tom cruise mission impossible dead reckoning review

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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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In a film scene, a man in a shirt, tie and vest with no suit jacket is handcuffed to a woman in a button-down shirt. A car is behind them in an alley.

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’ Review: A Stunt-Loving Tom Cruise Takes On AI … and Big-Screen CG Rivals

Combining breaking-news intrigue with ever-crazier practical set-pieces, Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie keep this almost-three-decade franchise feeling cutting-edge.

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Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One - Variety Critic's Pick

Sooner or later, Ethan Hunt will face a mission he really ought not to accept. But for the time being, he remains the one man on Earth willing to attempt the impossible without questioning the motives of those who require his services. That’s the deal with America’s most dutiful Boy Scout, Tom Cruise , who’s carried the billion-dollar “Mission: Impossible” franchise across 27 years without losing steam. Compare that with Indiana Jones, who’s failed to connect with a younger generation, or the “Fast and Furious” movies, which aren’t running out of gas so much as guzzling the laughing sort.

Popular on Variety

While Cruise’s Hunt is busy being the movie’s action figure, he’s supported by tech agents Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), who give him pointers via headset. “Dead Reckoning” also brings back sharpshooter Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and arms dealer the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), lining up a neat little ensemble of friends and associates that the AI can target and/or manipulate. The idea here is that the Entity’s mile-a-minute computation skills have concluded that the only thing that stands in its way is Hunt. And what is Hunt’s weak spot? Loyalty to his friends. As Hunt tells a gifted recruit known only as Grace (Hayley Atwell), “Your life will always matter more than my own.”

That’s just a flat-out lousy tactical philosophy, but it’s the kind of stubborn thinking that Cruise embodies so well: a blunt instrument traveling at extremely high velocity, guided by instinct and that inner ethical barometer. Even though we’ve just met Grace — who’s a pickpocket for hire, and not much of a team player — Hunt has decided she’s worth protecting. Heck, she could even be Impossible Mission Force material. So, when the Entity forces Hunt to choose which of his amigas to save, Ilsa or Grace, the guy all but short-circuits. In theory, that’s how you beat a virtual brain: You give it an impossible problem to solve (à la the tic-tac-toe game in “War Games”). For the moment, the Entity seems to be playing chess, not Risk, as “Dead Reckoning” has yet to show what renegade AI is capable of. Told that one of these women must die, Hunt does his darnedest to save them both. As usual, he’s got face masks in his arsenal, while the Entity has a nifty trick for pretending to be various people — a reminder that you can never trust your eyes or ears in an “M:I” movie.

Since Hunt can’t really deal with the Entity directly, the movie concocts a handful of human henchpeople to do its bidding (and punching, driving, etc.). To that end, Esai Morales plays a guy named Gabriel who’s been retconned into Hunt’s backstory, which supposedly makes this a more personal mission than those that came before — although the effect is no different than if he’d been invented for this movie. Gabriel takes orders from the Entity, while right-hand woman Paris (Pom Klementieff, who played Mantis in the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies) proves the more threatening adversary. She first appears in Rome, where an elaborate car chase shot on location expertly balances thrills and laughter, the latter courtesy of a puny Fiat 500 and a pair of handcuffs.

With just one film left in the series, “Dead Reckoning” starts to tie up loose ends, which means none of the canonical characters is safe — not even Hunt. Combine that with the Entity’s strategy of targeting his friends, and the movie succeeds in humanizing the stakes. At the core, this is still just an elaborate game of hot potato, as everyone chases the two-part key that went down with the Russian sub, and which keeps changing hands over the movie’s 163-minute running time. The action builds to the film’s best set-piece, as Hunt finds a novel way to board a speeding train — and an even more unconventional way to disembark once it starts sliding off a bridge, one car at a time. This outing may be one-half of a two-part finale, but it gives audiences enough closure to stand on its own, and every reason to expect the last installment will be a corker.

Reviewed at Paramount Theatre, Los Angeles, May 27, 2023. MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 163 MIN.

Production: A Paramount Pictures release of a Paramount Pictures, Skydance presentation of a Tom Cruise production. Producers: Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie. Executive producers: David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger, Tommy Gormley, Chris Brock, Susan E. Novick.
Crew: Director: Christopher McQuarrie. Screenplay: Christopher McQuarrie & Erik Jendresen, based on the television series created by Bruce Geller. Camera: Fraser Taggart. Editor: Eddie Hamilton. Music: Lorne Balfe.
With: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Mariela Garriga, Henry Czerny, Shea Whigham, Greg Tarzan Davis, Charles Parnell, Frederick Schmidt, Cary Elwes, Mark Gatiss, Indira Varma, Rob Delaney

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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, mission: impossible - dead reckoning: part one.

tom cruise mission impossible dead reckoning review

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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.

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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One movie poster

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some language and suggestive material.

163 minutes

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

Cinematographer

Fraser Taggart
Eddie Hamilton
Lorne Balfe

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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

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Watch Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One with a subscription on Paramount+, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

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With world-threatening stakes and epic set pieces to match that massive title, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One proves this is still a franchise you should choose to accept.

With a terrific cast and some beautifully shot stunts, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One might be the best action movie of the year.

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Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt and Esai Morales as Gabriel

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One review – Tom Cruise is still taking our breath away

With star turns from Vanessa Kirby and Hayley Atwell, plus a zeitgeisty AI plot, this seventh MI outing is one of the most exhilarating yet

MI goes AI in this seventh outing for the TV-series-turned-action-cinema-franchise, a genuinely breathtaking romp that tops the previous Christopher McQuarrie-directed episodes (2015’s Rogue Nation , 2018’s Fallout ) for sheer nailbiting spectacle and pulse-racing tension. The zeitgeisty plot may have holes through which you could drive the Orient Express, but for pure adrenaline rush entertainment this will leave you exhilarated and eager for more.

Three decades ago, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) sold his soul to the IMF (“no, the other IMF – the Impossible Mission Force”), a covert organisation whose oath demands that its members “live and die in the shadows for those we hold close and those we never meet”. Since then, Hunt has saved the world more than once (his last mission involved neutralising nuclear bombs). But now he’s up against everyone’s favourite enemy de nos jours – a fiendish artificial intelligence known as “the Entity”, a name that will sound sillier every time it is spoken out loud (and it is spoken out loud a lot ).

It’s hardly a new idea. Jack Paglen’s script for 2014’s 70s-influenced Transcendence dramatised the “singularity” (the point at which technology out-thinks humankind) a decade ago, paving the way for MI7’s sentient viral intelligence (“this thing has a mind of its own?! ”), which is “everywhere and nowhere… godless, stateless, amoral”, controlling and manipulating information so that “truth as we know it is in peril”.

Somehow, this very modern threat has a very old-fashioned key – a weird, crucifix-shaped dongle that (like Archimedes’s Antikythera in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny ) has been split into two pieces that must be reunited to unlock its secrets. “Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to bring us the key,” declares the familiar self-destructing tape, the IMF having apparently shunned new-fangled voicemail or encrypted WhatsApp messages. Later, they will retreat to the safety of an offline analogue room – the one place the Entity can’t get to them.

Warring forces wish to own the Entity, to control and weaponise it. Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) apparently holds part of the puzzle – which puts a price on her head, because “the fate of the world depends on finding whatever it unlocks” – thus sending Hunt off in globetrotting pursuit. The pre-credits sequence alone takes us from a submarine in the Bering Strait to a horseback chase through the desert, en route to a sandstorm shootout with brief stopovers in Amsterdam and elsewhere. We also get an early reminder that we’re back in a world in which rubbery masks are realistic enough to get Jason Statham believing in the Face/Off machine again.

There’s plenty of caperish comedy afoot, particularly after Hunt teams up with Hayley Atwell’s light-fingered Grace. A handcuffed car-chase featuring a Fiat 500 careening down Rome’s Spanish Steps recalls the Mini-fuelled fun of The Italian Job (with a cheeky nod towards Battleship Potemkin ), while the wisecracking interaction between Cruise and Atwell has a nice, old-school screwball flavour.

Hayley Atwell and Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.

Elsewhere, the join-the-dots plot includes a James Bond-style mission to a lavish party where a scene-stealingly cracked Vanessa Kirby warns that “truth is vanishing – war is coming”, a prologue to a Don’t Look Now - style chase through the alleyways of Venice. Esai Morales, who proved so chilling in Ozark , nails another villainous role as Gabriel, a “dark messiah” who is “the Entity’s chosen messenger”. As for Cruise, he may still have the physical fitness of a less-than-40-year-old, but he’s also developed a Richard Gere-style blinky squint of late, which adds a touch of melancholy maturity to his otherwise boyish charm.

The action is impressively gender neutral, with men and women killing and dying with equal relish (plaudits to Pom Klementieff, whose relentless – and largely silent – assassin, Paris, could give Grace Jones in A View to a Kill a run for her money). It all builds to a frankly jaw-dropping train-bound finale in which the heavily trailered sight of the real Tom Cruise really driving a real motorbike off a real mountaintop is only an appetiser for what is to come – one of the most audaciously extended action set pieces I have ever seen, which left my nails not so much bitten as gnawed to the bone. The fact that this is “only the beginning” is cause for celebration. Roll on Dead Reckoning Part Two.

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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

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Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.

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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Tom cruise hangs on for dear life to his 'mission' to save the movies.

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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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The scary question at the heart of the Mission: Impossible movies

In Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, Tom Cruise once again leads a franchise that’s all about trickery, subterfuge, and the nature of reality itself.

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Tom Cruise, in a vest and nice pants, rides a motorcycle through the stone paths of a European city.

In the very first scene of the very first Mission: Impossible film, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is interrogating a Russian guy. We don’t know it’s Hunt, though, because — in perhaps the most iconic running bit in the M:I universe — he’s wearing an extremely lifelike rubber mask. Two minutes into the scene, he walks over to the Russian, drugs him till he passes out, and then pulls off the mask, dramatically revealing the face of a slightly flushed and rumpled Cruise. (It’s hot under all that latex.)

Shortly after that first reveal, the walls of the room fall outward into a warehouse, which makes for a bigger reveal: The whole scene was faked. Not only was the now-immobilized Russian hoodwinked, but the audience was tricked into believing their senses. For us, the moment is delightful; for the laid-out man, not so much.

That opening parry for Mission: Impossible, created and produced by Cruise as a spy-action franchise for himself, showed up in movie theaters in May 1996, with Brian De Palma (of Carrie and Scarface ) in the director’s chair. Compared to the latest installment in the franchise, frequent Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One , the 1996 version is much sweatier, darker, and kind of erotic. (A Brian De Palma movie indeed.)

Cruise and Atwell appear to be hanging sideways in a train car.

The omnipresent unmaskings , of which there have been at least 15 or 20 by now, are still a mainstay of the films. What’s so great about those reveals, in particular, is that you’re rarely actually expecting them. Dead Reckoning Part One plays with this a little, but for the most part, through all the films, any guy at any time could rip his face off and you’d still be like, “Wow, I did not see that coming.”

The new version is like its predecessors, employing a trope borrowed from the TV show that spawned the film: trickery around every corner, a sense that you can’t quite believe what you see. Dead people turn out to be not-dead people. Walls of rooms keep falling apart to reveal they’re constructed in some warehouse somewhere. Everyone could be a rogue agent or maybe not, and the movie sure isn’t going to wink at you about it till it’s good and ready.

