanity that are Mission: Impossible's secret weapon. Ethan Hunt and the franchise at large remind us that our choices are what define us, if we only choose to accept the path laid before us. Grade: A-

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‘Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One’ Review: Still Running

In this franchise’s seventh entry, Tom Cruise’s mission includes increasingly improbable leaps, chases and stunts. Luckily for us, he chooses to accept it.

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By Manohla Dargis

I don’t know if anyone has ever clocked whether Tom Cruise is faster than a speeding bullet. The guy has legs, and guts. His sprints into the near-void have defined and sustained his stardom, becoming his singular superpower. He racks up more miles in “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One,” the seventh entry in a 27-year-old franchise that repeatedly affirms a movie truism. That is, there are few sights more cinematic than a human being outracing danger and even death onscreen — it’s the ultimate wish fulfillment!

Much remains the same in this latest adventure, including the series’ reliable entertainment quotient and Cruise’s stamina. Once again, he plays Ethan Hunt, the leader of a hush-hush American spy agency, the Impossible Mission Force. Alongside a rotating roster of beautiful kick-ass women (most recently Rebecca Ferguson and Vanessa Kirby) and loyal handymen (Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames), Ethan has been sprinting, flying, diving and speed-racing across the globe while battling enemy agents, rogue operatives, garden-variety terrorists and armies of minions. Along the way, he has regularly delivered a number of stomach-churning wows, like jumping out a window and climbing the world’s tallest building .

This time, the villain is the very au courant artificial intelligence, here called the Entity. The whole thing is complicated, as these stories tend to be, with stakes as catastrophic as recent news headlines have trumpeted. Or, as an open letter signed by 350 A.I. authorities put it last month: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.” In the face of such calamity, who you gonna call? Analog Man, that’s who, a.k.a. Mr. Hunt, who receives his usual mysterious directives that, this time, have been recorded on a cassette tape, an amusing touch for a movie about the threat poised to the material world by a godlike digital power.

That’s all fine and good, even if the most memorable villain proves to be a Harley Quinn-esque agent of chaos, Paris (Pom Klementieff), who races after Ethan in a Hummer and seems ready to spin off into her own franchise. She tries flattening him during a seamlessly choreographed chase sequence in Rome — the stunt coordinator, Wade Eastwood, is also a racecar driver — that mixes excellent wheel skills with scares, laughs, thoughtful geometry and precision timing. At one point, Ethan ends up behind the wheel while handcuffed to a new love interest, Grace (Hayley Atwell, another welcome addition), driving and drifting, flirting and burning rubber in what is effectively the action-movie equivalent of a sex scene.

Despite the new faces, there are, unsurprisingly, no real surprises in “Dead Reckoning Part One,” which features a number of dependably showstopping stunts, hits every narrative beat hard and, shrewdly, has just enough winking humor to keep the whole thing from sagging into self-seriousness. This is the third movie in the series that Cruise and the director Christopher McQuarrie have made together, and they have settled into a mutually beneficial groove. On his end, McQuarrie has assembled a fully loaded blockbuster machine that briskly recaps the series’ foundational parameters, adds the requisite twists and, most importantly, showcases his star. For his part, Cruise has once again cranked the superspy dial up to 11.

Over the years, McQuarrie has loosened up the star, who generally seems to be having a pretty good time. Still, it must be exhausting to be Tom Cruise, who famously performs his own stunts. A smattering of creases now radiate around his smile, but time doesn’t seem to have slowed his relentless roll. The most arresting set piece here finds Ethan smoothly sailing off a cliff via a motorbike and a parachute. Improbable, yes? Impossible? Nah. Like the other large-scale, stunt-driven sequences, this showy leap at once underscores Cruise’s skills and reminds you that a real person in a real location on a real motorbike did this lunatic stunt.

Nothing if not a classicist, Ethan also goes one to one with a baddie (Esai Morales) atop a speeding train, perhaps in homage to his cliffhanger moves on another train in the first “ Mission: Impossible ” (1996). In his review, the New York Times critic Stephen Holden observed that with this film Cruise had “found the perfect superhero character.” It’s worth noting that, in 1996, the top 10 movies released in the United States were largely high-concept thrillers and comedies; in 2022, half the top 10 releases were from Marvel or DC. Yet the film that connected most strongly with audiences was Cruise’s “Top Gun: Maverick.”

