Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One review: Cruise controls the pace

Now we’re onto the seventh of Tom Cruise’s implausible, beyond the realms of the possible, by the skin of his teeth adventures, you’d have to say that the odds are on the mission at hand being eminently possible, if a little drawn out. 

Mission: Impossible is different to most modern action films, however, in that you aren’t expected to merely enjoy the spectacle with no skin in the game. You go into the cinema knowing that Cruise, certified loon, is ready and willing to put himself on the line in the name of a good movie. That’s his mission, and he’s chosen to accept it. The stunts aren’t a snoring CGI-fest with shots flurried together so quickly they hope you won’t see the joins. 

We won’t bother you with any of the plot details, such as they are – the world is threatened by an incredibly dangerous thing that’s being hunted down by an incredibly dangerous man and his incredibly dangerous team of henchpersons. Standard fare. It has to be getting to the end of Cruise’s M:I run simply because it’s becoming increasingly difficult to raise the stakes any higher. And how can one man cope with all this stress? If the world sits on the brink of ending one more time you get the impression that Ethan Hunt might just let it happen just so the poor bloke can get a day off. 

The cars, though, that’s what you want to know about isn’t it? There are some, so that’s promising. The car action in Dead Reckoning Part One is top drawer, actually. It’s visceral, even if the overt BMW sponsorship is wearing a little thin. Though it’s really no worse than Bond shoehorning in a contractually obliged Land Rover-themed car chase, or indeed watching Tom Cruise sprint pointlessly about the place. He’s got a lovely straight back when he goes for it, but seriously – there’ll be another bus in eight minutes. 

When he does get to drive, Ethan Hunt is all in, as relentlessly single-minded as he is in all of his other activities. Catching a train on his motorbike is a particular delight, the whole sequence a textbook example for the future on how to whet the audience’s appetite without giving the whole thing away. It’s also a treat to watch Hunt flummoxed by his first EV, though. Probably too busy dismantling a chemical bomb to make the compulsory online training session about how to get the best from regenerative braking. 

And we’ve established by now – seven movies in – that Ethan Hunt is something of a daredevil – he makes it clear even in this film that he values the lives of his team members over his own miserable existence (think of it as Chekhov’s chum, trying to create an emotional resonance before everyone gets bumped off in next year’s second part), but it literally wouldn’t kill him to put a seatbelt or crash helmet on once in a while. 

Above all with this latest Mission: Impossible movie is the sense that everyone involved is having a riotous laugh doing it. Stars like Hayley Atwell or Pom Klementieff chew up the scenery in grand style alongside some of the more regular faces, and with every crunch to the face or head-on collision with a riot van you get the impression that this was the best day to be in the office ever. This all looks particularly stark alongside the more po-faced blockbusters we’ve been faced with so far this summer – perhaps the truly impossible mission Tom Cruise faced was making it all look like so much fun.