That those twists and turns keep surprising us seven movies in points to what’s truly delightful about the Mission: Impossible franchise, and what makes it, in my opinion, both the most inventive and the most satisfying long-running franchise in Hollywood. On one level, M:I is wonderful because the convoluted plots are pretty much beside the point; if they can be said to have a consistent theme, it is “Tom Cruise likes almost dying on camera.”

And yet once you’ve watched them all, you can detect a kind of meta-theme to the M:I movies. It stems from a simple moviegoing fact: Most of us believe that what we are seeing in a movie is how things actually happened in the world of the movie. It’s why a movie like A Beautiful Mind or Big Fish or The Irishman is so memorably affecting; we are trained to believe our narrators, and when it turns out that what we’ve been watching is not quite what actually happened, it’s thrilling. New meaning emerges from the mismatch.

Mission: Impossible plays on this expectation, though there’s no specific perspectival narrator. The thrill comes from occasionally discovering that what we’ve been watching is an elaborate fake-out. Sleight of hand is everywhere. Don’t trust your senses, Mission: Impossible exhorts us — they’re easily manipulated.

Tom Cruise on a motorcycle suspended midair with mountains in the background.

This is underlined, in another meta-heavy way, by what makes the films so distinctive: Cruise’s incredible, literally death-defying stunts, every film seeming to take them to a new level. He climbs up sheer rock walls , leaps across rooftops , fights cliffside , and hangs off the side of a flying Airbus A400M . Each time a new Mission: Impossible movie is released, it’s accompanied with marketing material that mainly leans on explaining that yes, Tom Cruise did actually climb the Burj Khalifa . Personally I, and I suspect Cruise, will not be satisfied until Ethan Hunt is in outer space. (Oh, he’s doing it .)

Why emphasize that he’s actually doing these stunts (albeit with cables and nets — you could never afford to insure the production otherwise) as the lynchpin of the M:I marketing? First, of course, because it is pretty badass. But the second reason is obvious: While action is a mainstay of American cinema, particularly in superhero movies, we all know they’re flying around on soundstages and are CGI’d within an inch of their lives. It’s all spectacle, but with no reality.

With Mission: Impossible , however, our deceiving eyes don’t quite extend to the stunts. Yes, there are tricks of the camera and computer going on. But Tom Cruise is actually driving a motorcycle off a cliff and then plummeting down . That’s real — real enough to gasp and hold your breath and get a little shaky. It’s as much a mainstay of the movie as the mask trickery, and that subtle play with what we’re seeing, with the real and the unreal, suggests the movies might be doing this very much on purpose.

Image reads “spoilers below,” with a triangular sign bearing an exclamation point.

I’d already formed that thought and pitched it to my editor before going into Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One , and about 10 minutes in, I started silently fist-pumping. This movie’s Big Bad is something everyone calls “the Entity,” which is not a person, or even a shadowy cabal of persons, but an AI that’s become sentient and is out to take down humanity.

There’s arguably a tad too much explanation about the Entity throughout the movie that bogs it down a little, but the irony is so bold you sort of have to respect it. At the same time that Hollywood’s workers are battling to make sure their bosses don’t replace them with AI to cut costs and please shareholders, one of the summer’s biggest movies is about how AI wants to wipe us all out. It’s of a piece with recent blockbusters that are straightforwardly about how our digital doppelgangers want to kill us, algorithms are out to destroy originality , and continually repurposing nostalgia IP is how a culture dies . The call is coming from inside the house, et cetera.

But the reason I loved the Entity plotline — which, like most of the characters, will clearly be developed and wrapped up in Part Two (due out next June) — so much is that it shows what Mission: Impossible has been about all along.

Thus the Entity’s greatest threat is its ability to change reality — well, in a manner of speaking. It’s not that the digital threat can change the physical bones of reality. The Entity’s danger to humanity lies chiefly in the fact that the world is fully networked, everyone passing currency and information and even warfare along digital pathways that a sentient AI would have no trouble hacking and manipulating. In a highly mediated world, where we encounter everything and everyone through screens, the way reality is represented to us suddenly becomes, effectively, reality. If a story or a myth is floated around the internet and people come to believe it, does it even really matter, in a practical matter, if it’s true? If, as in the 1964 film Fail Safe , a country’s government thinks it’s under attack and launches a missile back at the supposed aggressor who then counterattacks, how much does it matter to the civilians on the ground that there was never an attack in the first place?

This is exactly what the humans of Dead Reckoning fear: that the entity will create reality by manipulating it, and we’ll just wipe ourselves out as a result. It’s a problem that humanity caused, of course, by getting itself so digitally intertwined and creating an AI in the first place. But now it’s out of our hands, and whoever controls it — if it can be controlled at all — is, in effect, God.

All of which weaves seamlessly into the broader Mission: Impossible narrative. What’s impossible about these missions? They’re famously difficult to pull off, with death-defying stunts that require Hunt and his buddies to precisely understand their surroundings, down to the millimeter and the temperature and pull of gravity. It’s thrilling to watch, and thrilling to experience, for sure — but it’s a reality that waits for us. In the future, the way we trust our senses will be radically altered. You know, because you’ve felt it, too.

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One opens in theaters on July 13.

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Tom Cruise Is Doing the Most to Try to Save the Movies in the New <i>Mission Impossible</i>

Tom Cruise Is Doing the Most to Try to Save the Movies in the New Mission Impossible

A t the end of the apocalypse, after the sun has fried every flower and tree, as the last skyscraper turns to dust, when each extant cockroach has gone belly-up with x’es for eyes, there will be one man standing tall, or somewhat tall: Tom Cruise is forever, and if that idea may have seemed mortifying 40-odd years ago, when he was mugging his way through thinly disguised navy recruitment ads or grinning and grinding in his skivvies to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock & Roll,” it’s more palatable now. Cruise has never been a great or subtle actor, but he has grown into a perfectly watchable one , and that has come to mean more at a time when the movies are shrinking, literally and metaphorically. He’s the star attraction of the seventh Mission: Impossible film, Dead Reckoning Part One, and he carries the film ably on his back, along with his always-at-the-ready parachute. Cruise, still in love with what big mainstream movies used to be, has become a chivalric dreamer, striving to ensure their survival by sheer will. Maybe he can pull it off and maybe he can’t. But at least there’s some pleasure to be had in watching him try.

If you’re fond of MacGuffins, you’ll love Dead Reckoning Part One, whose central thingie is a two-piece key that can be used to control an instance of artificial intelligence gone rogue, a manmade smarty-pants that has beehived into an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful entity known, cleverly, as the Entity. Basically, it’s all just an excuse for Cruise—returning as Impossible Mission Force veteran Ethan Hunt—to do stuff like ride motorcycles off cliffs and drive teeny-tiny cars down Rome’s Spanish Steps. Cruise’s devotion to practical action and his insistence on doing most of his own stunts, many of them quite dangerous, are already the stuff of legend, or at least a bunch of press releases, and it’s not giving too much away to say that the plot of Dead Reckoning Part One —directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who has been pulling the franchise’s various strings and levers since 2015’s Rogue Nation —is virtually unfollowable after about the first third. The story exists only as flimsy interstitial tissue between the Tom-centric stunts, but maybe that’s enough. Ostensibly greater movies have given us less.

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

All you need to know going in, really, is that every woman for whom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt expresses even the tiniest bit of affection is doomed. But not right away, which means that Dead Reckoning brings back Rebecca Ferguson’s silky-steely Ilsa Faust, of the most engaging characters from the franchise’s last two entries, Fallout (2018) and Rogue Nation (2015) . She, apparently, has one-half of the much-desired-by-many-parties key, which makes her a target of, well, everybody: We first see in her in the corner of the world where she’s been hiding out, the Arabian Desert near Yemen. Ethan shows up on horseback, a dazzling sight wrapped in scarves and goggles designed to shield him from the swirly, sandy wind. There’s an encounter, and an event. Shortly thereafter, the action shifts to IMF headquarters (“the other IMF,” as one character quips wryly), where zillions of workers in suits are rushing to make hard copies of digital information—on typewriters. You could make a whole movie about that and plenty of people would be happy, but admittedly, it would be rather low on action.

As it is, the action in Dead Reckoning zips from the desert to the office to Rome to Venice to the Austrian Alps—the locations alone are transportive, even if the plot is a mess. Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames return as Ethan’s sidekicks Benji and Luther, and the three of them make almost as many solemn pronouncements about loyalty and family and friendship as Vin Diesel does in the Fast and Furious movies. Ethan stands by his team; he’s willing, he reminds us more than once, to die for them, and that includes any newbie who might enter the fold. In this case, that would be Hayley Atwell’s Grace, a pickpocket extraordinaire and sleight-of-hand expert who, at any given point in the movie, may or may not have the all-important half-key. The point is to keep it out of the hands of Ethan’s adversaries, which include Vanessa Kirby’s Alanna, AKA the White Widow, and an acrobatic assassin, Paris, played by Pom Klementieff. Ethan’s biggest enemy, though, is evil silver fox Gabriel (Esai Morales), who seeks the key to unleash chaos upon the world. Or something.

And the stunts! Isn’t that really what it’s all about? They include, but are not limited to, a gorgeously staged duel between Faust and Gabriel, set on a slender Venetian bridge: Faust wears a silky topcoat whose tails whirl about her as her sword slashes through the air, intensifying the already intense aura of Venetian mystery and drama. There is that business with the almost-miniature vintage Fiat 500 and the Spanish Steps, though rest assured, no Spanish Steps were harmed in the making of this film. The movie’s last third or so takes place in and around—but also, of course, atop—the Orient Express as it steams through the Alps. That section, already detailed in promotional videos for the film, also features Cruise speedflying—not to be confused with skydiving—over jagged mountain terrain. It’s beautiful, and it does look pretty dangerous.

Cruise has invested a great deal of emotional energy in making sure we know it’s really him doing these stunts, and you can’t blame him. In a green-screen movie world, where the idea of excitement, if not the thing itself, can be filled in long after filming is done, it’s rare to be able to watch a human being move like this. Cruise is muscular, feisty, nimble—but he does have bones, like everyone else, and those bones are now 61 years old. He’s the last survivor of his generation of action stars. Nicolas Cage and Bruce Willis have moved on, by necessity or choice, but Cruise still wants to do some version of what he has always done, whether it’s flying, running, or wrestling down random baddies on top of a moving train. Ethan Hunt is a grave presence—a recurring flashback in Dead Reckoning features snippets of a murder that looms large in his psyche, apparently influencing his every move. But Cruise doesn’t have a naturally grave persona; he has to work at it, and so he does.

At a certain point in Dead Reckoning, Ethan is required to smile at one of the women in his orbit. She has just said something nice to him, or about him, and he must respond appropriately. So he stiffens his jaw ever so slightly, and his eyes crinkle like those of a painted Santa. This expression of veiled gratitude, of being a sturdy guy who knows it’s better not to show much emotion, takes some effort, and you can see Cruise working to deliver. But even this not-quite-a-smile takes muscle and nerve. Think of it as a microstunt, less dangerous, certainly, than riding a motorcycle off a cliff, but a bit of risky business in its own right.