Although “Maverick” featured plenty of digital whiz-bangery, its most spectacular draw of course was Cruise, who has also remained the single greatest attraction in the “Mission” movies. To that point, while there’s little of substance that I remember about the first film other than it was directed by Brian De Palma, I can vividly picture — with the crystalline recall that only some movies instill — two distinct images of Cruise-Ethan from it. In one, he races away from a tsunami of water and shattered glass; in the second, he hovers inches above a gleaming white floor, his black-clad body stretched head to toe in a near-perfect horizontal line. The filmmakers imprinted those images on my memory; so did Cruise.

Early in the “Mission: Impossible” series, the outlandishness of the movies’ plots and Cruise’s equally fantastical stunts started to make him seem less than human. By the second movie, I wondered if he were disappearing altogether, turning himself into little more than a special effect. Since then, the plots and the stunts have remained impossibly absurd, sometimes enjoyably so, as here. Yet over the years, the series has unexpectedly made Cruise seem more poignantly human than he has sometimes seemed elsewhere. One reason is that the “Mission” movies were instrumental in shifting the locus of his star persona from his easygoing smile — the toothy gleam of “Risky Business” and “Jerry Maguire” — to his hardworking body.

The obvious effort that Cruise puts into his “Mission” stunts and the physical punishment he endures to execute them — signaled by his grimaces and popping muscles — have had a salutary impact on that persona, as has the naked ferocity with which he’s held onto stardom. It’s touching. It’s also difficult to imagine any actor today starting out in a superhero flick reaching a commensurate fame, not only because the movies, Hollywood’s at least, no longer retain the hold on the popular imagination that they once did, but also because the corporately branded superhero suit will always be more important than whoever wears it. Tom Cruise doesn’t need a suit; he was, after all, built for speed. He just needs to keep running.

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One Rated PG-13 for thriller violence. Running time: 2 hours 43 minutes. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic of The Times, which she joined in 2004. She has an M.A. in cinema studies from New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One Reviews

Cruise's action adventure is a triumph, full of physical jeopardy and Hollywood setpieces par excellence.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 18, 2024

Blending a good mix of easily identifiable stakes and intricate psychological strategizing that feels like six dimensional chess at times, it is a film with constant momentum and breakneck pacing.

Full Review | Jul 19, 2024

The fact that the now 61(!)-year-old Cruise is still willing to push his physical limits to this level for the sake of doing cool stuff on screen is as admirable as it is truly insane.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Jul 12, 2024

The movies are built around death-defying showcases of suspense and bravado that grow increasingly more mind-boggling with each sequel.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 7, 2024

Dead Reckoning is a victim of its own high standard. By now, we know how superlative the Mission: Impossible series can be. Anything less feels like a step down, and a step down felt unthinkable until now.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 3, 2024

The film’s dense, fast-moving cold open harkens back to the franchise’s roots as a Cold War-era spy series.

Full Review | May 21, 2024

If anything the potential dangers of AI are even more in the news now than when the film was shot, making it feel bang up to date.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 2, 2024

A fading echo of Hawksian professionalism and humanism...

Full Review | Mar 8, 2024

Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie have perfected their formula: cram so much action in that audiences don't care how repetitive the plots have gotten.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 25, 2024

Tom Cruise runs and jumps and flings himself off of and into things for our enjoyment, as always. Just a big and loud summer blockbuster in all the ways a big and loud summer blockbuster should be.

Full Review | Jan 13, 2024

Piecing it all together

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 11, 2024

alternates between big action set-pieces and more suspenseful character-driven standoffs, which gives the film an invigorating rhythm that keeps you glued

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 18, 2023

The action is so extraordinary (and surprisingly, at times, really really funny) throughout this epic, gasp-inducing global adventure that any hesitation to recommend would be a disservice to the spirit of excitement that movies so rarely achieve anymore.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Dec 13, 2023

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One seemed a bit ambitious with its lengthy run time and a cliffhanger ending. By the time the credits rolled, it’s clear the franchise can go as long as Cruise and McQuarrie want it to at this point.

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Dec 9, 2023

A solid new entry with plenty of astonishing set-pieces.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 12, 2023

Dead Reckoning delivers most of everything that series fans could want, though it’s still only half a film.

Full Review | Nov 10, 2023

"Dead Reckoning Part One" is honestly only as great as it is thanks to each film that came before it. So wherever this film may fall on a series ranking list, it owes all of its successes to the work done previously.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Nov 3, 2023

It may not have the strongest storyline of the lot, but it serves it well enough, giving you all the thrills we've come to expect from the series.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 30, 2023

The movie delivers an extraordinary production that has a few minutes worthy of the action movie hall of fame... [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 27, 2023

Overlong if enjoyably bonkers, there's also an undercurrent of chaos, with bits of key turning up everywhere; at times it felt like there were enough for everyone to have a spare set. 

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 27, 2023