At The Movies: Big action, high stakes in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (PG13)

163 minutes, opens on Thursday

4 stars

The story: The elite team of spies headed by Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is activated when a new, potentially world-ending terror emerges. Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg) and British ally Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson) travel to North Africa, Italy and Switzerland, chasing clues and carrying out heists in a bid to stop this new enemy. An old adversary, the arms dealer nicknamed the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), is involved in the plan to subjugate the world. Part Two will be released in 2024.

When so many Hollywood action franchises devolve into mush by the second movie, it is something of a miracle that the Mission: Impossible series exists.

That the series has not taken a plunge in quality the same way that, say, the Jurassic Park (1993 to 2022) or the Fast & Furious (2001 to present) series have is thanks to Cruise, its finicky star and producer, who has the clout to refuse any studio plea to crank out movies at a faster pace or for less money.

Cruise, working with director Christopher McQuarrie, delivered the highly watchable Rogue Nation (2015) and Fallout (2018), the fifth and sixth additions to the Impossible series.

In this film, the third McQuarrie-Cruise collaboration, they have kept standards high. There is a satisfying groundedness here, at a time when every other action hero is a supernaturally skilled killer who pops out of thin air when required.

Cruise established some time ago that Hunt runs and, as the film demonstrates, running can be exciting to watch.

Hunt is vulnerable – he is afraid if he has to take a parachute jump above dangerously close rocks. Hackers Benji and Luther are his direction-finders, without whom he would be lost. And sometimes, the bad guys make mincemeat of him in a fistfight.

British actress Hayley Atwell is a franchise newcomer who makes the most of the meaty role she is given. In contrast, French actress Pom Klementieff, also a fresh inductee, is wasted playing a nearly-mute assassin with an inexplicably career-damaging preference for clown make-up.

The plot, as usual for the series, is a flimsy heist-centred concoction on which stunts are hung. But when the stunts are this good, the plot can be an afterthought.

There is a car chase in Rome that is an exhilarating distillation of the Impossible ethos: Action that looks cool is fine, but action that looks cool while also being funny and dramatic is far better.

Hot take: It has been five years since the last Impossible film, but the wait is worth it. The action – grounded in real cars, motorcycles, trains and parachutes – makes other franchises look flat and static.