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The Extravagant Treats of “Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One”

By Anthony Lane

Tom Cruise riding a motorcycle off a cliff.

Like the beat, beat, beat of the tomtom, a pounding of the drums tells us that another installment of “ Mission: Impossible ” is under way. Most of us know the trills and thrills of Lalo Schifrin’s original score, which remains the most exciting theme tune ever composed for TV. (Paddling furiously in its wake is that of “Hawaii Five-O.”) For the ensuing movie franchise, the tune has been repeatedly stretched and tweaked—or, in the case of the second film, lacerated by Limp Bizkit. Now, as the seventh chapter of the saga begins, we hear no melody at all: nothing but the rhythm, thudding forth. But it’s enough. We brace ourselves, and adopt the Mission position. Here we go.

The new movie, which is directed by Christopher McQuarrie, runs for two hours and forty-three minutes, and its full title is “Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One,” which takes about half an hour to say. If Part Two, which is due to be released next June, is of similar dimensions, we’ll be landed with a tale that is more than five hours in the telling. Concision junkies will have to look elsewhere. The first sign of swelling, in this latest adventure, comes with a gathering of U.S. intelligence personnel, which goes on and on. It’s eventually halted by a guy who throws smoke bombs around, unleashing clouds of pretty green gas—a mild surprise to those present, who were presumably expecting coffee and a selection of pastries, but by this stage any interruption is welcome.

The topic of the meeting is the Entity, which is discussed at such length, and in tones of such grandiloquent awe, that I understood it even less at the end than I did at the start. In the world of “Mission: Impossible,” villainy gets bigger and more abstract by the movie. In “ Rogue Nation ” (2015), we had the Syndicate. In “Fallout” (2018), we had the Apostles. Now we get the Entity. (What next? The Intimation? The Word in Your Ear?) It seems to be a species of A.I.—“an enemy that is everywhere and nowhere,” we hear, with “a mind of its own.” Access to it is granted by a cruciform key, in two sections; collect the pair, slot ’em together, and the Entity lies within your grasp. Any government or terrorist outfit possessing it will wield unquenchable power, and the one person who can stop it from slipping into evil hands is, of course, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), Frodo Baggins having taken early retirement.

Ethan assembles his usual gang, consisting of Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), who has been on call since the first “Mission: Impossible” (1996), and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg). Also in the mix is Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), who made her début in “Rogue Nation.” To my eyes, it was with the arrival of Ferguson that the franchise truly took flight; her manner was tranquil even at the height of tension, her character’s fealty was elusive, and she was splendidly unimpressed by the hero. That impressed him. Make no mistake, Cruise is in control of these movies—“A Tom Cruise Production,” the opening credits of “Dead Reckoning” announce—but he has the wit to realize how dreary that dominance would become if Ethan were not, at regular intervals, unmanned by women.

Hence the amazing Grace (Hayley Atwell). She is a thief, whom Ethan bumps into at the Abu Dhabi airport. The thing about bumping into Grace is that, post-bump, you will find yourself bereft of valuables, for her fingers are feather-light. Although she has a sheaf of passports, like Jason Bourne, she is new to mayhem, never mind to brutality, and Atwell does a lovely job of suggesting that Grace’s natural state is one of criminal innocence—wide-eyed yet without a flake of ditziness, and far too schooled in common sense to be a femme fatale. Observe how she pauses, with a frown of uncertainty, before putting on one of those rubber masks which more seasoned habitués of “Mission: Impossible,” when switching identities, don and doff like gloves. Ever practical, she ties her hair back before clambering onto the outside of a speeding train, and, as she and Ethan are harried through Roman streets by multiple vehicles, exclaims, “Is there anyone not chasing us?” An excellent question. The chase concludes with a merry plea. “Don’t hate me,” she says, leaving Ethan bewitched, bothered, and be-handcuffed to a steering wheel. Nice.

The cuffs are a Hitchcockian clue, and the whole movie is clamorous with echoes of earlier works. (“Dead Reckoning” was a Humphrey Bogart thriller from 1947—tangled, surly, and steeped in postwar bitterness.) On the trusty comic principle that huge blockbusters deserve dinky modes of transport, Ethan and Grace scoot through Rome in a Fiat 500, the color of ripe lemons, recalling Roger Moore’s Citroën 2CV in “For Your Eyes Only” (1981), or, indeed, the tuk-tuk driven to exhaustion by Harrison Ford in the latest “ Indiana Jones .” The climax of McQuarrie’s film, set on and atop a train, alludes with pride to the first “Mission: Impossible” and winds up saluting “The General” (1926), Buster Keaton’s runaway masterpiece, as a locomotive takes a deep dive through a broken bridge.

Cruise has none of Keaton’s dreamy stoicism, but both actors, trim and compact, define themselves by the outsized magnificence of their stunts. In addition, each of them is most at ease when in haste. They run unstoppably yet with an oddly formal poise—torso held upright, like that of a waiter with a tray, above the pumping pistons of their legs. Watch Keaton sprint along the crest of a hill, a century ago, in the finale of “Seven Chances,” or Cruise in full flow on the roof of an airport, in “Dead Reckoning.” Relentlessness of this order ought to be chilling. Not so. Instead, we are stirred and amused by a preternatural sight: men as little machines.

There is a devout podcast, “Light the Fuse,” which peruses “Mission: Impossible” in all its incarnations. Should you wish to hear an interview—nay, a two-part interview—with a former marketing intern on the third film, here is your opportunity. As the podcast approaches its two-hundred-and-fortieth episode, one has to ask: why do these movies continue to suck us in? Perhaps because they are as fetishistic as their fans. Precision is everything. I have lost count of the objects, friendly and hostile, that click, lock, or shunt into place. The bass flute that turned into an assassin’s rifle, in “Rogue Nation,” somehow stood for the cunningly wrought design of the entire narrative. Likewise, on a larger scale, the main attraction of “Dead Reckoning” is a motorbike-and-parachute leap that was previewed, unpacked, and explained online, many months ago, the purpose being to demonstrate that Cruise, the nerveless and unfading star, had performed the maneuver himself. Here is a motion picture equipped with auto-spoilers, eager to stress that at the heart of its fantasy lies something risky and real.

It was after “Rogue Nation” that I searched my conscience and discovered, as I sorted through the rubble, that I was looking forward with greater gusto to the next helping of “Mission: Impossible” than I was to the upcoming James Bond. For somebody reared on 007, this was tantamount to apostasy. I felt like a mid-Victorian Protestant admitting, in shame and confusion, to the lure of the Catholic faith. The change of allegiance was merely hardened by “No Time to Die,” the most recent Bond flick, in 2021, which foundered in an agony of self-involvement. Who wants a hero who expires under the sheer weight of backstory? Where’s the fun in that?

By contrast, retrospection has played a blessedly small part in the emotional legend of Ethan Hunt. We gaze back, in remembrance of stunts past—“Oh, my God, that bit in the fourth one where he climbed a skyscraper with magnetic suckers on his mitts,” and so on. Ethan’s own impulse, though, is forever onward, and to complain that his character lacks depth is to misinterpret the laws of dramatic physics. He is mass times velocity plus grin. If he has a history, it tends to self-destruct from film to film; which of us honestly remembers, let alone cares, that he got married in “Mission: Impossible III” (2006)? Does he remember? That’s why the plot of “Dead Reckoning” is a cause for concern—not because of the metaphysical fluff (“Whoever controls the Entity controls the truth”) but because of Gabriel (Esai Morales), a smooth devil who craves the cruciform key. Thirty years ago, apparently, he crossed paths with Ethan, who declares, “In a very real sense, he made me who I am today.” I don’t like the sound of that. Let us pray that Part Two will not require Ethan to follow the example of poor 007, forsaking crazy capers to lick his psychological wounds.

For now, how does Part One stack up? Well, as I say, it’s too talky by half. A funky soirée at the Doge’s Palace, in Venice, brings together Ethan, Ilsa, Gabriel, Grace, and the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), the arms dealer with a hypnotizing stare whom we first encountered in “Fallout.” All the interested parties, in other words, yet the result is just not interesting; I vaguely hoped that Miss Marple would show up, reveal the killer’s name, and hit the dance floor. Soon afterward, a fight breaks out in an alleyway, during which Ethan beats a woman’s head against a wall—a spasm of nastiness that has no place in a saga as strangely anesthetized as “Mission: Impossible.” There isn’t the faintest shudder of sex in “Dead Reckoning,” so why does McQuarrie allow such violence to sour the spirited action?

But let’s be fair. Despite its longueurs and shortcomings, this movie is still a bag of extravagant treats. A submarine attacked by an invisible foe beneath the Arctic ice. A grand piano suspended directly over Ethan and Grace, and prevented from dropping only by a slowly weakening clamp. Rebecca Ferguson wearing a sniper’s eye patch. A nuclear bomb that asks the person trying to defuse it whether he is afraid of death. And, best of all, in Rome, the Fiat 500 rocking and rolling down the Spanish Steps—which, as we are charmingly assured in the closing credits, were not harmed in the making of the film. Thank God. Or thank Tom Cruise. The choice is yours. ♦

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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: Tom Cruise Soars, But the Women Fly Higher

The seventh installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise shows why this might be the greatest action series ever.

Over the past four decades, Tom Cruise has turned Mission: Impossible into one of the greatest action film series of all time, a franchise that continuously has pushed the possibilities of what a modern blockbuster could be, and found new terrifying ways to put Cruise into harm’s way for our amusement. After an intriguing start to the series with a stretch of directors like Brian De Palma , John Woo , J.J. Abrams , and Brad Bird , Cruise found his match with Christopher McQuarrie , who has helmed this series since 2015’s Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation . Despite the majority of the films involving Cruise’s Ethan Hunt being considered a rogue by the Impossible Missions Force (IMF), and despite the series pulling the same dang face mask trick on us over and over again, Mission: Impossible series has been consistently exciting, and because of Cruise’s dedication to bonkers stunts, this series has always felt more tactile, more real, more dangerous than your standard action film.

The seventh and latest installment in this series, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One , comes five years after the last film, Mission: Impossible — Fallout , which felt like both a culmination of everything that came before it, and in many ways the pinnacle of what this series could be. Coming off that high, Dead Reckoning Part One has a lot to live up to, especially when you consider that over these last few decades, Mission: Impossible has continuously set the bar high for itself and action films in general. Compared to other blockbuster action films—especially in a year that’s given us several disappointments already — Dead Reckoning Part One is still an impressive feat from both Cruise and McQuarrie, but after the apex that was Fallout , and coming after some of the most impressive action films ever made, the newest film can’t help but feel like somewhat of a disappointment.

'Dead Reckoning Part One' Is the Beginning of the End and a New Beginning

Dead Reckoning Part One acts as the beginning of the goodbye for Tom Cruise as this series’ protagonist, while also setting up who could follow in his footsteps, and making this film a sort of jumping-off point for those new to the franchise. Dead Reckoning Part One has Ethan Hunt and the IMF trying to track down a sentient AI called The Entity, which would essentially give the owner power to control the world. However, this enemy that can be anywhere is unlike anything Hunt and his team have ever faced, leading Hunt to come face-to-face with Gabriel ( Esai Morales ), who share a past that made Hunt the man he is today. In order to stop The Entity, Hunt’s mission (don’t worry, he chooses to accept it), involves finding two keys that when combined, unlock…something that seems extremely important to The Entity.

RELATED: Watch Tom Cruise Run Through All Seven ‘Mission: Impossible’ Movies in New Video

On Hunt’s hunt for The Entity and the keys, he is again joined by Luther ( Ving Rhames ) and Benji ( Simon Pegg ), and his paths cross once more with Ilsa Faust ( Rebecca Ferguson ). Hunt also meets Grace ( Hayley Atwell ), a thief who gets in over her head when she gets in the way of Hunt’s goals. Dead Reckoning Part One also sees the return of Henry Czerny ’s Eugene Kittridge, who hasn’t been in this series since the first Mission: Impossible , and introduces us to Paris ( Pom Klementieff ), who is hunting down Ethan on behalf of Gabriel, as well as Jasper ( Shea Whigham ) and Degas ( Greg Tarzan Davis ), who is also trying to hunt down Ethan, but for different reasons.

One of the most noticeable differences in this latest film almost right from the beginning is how convoluted and explained everything often feels. An early meeting scene has Eugene Kittridge explaining to Denlinger ( Cary Elwes ) and the audience exactly what the threat is, who Hunt is, and what the IMF does, and while it’s clear this scene exists for newcomers to this series, it also is far heavier on the exposition than these movies usually are. And while these movies often center around a MacGuffin that Hunt and the antagonist are fighting over, it’s never felt as Byzantine as it is here. There are double and triple-crosses, misdirection, and even a surprising amount of close-up magic, all of which make this quest for the keys more complex than it probably needs to be. Did the entire first part of this two-part movie really need to be about finding these keys? Only time will tell once Part Two is released.

Action Is Still Where 'Mission: Impossible' Thrives

But the story is secondary to great action sequences in Mission: Impossible , and Dead Reckoning Part One shows this series still delivers. A chase through Venice that puts Ethan and Grace into the tiniest car possible continuously builds the stakes and excitement, while also managing some pretty solid comedic moments between the two. While the film’s major train set piece that has been teased forever does use more CGI than one would expect from a Mission: Impossible film, it’s the way that McQuarrie directs this sequence that makes it work quite well, as naturally, everything that could go wrong does go wrong.

Mission: Impossible has often relied on tension in these action scenes as we watch Tom Cruise do truly mind-boggling stunts for the amusement of the audience. Yet Dead Reckoning Part One makes this tension work even better outside the extravagant set pieces. For example, one scene at an airport balances new character introductions, Jasper and Degas trying to find Hunt, while Luther and Benji have their own little side adventure. McQuarrie mixes all of these elements in a way that makes walking through an airport actually electrifying. Another scene on the aforementioned train shows us that all the mysterious allegiances and twists of character motivations happening within the train are just as captivating as Cruise’s attempts to almost kill himself to get on top of the moving locomotive. Even though the script, by McQuarrie and Erik Jendersen ( Band of Brothers ) can often be a bit too overwritten, it’s in these smaller-scale action scenes that build and build, adding new elements at every turn, where we can see the excitement inherent in the screenplay.

McQuarrie and Jendersen’s screenplay also excels at mixing our old favorite characters with the new. We get all the Ethan/Benji/Luther moments we’d expect, but this new cast hints that the future certainly has potential. Especially fun is Klementieff, who is gleefully malicious, as she drives over cars with joy and tracks down Hunt with viciousness. Whigham is also a hilarious addition, acting almost as if he’s seen one too many Mission: Impossible movies himself, and attempting to rip off the “face masks” of innocent civilians that get in between him and Hunt.

Tom Cruise Is Great, But the Women of 'Mission: Impossible' Are Even Better

Yet it’s Hayley Atwell ’s Grace that leaves the biggest impression, as she certainly feels like she could be where this franchise is heading, and Dead Reckoning Part One does a fine job showing us that this series would be in good hands with her at the helm. Whether or not that will be the case down the road is yet to be seen, but along with the return of Ferguson and Vanessa Kirby ’s Alanna Mitsopolis, Dead Reckoning Part One certainly makes the case that the women in Ethan Hunt’s life are far more interesting than Hunt himself. Unfortunately, while Morales’ Gabriel is being set up as the main antagonist in Hunt’s life, there’s little here to make him all that interesting of a villain, especially compared to how gripping this brand’s villains can be when they’re at their best. As an endgame villain of sorts, Gabriel is fairly underwhelming.

Dead Reckoning Part One is plenty of fun, and one of the best action films of the summer by far, but coming five years after Fallout , it’s hard for this seventh film to not feel like a bit of a disappointment. Again, comparing Dead Reckoning Part One simply to other Mission: Impossible films means you’re essentially holding it up against some of the best action films of the 21st century. There’s a bit of a franchise bloat that this series has never had before, largely because Dead Reckoning Part One often feels like it’s doing more than it needs to—be it through explaining itself, throwing in characters, or scenes that just go on far too long—yet in those consistently exhilarating action sequences, all that slips away. Dead Reckoning Part One shows that there’s still plenty of gas in the tank, but maybe we’re seeing that this series needs a shakeup to keep it as thrilling as it has been.

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One comes to theaters on July 12.

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‘Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One’ Review: Tom Cruise Escalates His War Against Streaming with Actioner About Evil of Algorithms

David ehrlich.

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What others might see as a content-driven culture war, Cruise naturally regards as an existential threat, and the last few years have seen the actor-producer channel his singularly clenched intensity into a holy crusade against the standard-lowering forces of digital technology ( the Eighth Dynamic saves its toughest battles for its strongest warriors). Related Stories For ‘Seven’ Restoration, David Fincher Went Back and ‘Kissed in Some of the City’ David Zaslav’s 2023 Pay Was Almost $50 Million

Motion-smoothing might just be a setting that you need to change on your parents’ TV, but Cruise sees it as a vast conspiracy to make people more apathetic towards the viewing experience. Venture capital might have sold the masses on the idea that movie theaters are a relic of the analog era, but Cruise sees them as irreplaceable churches where alienated strangers can be united in the light of the collective imagination (and codify his ever-inflating savior complex). A.I. might promise to make your life easier, but Cruise sees it as a willful surrender of human agency, an affront to objective reality, and — perhaps most of all — a massive “fuck you” to a multiplex icon who frequently risks his life to restore the relationship between seeing and believing.

Anyone who saw “Top Gun: Maverick” knows that Cruise isn’t shy about confronting these concerns on-screen, and since everyone saw (and believed) that Best Picture-nominated mega-hit despite the supposed death of cinema, it stands to reason that Cruise’s next blockbuster — the goofy, romantic, and often transcendently committed “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” — should escalate his beef with the machines to hilariously literal new heights.

Over time, the “Mission: Impossible” series has forged a cohesive identity through its obsession with balancing the human element against bottom-line calculations, and that’s why it’s become such a natural place for Cruise to motorcycle into traffic around the Arc de Triomphe, fly a motorcycle off the top of a mountain in Norway, or otherwise showcase that he’s the only A-lister mad enough to save the movies from themselves. These death-defying spectacles risk becoming snuff films in the service of self-preservation; absent the unbridled nostalgia of “Maverick,” the forward-thinking new installment feels like nothing less than a $300 million backdrop for Cruise to argue that blockbusters can’t afford to lose their last shred of believability.

Ridiculous from the start but also strangely fresh for yet another 21st century tentpole about a rogue A.I., “Dead Reckoning Part One” may not be the best movie in the “Mission: Impossible” franchise — there’s no topping the raw adrenaline rush of “Fallout,” and McQuarrie is smart enough not to try — but this extravagantly entertaining Dolby soap opera nails what the “Mission: Impossible” franchise does best: Weaponizing artifice and illusion in order to fight for a world that’s still worth believing in.

That being said, the decision to make the bad guy a string of code or whatever — with heavy emphasis on the whatever — can’t help but feel a bit like throwing in the towel, least of all in a series that’s suffered from a serious villain problem from the very beginning (Philip Seymour Hoffman being the sole and undeniable exception). Which isn’t to say that Ethan Hunt and his pals at the Impossible Mission Force are tasked with defeating a bad piece of malware or another run of the mill Skynet ripoff. Far from it.

Essentially, the streaming algorithm identifies Tom Cruise as the only person who can stop it, and therefore does everything in its power to kill him; art imitating life imitating art. Little does the Entity know that it’s dealing with the living manifestation of destiny himself, now rebranded as “a mind-reading, shape-shifting incarnation of chaos.”

If the deeply satisfying “Dead Reckoning Part One” only feels unfinished or half-told because of the human stooge the Entity hires to do its bidding: A zero-impression terrorist named Gabriel (Esai Morales) who was supposedly instrumental in Hunt’s decision to join the IMF all those years ago. We learn next to nothing about their overlapping pasts over the course of this movie, which feels like an egregious oversight because Gabriel has so little to offer beyond generic intrigue, sinister handsomeness, and an unstoppable crony of his own (a homicidal Pom Klementieff, electrifying despite the tropiness of the whole “silent Asian henchwoman” archetype).

In stark contrast to several of the previous “Mission”s, Hunt and his team, headlined as usual by Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames’ snippy hackers, are presented as more prey than predator. Likewise, this movie’s rather small array of action setpieces — all of them fresh, tactile, and utterly spectacular in a way that continues to put the rest of Hollywood to shame — are less dependent on what the spies are trying to accomplish than what they’re hoping to avoid. Or escape.

Oh, one more insane flex while we’re on the subject: Shooting an elaborate first-act heist sequence, complete with hundreds of extras and a nuclear bomb, in the world’s biggest airport terminal just before it opened to the public. The wow factor might not rate alongside the Rome chase to come, but hyper-convincing production design and a frightening degree of directorial confidence make for a powerful combination, and McQuarrie has so much fun with the space that you’re basically all-in for whatever the movie does next by the time “Dead Reckoning” takes off from Abu Dhabi.

You see, Hunt doesn’t trust any country on Earth with control of the Entity, including his own. Power is never safe in the hands of anyone who cares about algorithmic data more than people. Nevertheless, “Dead Reckoning” is only able to cast our digital future as an enemy unto itself because its heroes wield some pretty spiffy technology of their own, and it would be wrong to suggest the “Mission: Impossible” movies outright reject the tools of modern Hollywood. Tom Cruise might be the world’s least insurable film star, but he’s not Amish.

The marketing campaign for this sequel kicked off with a behind-the-scenes look at “the biggest stunt in cinema history,” in which Cruise drives a Honda CRF 250 off the peak of a Norwegian mountain and then plunges 4,000 feet into a ravine before opening his parachute, and even that head-shaking tribute to practical magic made it clear that the full effect — still a heart-in-your-throat experience after eons of hype — was only possible with the help of some computer enhancement.

A glorified trolley problem set aboard the Orient Express, the situation itself is pretty standard for the “Mission” series, but the terms here are a bit starker and more nuanced than ever before. Likewise, the action might seem small-scale when compared to the CGI bonanzas that today’s audiences have been conditioned to expect from the third act of a studio blockbuster, but it’s conducted with such convincing force that it feels bigger and more involving than anything the Avengers have ever had to face (it also feels like a nod back to action cinema’s silent roots, when all you needed to make a great movie was a guy, some guns, and a really big train).

Paramount Pictures will release “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” in theaters on Wednesday, July 12.

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Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One review – As muscular, extravagant and old school as its star

Tom cruise represents all that is human in the face of a cold and robotic future in this thrilling sequel, article bookmarked.

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Top Gun : Top Gun: Maverick and the new Mission: Impossible share the same message: that Tom Cruise , and Tom Cruise alone, is the last line of defence against the AI invasion. At a time like this, when a sudden panic over the profitability of digitised entertainment has seen streaming services slash and burn their own content while Hollywood’s writers remain on strike, Cruise has cunningly positioned himself as the idealistic (and no doubt patriotic) alternative. He is all that is human in the face of a cold and robotic future. Pure muscle and sweat.

In Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One , Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is the only man on Earth capable of defeating a seemingly sentient, AI-powered virus that possesses the ability to infiltrate any top-secret infrastructure it sets its sights on, like, say, the CIA or the World Bank. Finally, the super spy’s greatest asset – the limitless pool of technology that has, over the course of six earlier films, allowed him to wear other people’s faces as masks and scale the Burj Khalifa – has turned against him. Dead Reckoning can, admittedly, feel a little too immaculate and calculated when held up against the more lofty, idea-driven blockbusters of our age (say, a Dune or an Across the Spider-Verse ). But any simplicity here is outweighed by the sheer force of Cruise’s brand.

The film is a mirror image of its star – a muscular, extravagant, thoroughly old-school work of ingenuity and craft. In it, Hunt chases two halves of a key with a mysterious connection to the AI across several fabulous international locations: Abu Dhabi, Rome, Venice and the UK (standing in for the Alps). His loyal techies, Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji ( Simon Pegg ), are always stationed nearby.

On the way, he crosses paths with various beautiful European women and surly American agency workers. Rebecca Ferguson ’s magnetic Ilsa Faust returns, as does Vanessa Kirby ’s aristocratic arms dealer, White Widow. Hayley Atwell appears as a master thief who’s also, somehow, the closest the franchise has ever been to a bumbling Hugh Grant-type. Although still notably underused, Pom Klementieff’s largely silent henchwoman is the film’s non-Cruise-related standout. Maniacally bloodthirsty and exquisitely well-dressed, she is a slick combination of classic Bond villain and DC’s Harley Quinn. Shea Whigham and Greg Tarzan Davis play two intelligence officers who have no clue how to apprehend Hunt and his team, but still give it the old college try.

We’re supposedly at the beginning of the end here, with next year’s Dead Reckoning Part Two set to be Cruise’s final outing in the role (or so he claims). Yet, Part One shares very little in common with today’s brand of indulgent, self-reflective, legacy-obsessed sequels. There are one or two connections to the past; the film’s human antagonist, Gabriel (Esai Morales), arrives together with a glimpse of Hunt’s pre-spy existence. But Hunt, really, is too busy saving the world to have any kind of existential crisis, stuck in a life that’s now become as mundane to him as any office job.

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Mission: Impossible is exactly the sort of franchise in which people simply roll their eyes when the bomb they’re trying to detonate turns out (of course!) to be a nuclear one. That lack of ponderousness is embedded bone-deep into Dead Reckoning , and how returning director Christopher McQuarrie chooses to operate. The action sequences are consistently dynamic, and always adapted to their environment: a shoot-out in a sandstorm focuses on stealth and precision, while a Vespa chase down Rome’s many staircases is all cartoon chaos. It all culminates in an absolutely insane stunt in which Cruise drives a motorcycle off a cliff and then parachutes down onto a moving train. You will leave Dead Reckoning the same way you always do: wondering how Cruise could possibly outdo himself in the next one – until, inevitably, he does.

Dir: Christopher McQuarrie. Starring: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Henry Czerny. 12A, 163 minutes.

‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’ is in cinemas from 10 July

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Early Reviews for Mission Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One Hail It As the “Best Mission Yet”

By Grant Rindner

ROME ITALY June 19 Actor Tom Cruise attends the world premiere Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning at the Auditorium...

The best movie of 2022 wasn’t the biggest superhero film or the Oscar darling, it was a nine-minute featurette on the Paramount Pictures YouTube channel about Tom Cruise riding a motorcycle off a cliff. The marquee stunt of Mission: Impossible–Dead Reckoning Part One set the tone for what fans could expect from the seventh installment in the franchise. Of course, with a set piece that big it’s worth wondering whether the rest of the two-and-a-half-hour film can keep up—thankfully early buzz from the Dead Reckoning premiere in Rome is overwhelmingly positive.

Collider’s Perri Nemiroff praised the film effusively , noting that the movie offers “some of the most well-defined and exhilarating set pieces photographed in ways that truly make you feel like you’re in the middle of the action.” She also spoke highly of Hayley Atwell, who seems to be emerging as a fan favorite from early screenings, writing that Atwell gives one of “the most captivating performances/arcs, and just a hugely enjoyable character to watch.”

Atwell is no stranger to major franchises, having played Peggy Carter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since 2011, but joining Mission Impossible is an entirely different task. She told ET Canada she spent five months learning how to drift in a car for one stunt, which People film editor Nigel Smith spoke very highly of, saying that “it reinvigorated my love for the summer blockbuster.”

“What ends up being the case is this is a consistently inconsistent character, which I’m delighted about because I wanted to elevate her. I wanted her to be more than a femme fatale, or an ingénue, or an ice queen. I wanted her to have nuance,” Atwell explained.

Film critic Scott Mantz dubbed it “the best Mission yet,” while emphasizing that despite being the first chapter of a two film saga, “It’s a complete movie that stands on its own.” Other writers like Screenrant’s Joseph Deckelmeier mentioned how Dead Reckoning sets up an eerily timely antagonist. “With the AI being the villain, this feels like a cautionary tale,” Deckelmeier wrote. While the exact details of the plot have been kept predictably under wraps, director Christopher McQuarrie did explain to Empire in November what the title meant.

“There are many things emerging from Ethan’s past. ‘Dead reckoning’ is a navigational term. It means you’re picking a course based solely on your last known position and that becomes quite the metaphor not only for Ethan, but several characters,” McQuarrie said.

And if you’re afraid that watching the motorcycle jump featurette will diminish Dead Reckoning’s impact, fret not—apparently here’s a train sequence in the film that is equally thrilling. The scene, which involves Cruise’s Hunt fighting someone atop a moving train, was such a herculean undertaking that McQuarrie told Empire , “If we’d known the challenges, we’d never have done it.”

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning was slated to begin filming in February 2020, though it was delayed several months due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Leaked audio from the set saw Cruise admonishing crew members who did not strictly follow the COVID safety rules, and, according to The Wrap , principal photography didn’t finish until April 2023. (Both Part 1 and Part 2 were filmed back-to-back.)

Dead Reckoning premieres stateside on July 12, featuring Cruise, Atwell, returning co-stars like Ving Rhames and Vanessa Kirby, as well as Henry Czerny reprising his role as IMF director Eugene Kittridge for the first time since the original film came out in 1996. Dead Reckoning Part Two is slated for release on June 28, 2024. At this point, all we can hope is that Cruise jumps a motorcycle out of a plane and onto a moving train.

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Tom Cruise’s Stunts Are as Spectacular as You Hoped in New ‘Mission: Impossible’

THE G.O.A.T.

The daredevil star pulls off another action-movie miracle in “Dead Reckoning Part One,” filled with astonishing stunts and an all-too-relatable villain: artificial intelligence.

Nick Schager

Entertainment Critic

Christian Black / Paramount Pictures

Having pulled off a miraculous multifaceted mission with 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick —which revitalized the post-pandemic box-office, reconfirmed its headliner’s eternal youthfulness , and bested its illustrious ’80s predecessor in thrills and charm—Tom Cruise returns to the spy game fold with Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One , the first installment of a two-film franchise finale that aims to demonstrate that the 60-year-old leading man can still do it all.

That includes, of course, executing astonishing stunts on his own, which Cruise does in the third act of this summer-season sequel, driving a motorcycle off a ramp-like cliff in the Austrian Alps and parachuting onto a moving train. It’s yet another testament to his enduring virility, as well as the latest in a long line of daredevil feats designed to take moviegoers’ breath away and raise the blood pressure of the tentpole production’s insurers.

Cruise is an analog star fighting the good fight against CGI unreality, and whereas his prior blockbuster pitted his ace pilot against unmanned drones, Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One has his IMF super-agent Ethan Hunt square off against an even greater digital foe determined to make man obsolete: artificial intelligence.

That sentient computer program is known as the Entity, and because it can infiltrate and seize control of every electronic system in the world, it’s a most fearsome adversary, capable of manipulating not only Hunt’s gadgets but the truth itself—thereby constantly calling into question everything he thinks he knows. Moreover, despite its fundamental incorporeality, the Entity is posited by Christopher McQuarrie’s film as an evil mirror image of Cruise’s hero, both of them figurative “ghosts” that have an instinctive habit of going “rogue.”

McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen’s script has characters repeatedly explain the apocalyptic threat facing Hunt, his eye-in-the-sky comrades Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), and his ex-MI6 ally Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson), whom Hunt seeks in the UAE desert at the outset of Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One , given that she’s in possession of one half of a mysterious key sought by the Entity and every major global government.

What this interlocking crucifix-ish mechanism precisely does is unknown to everyone, but its importance is inarguable, and once Hunt acquires Ilsa’s portion of it, he and his team attempt to acquire its matching piece. Their efforts, however, are immediately thwarted by an airport run-in with Grace (Hayley Atwell), a master thief who turns out to be an unexpected player in this espionage game, and whose presence creates chaos that’s amplified by the appearance of Gabriel (Esai Morales), a nemesis from Hunt’s past who likewise covets the key—and seems to be in league with the Entity.

“Whatever it takes!” screams Hunt in Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One , and while the pronouncement explicitly refers to the protagonist’s commitment to his civilization-saving task, it also resounds as Cruise’s statement of artistic principles. Whether speeding through Venice’s narrow alleyways on a motorcycle, careening down that city’s streets and public steps in a tiny Fiat that he steers with one hand—all as he evades pursuers led by an armored police van—or battling baddies in a claustrophobic corridor and on the roof of a runaway train, the actor wholeheartedly commits to walking his proverbial walk. That McQuarrie and Jendresen’s story eventually has Hunt employing outdated equipment, and his own flesh-and-blood athleticism, to get the job done—and prioritizing others, and his objective, ahead of his own safety—is now par for Cruise’s cinematic course, as his films have become outright expressions of his forever-young DIY ethos.

Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One boasts a grab-bag of shout-outs to its forerunners, in particular Brian De Palma’s original Mission: Impossible , via the reappearance of Henry Czerny’s pain-in-the-ass intelligence community bigwig Eugene Kittridge and McQuarrie’s preference for intense canted-angle close-ups in which faces and bodies are packed into one side of the frame. Yet unlike the nostalgic Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny —which, coincidentally, stages a number of similar set pieces—McQuarrie’s spectacular doesn’t incessantly rely on computer effects for its jaw-droppers. Instead, its action is bruised, battered and borderline concussed, with Cruise suffering the lion’s share of the abuse, including inside a variety of flipping, tumbling, crashing vehicles. There’s a thunderous brawniness (and goofy wit) to the director’s showstoppers, which expertly up the ante, culminating with a massively inventive and suspenseful climax that puts the loco in locomotive.

Even at 60 years old, Cruise looks as spry as ever while going toe-to-toe with villains decades his junior and (per his trademark) running, running, and running some more. As the beginning of the series’ end game, Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One features genuine stakes, as illustrated by its willingness to dispatch some of its long-standing characters. Simultaneously, it gives its veterans requisite time in the spotlight (with Ferguson remaining these films’ charismatic secret weapon) and introduces two compelling new figures in Morales’ Gabriel, an Entity pawn whose arrogance comes from his AI-facilitated belief that he can see the future, and Atwell’s Grace, a career criminal whose sleight-of-hand skills speak to her deceptiveness and, with it, her inability to trust others. Cruise and Atwell have gangbusters chemistry, and McQuarrie surrounds them with an assortment of compelling collaborators and opponents, from Shea Whigham’s Hunt-hunting federal agent Jasper, to Vanessa Kirby’s seductive arms dealer Alanna, to Pom Klementieff’s Gabriel-hired assassin Paris, who’s as adept behind the wheel as she is with a blade.

Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One isn’t quite as dynamic as McQuarrie’s preceding Fallout , but it’s not far off that standout’s pace, and it finds a way to concoct a satisfying resolution to its tale even as it sets up its closing 2024 chapter. That Hunt’s missions will soon be a thing of the past is a depressing reality to contemplate, considering that no other big-budget franchise has consistently matched its bloody-knuckled scale and ferocity. Nonetheless, Cruise makes sure that his penultimate Hunt outing is just as vigorous as its predecessors. And in its remarkable conclusion, he proves that that by risking life and limb to cling tightly to the things he most loves, he continues to be Hollywood’s old-school action-movie savior.

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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One Spoiler Review: A Masterpiece Of Action Filmmaking

Early in the greatest film of all time, "Singin' in the Rain," Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) describes to a fawning group of fans his rise to fame in Hollywood. Part of that rise includes his career as a stuntman, from bar-fight scenes to more elaborate gags. In one stunt, Don puts on racing goggles, rides atop a motorcycle and sends it right over a huge cliff. If you watch "Singin' in the Rain" enough times, you may ask what type of movie would require that kind of stunt. Seven-plus decades later, with the action masterpiece "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One," we finally have the answer.

It is an unassailable truth that a few handfuls of images are among the greatest ever captured on film. Some examples: Kelly dancing with an umbrella on a rainy street at night. Mickey Mouse commanding the stars with the power of a sorcerer at his disposal. Marlon Brando's tank-top-wearing lout screaming to the heavens for his wife. Oh yes, and Tom Cruise running for his life and/or to save the lives of those around him, speaking not only to Cruise's intense and remarkable physicality but to an innate choice to always be the selfless hero.

Tom Cruise was born to run. He doesn't just run like hell in the "Mission: Impossible" films, but it's no accident that to commemorate his 61st birthday earlier this month, Paramount Pictures put together a supercut of his running in the franchise. Tom Cruise is one of our last living true-blue movie stars, and it's been more than 25 years since he helped create out of whole cloth a series that has ensured his presence on the Mount Rushmore of action heroes.

Yes, "Mission: Impossible" existed as a TV series decades before the opening film released in 1996, but Cruise – whose producing effort is not coincidentally the Brian de Palma film that kickstarted the franchise – was quite nakedly attempting to become an American James Bond. It got to the point where the actors from the TV series loudly criticized the film for running so far from the source material, including turning the show's lead into a villain who's killed off gruesomely. But that tracks, because Tom Cruise was born to run.

Choose to accept

While "Mission: Impossible" (1996) served as an origin story for Ethan Hunt, the sterling secret agent who is often the only person standing between humanity and certain doom, it only briefly touched on his past, let alone what led him to become an IMF agent. The excellent "Dead Reckoning: Part One" (despite being a mouthful of a title) offers some valuable hints. In the extended pre-credits section, we learn that the famous line – "Your mission, should you choose to accept it" – was once framed to Ethan as a true choice between working for the government or being sent to prison for life. Moreover, the script (by director Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen) makes it obvious that this choice is extended to anyone in the same appropriately unpleasant situation: become an IMF agent or descend gradually into oblivion.

The watchword in this new film is "choice." Ethan's first appearance, shrouded in shadows in Amsterdam, involves him receiving his new mission and commending the young deliveryperson for making the right choice to join the team. The power of a choice -– between life or death, between the types of choices a person can make, and so on –- weighs heavy here, even amidst the many breathtaking action sequences.

Choice is so powerful here because it represents the logical endpoint of the franchise, as we learn that Ethan Hunt's latest enemy is not truly a person. Yes, the enemy has human avatars, such as the odious Gabriel (Esai Morales), but Gabriel works on behalf of a ... thing : an artificial intelligence known only as the Entity. We first encounter the Entity as it reveals its power in the depths of the Bering Sea by fooling a Russian sub with terrifying nuclear power to fire missiles at a ghost sub before destroying the real one, sending its denizens to float to their death on the bottom side of a glacier. For all the talk in "Rogue Nation" and "Fallout" about Svengali-like villains reverse-engineering scenarios to ensure our heroes make decisions that enable their evil plans, this is the first time Ethan could be outmatched. Ethan defines himself as a ghost at one point; the Entity actually is one.

I understand you're upset

Ethan can't be a ghost, because his past hovers over him more than ever. When he receives his first mission, he's greeted by the all-too-familiar voice of current CIA Director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny, making a very welcome return). All Kittridge tells Ethan is that his old friend Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson) has absconded with one-half of a key and is looking to sell it to someone who owns the other half. Who has the other half? What does the key open? What does this mystery item do once unlocked? Answers are scarce, but bounty hunters are after Ilsa and the key in the Middle East, so Ethan has to get there first.

Choosing to do so – because of course Ethan does choose to help, and does get there first – creates complications. Aside from his voice, Kittridge is first seen meeting with other members of the intelligence community (portrayed by Rob Delaney, Indira Varma, Mark Gatiss, and Charles Parnell). All of them have a better sense of the power of the two-part key, something that feels more disturbing with the images of Russian sailors floating in our minds just as they floated under a glacier. As mysterious as their conversation is, it also turns funny –- this film is often very funny –- when the Director of National Intelligence (Cary Elwes) learns about the presence of the IMF for the first time and that Ethan's identity is classified even to him.

But Kittridge knows Ethan, enabling the latter to calmly enter this covert meeting and neutralize it by knocking everyone else out with a smoke bomb. The ensuing conversation is all the more thrilling if you've watched the original recently. There's the joy of watching Tom Cruise and Henry Czerny sharing another tense conversation, echoing the confrontation from the original at a restaurant with an opulent aquarium. (It's equally joyous to hear Kittridge once again tell Ethan "I understand you're upset.") There's even the delight of how McQuarrie cuts to the opening credits, as Kittridge realizes Ethan can only escape their current conversation by wearing a mask ... of Eugene Kittridge.

Kidding aside, the true reckoning of this film is Ethan's, with deep and powerful echoes to his past throughout. The most powerful comes courtesy of the aforementioned Gabriel. We don't yet know Gabriel's full history, but we do know that Gabriel and Ethan had a run-in of some kind before Ethan joined the IMF, and that Gabriel killed some woman (Mariela Garriga) close to Ethan.

Death is no stranger to Ethan Hunt even if he's escaped it directly for decades. When Kittridge notes that the mission will "cost you dearly," it's like he's a seer. Ethan has visited Kittridge because our hero has learned that the bounty on Ilsa's head was placed on her ... by Kittridge himself, as a way to get American hands on the key. Though Ilsa doesn't die there, her life soon hangs in the balance, because Gabriel and the Entity force Ethan to make a choice.

A mind-reader capable of shape-shifting

Ethan has to make many choices across a series of setpieces that take place primarily in a) the airport in Abu Dhabi, b) the rollicking roads of Rome, c) a nighttime affair in Venice, and d) the Austrian Alps. (There are a few moments of downtime in the 163-minute film, but after the opening credits roll, the film's action is primarily confined to these locations.) He, of course, chooses to accept his mission, and brings back Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg). In Abu Dhabi, the plan is simple: they take their half of the key to meet a mysterious buyer, follow the buyer to Venice so they can figure out who the full key is being sold to, allowing them to learn what the key opens. The complications begin in the form of a beautiful jewel thief named Grace (Hayley Atwell), who steals the buyer's half of the key, throwing a wrench in the plan.

As Ethan tries to steer Grace towards the buyer and his plane in Venice, the team realizes there are two other complications: US intelligence agents and a nuclear bomb. The US agents — the irascible Jasper (Shea Whigham) and his partner Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) -– serve a recognizable role, as interceptors who eventually side with Ethan out of professional respect. Whigham makes a meal of his role, especially the first time Jasper thinks he's captured Ethan in the airport, only to find someone completely different and immediately start grabbing the stranger's face in the hopes of finding a mask instead of human skin. And the way Jasper identifies Ethan as "a mind-reading, shape-shifting incarnation of chaos" is about as good as hearing the now-dead Alan Hunley define Ethan as the living manifestation of destiny.

That last complication is the real issue, and one that Benji and Luther try to keep from Ethan as he focuses on Grace. Benji, in particular, is sharp enough to realize that a bag flagged as dangerous at the baggage claim is apparently housing a nuclear bomb. "Apparently," because although Benji is able to disarm the bomb with less than a second to spare (naturally), the bomb shell is empty –- it was a test from the Entity, and one that has enabled it to learn more about Benji in the process.

No digital Tom

Tom Cruise and Ethan Hunt often feel interchangeable, and the threats represented in the series feel like manifestations of his current psyche, so it makes sense that artificial intelligence like the Entity is the bad guy now. (The apocryphal story of Cruise pushing back against a CG version of himself doing stunts in "Ghost Protocol," in which he purportedly said "there is no digital Tom," seems awfully relevant now.) For Ethan, the Entity is as primal and existential a threat as possible, undoing all the potential good the IMF can do and reigning over all world governments.

The sight of Gabriel in Abu Dhabi makes Ethan abort the mission, which speaks to how terrifying the former must be to the latter. Ethan would rather risk losing Grace and regrouping in Rome. Once there, Ethan only gets Grace out of police custody to take her on the run in a novel, thrilling, and hilarious car chase in which –- thanks to some ill-placed handcuffs –- she has to drive with his guidance. (Cruise is assured as ever, but it's when he gets to be funny, as when expressing a good deal of agita at her shaky driving skills, that he can be most enjoyable.) The challenge of the chase is that Gabriel's henchwoman Paris (Pom Klementieff) is a true psychopath, gleefully laughing as she takes an Italian police truck and rams into any and all innocent cars in her way. The chase concludes much the way the first section did –- with Grace evading Ethan's grasp once more, and Ethan forced to regroup, this time with Luther, Benji, and Ilsa taking him to Venice.

In Venice, Ethan is eventually presented with an impossible choice: either Grace or Ilsa has to die. He and his team meet the person who wants to sell the two-part key: Alana Mitsopolis (Vanessa Kirby), who realizes with everyone else that the nighttime rave they're attending was set up by the Entity. The echoes from the first "Mission: Impossible" are at their loudest here. Yes, there is the return of Kittridge, and sly references to the hacker nicknames Luther sported when he was a younger man.

But the most emotionally intense sequence in the original comes when a young Ethan tries and fails to save his team from sabotage, especially the lovely Sarah (Kristin Scott Thomas), who's stabbed to death by an offscreen attacker. The mirror image comes after Ethan tries to save both Grace and Ilsa. Yet he finally, after so many years of protecting those around him, loses someone: Ilsa. The sword fight between her and Gabriel teased in the trailer, coming at night on Venice's deserted bridges, is pitched at an almost operatic level (Lorne Balfe's score, throughout, is as solid as you can get). And it ends with tragedy, as Gabriel stabs her and leaves the scene before Ethan can get to her. Another immensely talented agent, who was as close to a lover as Ethan had ever had, and now gone.

The line that Cruise and McQuarrie walk here is precise and careful: the "Mission: Impossible" films do not work because they are brooding, grimdark affairs. They work because they are breathless, rollicking, suspenseful adventures. So even with the immense loss of Ilsa weighing on Ethan, Luther, and Benji, they frame her sacrifice as something that can enable their mission. When Grace takes the blame, noting that if it wasn't for her, Ilsa wouldn't be dead, Luther reverses it: Ilsa chose to ensure that Grace could survive. Because this film is all about choices, Grace is given the biggest one of all: to join the team, and not just because they need her for this one. We can talk about how the first "Mission: Impossible" is an origin story for Ethan Hunt, but we already meet him as an IMF agent. With "Dead Reckoning," we have something of an origin story for how an IMF agent is made , as Grace accepts the mission.

Grace, of course, accepts, as she and Ethan break into the Orient Express as it zooms through the Alps. The intent is for her to don a mask as Alana, intercepting the two halves of the key and learning from the buyer what it opens. As ever, the plan has immediate complications. The first and most pressing is that Gabriel is on the train, too, and he knows Ethan wants to be there too. So Gabriel takes out the engine workers and disables the train's brakes, meaning Ethan can't hop onto the train via motorcycle.

The sum of his choices

So we come back to the beginning. Benji can only lead Ethan to get to the train by the top of a cliff he has to reach by motorcycle. (As funny as it was in "Fallout" for Ethan to frustratedly tell Benji "I'm jumping ... out a window " to clarify why he'd stopped chasing a terrorist mid-sprint, it's much better to watch Ethan splutter his way through explaining to Benji that just parachuting off the cliff won't work.)

The convergent elements of the climax –- Gabriel learning from Elwes' National Intelligence director that his team built the Entity, and he wants to buy the key to destroy any evidence of having been involved; Kittridge appearing on the train to represent Elwes as buyer and referring to having worked with Alana's mother, the late arms dealer Max from the first film; Grace having to fend off American agents as well as the softening Paris and Gabriel -– are no less than thrilling than in watching the jaw-dropping long shot in which Tom Cruise really and truly drives a motorcycle off a cliff. The rest of the third-act sequence is quite amazing, as Ethan and Grace have to derail part of the train after Gabriel blows up a bridge to take it out his "old friend," and also jump to safety as train car after train car falls to its doom. But you kind of can't beat the latest edition of "Tom Cruise risks death to entertain worldwide audiences" with that motorcycle stunt.

"Our lives are the sum of our choices." Kittridge intones this to Ethan in the opening of "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One", and there is no doubt that the same is true for this franchise. A series of seemingly disparate choices over the span of nearly three decades, initially avoiding long-term continuity or returning characters only to embrace both of those aspects as a way to glimpse into Ethan Hunt's wounded soul, have led us to this point. This film's subtitle makes clear that the entire mission isn't over yet, though this ends cleanly enough as Ethan and Grace recapture both parts of the key from an infuriated Gabriel.

But there's still the matter of the Entity itself. We know why artificial intelligence is dangerous –- at least in this film's example –- but we also know from the pre-credits sequence that the real reason the Entity took out the Russian sub is because said sub is where it can be taken offline. "Dead Reckoning Part Two" is reportedly set to open in theaters next June. So we have until then to wonder this much: Tom Cruise has run up the side of the tallest building of the world, he's dangled off an airplane, and he's sailed off a cliff ... so what deadly stunt will he have to perform to take down an artificial intelligence housed in the bottom of the sea? And can he top the brilliance of this film? It's a big challenge, but not one to run from.

Knowing Tom Cruise, he'll run towards the challenge. Because ... well, he was born to run.

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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One

Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Rebecca Ferguson, Simon Pegg, Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, Vanessa Kirby, and Mariela Garriga in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

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
357 Critic reviews
81 Metascore
17 wins & 64 nominations total

Luther Stickell

The White Widow

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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.

[from trailer]

Eugene Kittridge : Your days of fighting for the so-called greater good are over. This is our chance to control the truth. The concepts of right and wrong for everyone for centuries to come. You're fighting to save an ideal that doesn't exist. Never did. You need to pick a side.

Crazy credits Disclaimer as one of the last entries in the end titles scroll: "The production company would like to make it clear that at no point were vehicles driving on the Spanish Steps. These sequences were filmed at a set 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

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Jul 15, 2023
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July 12, 2023 (United States)
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Jul 16, 2023
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Rebecca Ferguson Gives In-Depth Explanation For Her Mission: Impossible Franchise Exit

Rebecca Ferguson explains that part of why Isla was killed in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning was because she didn't want the character to become a " team player ".
Ferguson also reveals that the franchise's production style resulted in a lot of time spent on the sidelines, and she wanted to work more.
Mission: Impossible movies under director Christopher McQuarrie have adopted an unorthodox filming style where there isn't always a clear blueprint for the film ahead of time.

Isla Faust actor Rebecca Ferguson opens up about the decision to kill off her character in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning . Directed by returning filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie, the latest installment in the hit action franchise features Tom Cruise returning as Ethan Hunt, this time to face off against a rogue AI enemy known as The Entity. The Mission: Impossible 7 cast features a host of newcomers and familiar faces, but the film notably serves as the last outing for Ilsa, who dies in Venice while defending Hayley Atwell's new character, Grace.

As the wait for Mission: Impossible 8 news continues, Ferguson sheds more light on the thinking behind Isla's death during an interview on an upcoming episode of WrapWomen's UnWrapped Podcast (via The Wrap ). While there were concerns about the direction of Ilsa as a character, the actor reveals that the franchise's unorthodox production style, which involves a lot of downtime, also contributed to her decision to depart . Check out Ferguson's full comment below:

“To speak very clearly — because I know a lot of people are sad about it, I’m sad about it — I had filmed three films. My deal was done. And I love her beyond words. Beyond words. I think she’s the most awesome, fantastic character. “Ilsa was becoming a team player. And we all can want different things, but for me, Ilsa was rogue. Ilsa was naughty. Ilsa was unpredictable. There was a lot of characters coming in, not leaving enough space for what she had been. “Selfishly, that’s a lot of time to make a ‘Mission’ film. And unless you’re going to have a lot of screen time, that’s a lot of time sitting around waiting to film a huge movie that could take over a year to film. It’s dedication.” “There’s a moment where you think it needs to be worth it, not just to love the character and to embrace Tom and [McQuarrie] and the story. I want to work, man. I want to work. I don’t want to sit in a trailer and know that there’s maybe coming a scene in credits. “You have to literally jump when they say jump, and that’s why it’s amazing. You’re highly trained, highly skilled. It is so intoxicatingly exciting when you’re rolling, but there’s a lot of waiting. And the more characters that are brought in, the more waiting.”

Rebecca Ferguson Already Revealed Her 1 Condition For An Ilsa Faust Mission: Impossible Spinoff

Mission: impossible's filming style explained, there are pros & cons to the tom cruise/ christopher mcquarrie approach.

It's well-documented now that Mission: Impossible movies don't get made like regular movies. While actors are given scripts, they seem to very much be living documents, with Cruise and McQuarrie leaving room for new inspiration to strike . As franchise star Simon Pegg explained in an interview last year: "[ McQuarrie] allows the locations we go to, the characters, the actors he’s working with to help him tell the story. He’ll let the story be revealed to him by, say, looking at the streets of Rome or the canals of Venice ."

Emblematic of this approach is McQuarrie's previous reveal that, before there was a clear story in mind for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning , he went into the film knowing he wanted to crash a steam train, and Cruise wanted to jump a motorcycle off a cliff. The story was then constructed around these major set pieces, with the finer details being ironed out along the way. This approach can evidently be very effective, with the Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning reviews being some of the franchise's strongest.

While this approach can certainly result in a thrilling film, there are some downsides, too, such as less certainty for the actors involved. While making Mission: Impossible 7 , Cruise and McQuarrie decided at the last minute to add in the sequence with the Sevastopol submarine, further ballooning the film's already COVID-inflated budget to $291 million. It remains to be seen whether this approach will work for the sequel to Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning , but audiences evidently shouldn't expect Ferguson to return.

Mission: Impossible 8 is currently in production.

Source: The Wrap

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning is an action-adventure spy thriller from director Christopher McQuarrie. It's the seventh entry in the Mission: Impossible series and a direct sequel to Mission: Impossible – Fallout. The title will star Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ving Rhames.

Director Christopher McQuarrie

Release Date July 12, 2023

Studio(s) TC Productions, Skydance

Distributor(s) Paramount Pictures

Writers Christopher McQuarrie

Cast Haley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny, Shea Whigham, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Rob Delaney, Esai Morales, Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Vanessa Kirby, Cary Elwes

Rating PG-13

Runtime 164 minutes

Genres Action, Crime, Adventure

Franchise(s) Mission: Impossible

Sequel(s) Mission: Impossible 8

prequel(s) Mission: Impossible - Fallout, Mission: Impossible, Mission: Impossible II, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, Mission: Impossible III

Budget $290 Million

Rebecca Ferguson Gives In-Depth Explanation For Her Mission: Impossible Franchise Exit

'It Needs to Be Worth It': Rebecca Ferguson Explains Her Mission: Impossible Exit

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning star Rebecca Ferguson explained why she decided to quit the Tom Cruise franchise.

Rebecca Ferguson exited the Mission: Impossible franchise after Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning . The actress, who played Isla Faust, has recently given a detailed explanation of her reasons for moving on from the Tom Cruise franchise.

Speaking on the Unwrapped podcast, Ferguson detailed why she chose to exit the film. The actress joined Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt and his IMF team, in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation . She reprised her role in Mission: Impossible – Fallout , with the recent Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning marking her final role in the series. However, the actress notes that the exit was "collaborative," and that it was her choice to leave.

'Not My Responsibility': Rebecca Ferguson Reveals Reactions to Her Viral Co-Star Story

The actress had a three-movie deal and decided to move on. She also expressed that she understands fans' reactions to her surprising death in Dead Reckoning , but she felt like her character wasn't becoming who she thought she was. “ To speak very clearly — because I know a lot of people are sad about it, I’m sad about it — I had filmed three films. My deal was done ,” Ferguson said via The Wrap . “And I love her beyond words. Beyond words. I think she’s the most awesome, fantastic character .”

“ Ilsa was becoming a team player. And we all can want different things, but for me, Ilsa was rogue ,” she explained. “Ilsa was naughty. Ilsa was unpredictable. There was a lot of characters coming in, not leaving enough space for what she had been .” Ferguson also explained that filming for the movie took an extended period of time, despite how much screen time she got.

“ Selfishly, that’s a lot of time to make a Mission film . And unless you’re going to have a lot of screen time, that’s a lot of time sitting around waiting to film a huge movie that could take over a year to film ,” she said. “It’s dedication.”

“ There’s a moment where you think it needs to be worth it, not just to love the character and to embrace Tom and [director Christopher McQuarrie] and the story. I want to work, man. I want to work. I don’t want to sit in a trailer and know that there’s maybe coming a scene in credits .”

“You have to literally jump when they say jump, and that’s why it’s amazing. You’re highly trained, highly skilled. It is so intoxicatingly exciting when you’re rolling, but there’s a lot of waiting ,” she said. “And the more characters that are brought in, the more waiting.”

Rebecca Ferguson Shares Major Update on Silo's Future at Apple TV+

Rebecca ferguson has been busy since wrapping mission: impossible.

Aside from starring as MI6 agent Ilsa Faust in three Mission: Impossible films, Ferguson also played Lady Jessica in Denis Villeneuve's two-part adaptation of Dune . Since wrapping filming Mission: Impossible , the actress told the same outlet that she filmed Dune: Part Two (and reshoots for Dune: Part One ) and two seasons of her Apple TV+ series, Silo .

She has also recently joined Guardians of the Galaxy 's Chris Pratt in the upcoming Amazon MGM Studios' Mercy . The sci-fi thriller will have Timur Bekmambetov at the helm with a script from Marco Van Belle, and will also star Kali Reis and Annabelle Wallis.

Mission: Impossible 8 is currently in production , set to premiere on May 23, 2025.

Source: The Wrap

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Rebecca Ferguson Reveals Why She Left The Mission: Impossible Films

Mission: Impossible actress Rebecca Ferguson explains why she left the Tom Cruise-led action franchise behind her.

By Blair Marnell on April 18, 2024 at 8:47AM PDT

Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson had her breakthrough role in 2015 opposite Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. As Ilsa Faust, Ferguson gave Cruise's Ethan Hunt all he could handle right up until her death in 2023's Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning. Now, Ferguson is opening up about her decision to walk away from the franchise.

"Ilsa was becoming a team player," explained Ferguson while appearing on The Wrap 's Unwrapped podcast. "And we all can want different things, but for me, Ilsa was rogue. Ilsa was naughty. Ilsa was unpredictable. There was a lot of characters coming in, not leaving enough space for what she had been."

Ferguson noted that she had only signed on for three Mission: Impossible films, and that she had a choice about whether to return for the next film.

"To speak very clearly--because I know a lot of people are sad about it, I’m sad about it--I had filmed three films. My deal was done," said Ferguson. "And I love her beyond words. Beyond words. I think she's the most awesome, fantastic character."

"There's a moment where you think it needs to be worth it, not just to love the character and to embrace Tom and [Christopher McQuarrie] and the story," added Ferguson. "I want to work, man. I want to work. I don't want to sit in a trailer and know that there's maybe coming a scene in credits."

Ferguson is currently starring in AppleTV+'s Silo, and she will likely return for Dune: Messiah.

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Rebecca Ferguson Says Her Mission: Impossible Character's Death Was 'Collaborative,' Not 'Enough Space' in Franchise

With “a lot of characters” joining the Tom Cruise franchise, Rebecca Ferguson says she had to make a difficult decision to have the “awesome” Ilsa Faust exit

Keith Hamshere/Paramount Pictures/ Everett

Rebecca Ferguson is clarifying the reasons behind her exit from the Mission: Impossible franchise.

The actress behind Ilsa Faust called the character’s planned death in 2023’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One “collaborative” in an upcoming interview on WrapWomen’s UnWrapped podcast, per TheWrap .

“Ilsa was becoming a team player,” said Ferguson, 40, of her butt-kicking assassin first introduced in 2015’s fifth entry in the Tom Cruise -led series, Rogue Nation . “And we all can want different things, but for me… Ilsa was naughty. Ilsa was unpredictable.”

In the franchise’s sixth and seventh entries, there were “a lot of characters coming in, not leaving enough space for what she had been,” she added.

Ilsa’s introduction to the Mission: Impossible world preceded Vanessa Kirby as Alanna Mitsopolis a.k.a. the White Widow, Angela Bassett as CIA Director Erika Sloane, Henry Cavill as CIA assassin August Walker, Pom Klementieff as assassin Paris, Hayley Atwell as thief Grace and Esai Morales as terrorist Gabriel.

It was the latter character who murderously ended Ferguson’s reign as the “rogue” Ilsa, as the Dune star reportedly said on UnWrapped . “To speak very clearly — because I know a lot of people are sad about it, I’m sad about it — I had filmed three films. My [contract] deal was done.”

Chiabella James/Paramount/Everett

She added that she loves her Mission: Impossible character “beyond words. I think she’s the most awesome, fantastic character.”

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Other considerations, she said, were the physical and logistical commitments to continuing in a blockbuster action franchise. “Selfishly, that’s a lot of time to make a Mission film. And unless you’re going to have a lot of screen time, that’s a lot of time sitting around waiting to film a huge movie that could take over a year to film.”

Ferguson added, “There’s a moment where you think it needs to be worth it, not just to love the character and to embrace Tom and [writer-director Christopher McQuarrie ] and the story. I want to work, man. I want to work. I don’t want to sit in a trailer… It is so intoxicatingly exciting when you’re rolling, but there’s a lot of waiting.”

Daniele Venturelli/Getty

For a growing franchise — whose eighth film is expected to hit screens on May 23, 2025 — the star noted, “The more characters that are brought in, the more waiting.” After wrapping up Ilsa's story in Dead Reckoning Part One , Ferguson pointed out, she filmed both Dune movies and two seasons of Apple TV+ drama Silo .

Ferguson also stars in the 2025 sci-fi drama Mercy with Annabelle Wallis and Chris Pratt.

Rebecca Ferguson Explains Why She Bowed Out of the ‘Mission: Impossible’ Franchise | Video

“There’s a moment where you think it needs to be worth it,” the “Silo” and “Dune” star tells the “UnWrapped” podcast

Rebecca Ferguson made a very final exit from the “Mission: Impossible” franchise this year, leaving fans who love Ilsa Faust reeling after “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning.” But how exactly did her death come about? According to the actress, it was a two-handed decision.

Ferguson first joined up with Tom Cruise and his IMF crew in “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation,” and then subsequently returned as Ilsa “Fallout” and “Dead Reckoning: Part One” (the “Part One” of the title was later dropped). With “Dead Reckoning,” Ferguson’s three-picture deal ended. So, she was faced with a decision — and a concrete offer — on whether or not she wanted to come back for more.

Appearing in an upcoming episode of WrapWomen’s “UnWrapped” podcast, Ferguson explained that her exit was “collaborative,” in that it was her choice to leave, but the exact means of her exit came down to cowriter-director Christopher McQuarrie and his team.

Of course, Ferguson totally understands the resulting emotions that hit fans with her fictional death, because she felt them, too. But, she wasn’t sure the character could go where she’d hoped it would.

“To speak very clearly — because I know a lot of people are sad about it, I’m sad about it — I had filmed three films. My deal was done,” Ferguson said. “And I love her beyond words. Beyond words. I think she’s the most awesome, fantastic character.”

The actress expressed, though, that with the fourth film about to be written and the offer on the table, it seemed to her that there wasn’t “enough space” for Ilsa to be the character she was.

Beyond the character elements, Ferguson admitted she also considered how much of her time she would have to give up in order to keep going with the physically demanding franchise.

“Selfishly, that’s a lot of time to make a ‘Mission’ film. And unless you’re going to have a lot of screen time, that’s a lot of time sitting around waiting to film a huge movie that could take over a year to film,” she said. “It’s dedication.”

“There’s a moment where you think it needs to be worth it, not just to love the character and to embrace Tom and [McQuarrie] and the story. I want to work, man. I want to work. I don’t want to sit in a trailer and know that there’s maybe coming a scene in credits.”

Ferguson went on to explain that, because McQuarrie’s “Mission” films are notorious for working out scripts on the fly and the production is “so extravagant,” there ends up being a lot of downtime for many on the cast.

“You have to literally jump when they say jump, and that’s why it’s amazing. You’re highly trained, highly skilled. It is so intoxicatingly exciting when you’re rolling, but there’s a lot of waiting,” she said. “And the more characters that are brought in, the more waiting.”

Ferguson was quick to point out that, since she wrapped “Dead Reckoning: Part One,” she’s filmed two “Dune” movies and two seasons of her Apple TV+ series “Silo.”

You can watch Ferguson’s full comments on her “Mission: Impossible” exit in the video above.

A woman with light-toned skinned and a man with light-toned skin, each in blazers, look at a phone held by the man. The people are Rebecca Ferguson and Stephen Colbert on the "Late Show" set.

Rebecca Ferguson Discusses Mission: Impossible Exit: ‘It Needs to Be Worth It’

By Brandon Schreur

Rebecca Ferguson is opening up about departing the Mission: Impossible franchise.

Speaking on the UnWrapped podcast, via The Wrap , Ferguson discussed her exit from the Mission: Impossible franchise and Isla Faust’s fate in the most recent entry, 2023’s Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning .

Noting that her exit was a “collaborative” decision, Ferguson said, “To speak very clearly — because I know a lot of people are sad about it, I’m sad about it — I had filmed three films. My deal was done. And I love [Ilsa] beyond words. Beyond words. I think she’s the most awesome, fantastic character.”

She continued, “Ilsa was becoming a team player. And we all can want different things, but for me, Ilsa was rogue. Ilsa was naughty. Ilsa was unpredictable. There was a lot of characters coming in, not leaving enough space for what she had been.”

Rebecca Ferguson discusses the Mission: Impossible franchise’s required commitment

Ferguson also discussed the commitment required to star in the Mission: Impossible franchise.

“Selfishly, that’s a lot of time to make a Mission film,” she said. “And unless you’re going to have a lot of screen time, that’s a lot of time sitting around waiting to film a huge movie that could take over a year to film. It’s dedication.”

She continued to explain that McQuarrie’s movies often have productions that are “so extravagant,” leading to a lot of downtime.

“There’s a moment where you think it needs to be worth it, not just to love the character and to embrace Tom [Cruise] and [McQuarrie] and the story. I want to work, man. I want to work. I don’t want to sit in a trailer and know that there’s maybe coming a scene in credits.

“…You have to literally jump when they say jump, and that’s why it’s amazing. You’re highly trained, highly skilled. It is so intoxicatingly exciting when you’re rolling, but there’s a lot of waiting. And the more characters that are brought in, the more waiting.”

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is currently streaming on Paramount+.

Brandon Schreur has been writing about comics, movies, television shows, and all things pop culture for roughly five years. He's a lifelong cinephile who spends way, way too much money buying Blu-rays and trade paperbacks. You can find him on twitter at @brandonschreur.

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Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is currently streaming on Paramount+. Brandon Schreur He's a lifelong cinephile who spends way, way too much money buying Blu-rays and trade paperbacks.

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