The Media Tourist

Tom Cruise returns to his leading role in the action-packed, stunt-tacular seventh installment of his blockbuster big-screen franchise

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning—Part One
Starring Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Hayley Atwell & Esai Morales
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
PG-13

In theaters Wednesday, July 12, 2023

What does a runaway train, renegade AI, a four-sided, two-piece doodad and a doomed Russian sub have in common? They’re all part of Tom Cruise’s latest “impossible” mission.

The seventh installment of the blockbuster franchise that began more than 25 years ago finds Cruise’s iconic character, Impossible Missions Force (IMF) agent Ethan Hunt, scrambling all over the place in a race for a four-sided key that could trigger a digital geopolitical doomsday in the wrong hands.

Everybody’s trying to get their paws on that mysterious gizmo, which can unlock access to an all-knowing, all-seeing, super-processing artificial intelligence known as The Entity, “a truth-eating digital parasite” with the dark power of total domination. And everyone, it seems, is also trying to stop Ethan, which certainly adds an additional level of difficultly to his job.

“The world is gonna be coming after you,” Ethan is warned, and it sure does.

It’s a big mission for a big movie on a grand scale—golly-whopping spectacle, breathless action and a threat that’s even bigger, and so much badder, than Big Brother.

The gang’s all here, for Mission: Impossible movie fans who’ve grown up watching the IMF continue the globetrotting spy shenanigans first introduced in the 1960s TV series. Cruise, the consummate movie star, is as dapper and unflappably cool as ever, rallying his loyal team (Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg), confronting a couple of formidable old foes (Esai Morales and Vanessa Kirby) and reuniting with a former ally (Rebecca Ferguson).

New characters include Hayley Atwell (well-known to Marvel movie fans) as a cagey thief with a criminal past, and Pom Klementieff (from Guardians of the Galaxy) plays a French assassin and lets her lethal skills do the talking. We’ll likely see them again in Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part 2, which is already in the can and due for release next summer.  

Director Christopher McQuarrie also returns to the franchise; he’s directed Cruise in several projects, include two previous Mission movies. He certainly knows how to move things along, make it an exciting, exhilarating ride and pepper the menu with some levity and laughs.  

The movie hinges on issues of privacy, deception, manipulation and misinformation in this modern era of digital overload. And it’s also about empathy; Ethan Hunt cares about those closest to him, and even about people he doesn’t know. The Entity, like all tech by design, is amoral and cares about nothing and no one, only about whatever its objective is programmed to be. (You think your laptop or smartphone, or Siri and social media, really care about you? Uh, no. So just imagine if they became your master and overlord.) Ethan and the Entity represent a battle between good and evil on a global stage, with the fate of the planet hanging in the balance.

But the plot is just so much blather and blah-blah, after all, when it comes to Tom Cruise and his Impossible missions—everyone wants to see the stunts, and Dead Reckoning certainly delivers. There’s a wild multi-vehicle chase through the narrow streets of Rome, with Cruise and Atwell handcuffed together (!) in a tiny Fiat, pursued by a monstrous Humvee, Italian cops and America CIA agents. Cruise zooms cross-country on a motorcycle, then shoots himself off a high cliff, out-Bonding James Bond in a jaw-dropping aerial sequence. And an extended bit through the Swiss Alps on that runaway train, well, it’s a nail-biting, death-defying, cliff-hanging choo-choo blast, a topsy-turvy, over-the-top obstacle course of everything but the kitchen sink, including pots, pans, parachutes, a flaming oven and a grand piano.

Everything is made even more exciting by knowing that Cruise performs almost all his own stunts. Wowza—it’s hard to imagine any other star ever even considering the elaborate, bonkers things that he’s made the lifeblood of his movies.

And, of course, there’s high-tech face-swapping, a bit of bruising street-fight physicality, plus a dash of sword fighting, knife slashing and even some sleight of hand magic.

Last year, Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick became the must-see movie of the summer, signaling that Hollywood was ready to welcome COVID-weary audiences back into theaters. Will he re-do that summer blockbuster magic with Dead Reckoning? Can his movie once again revive a sagging box office, rejuvenate franchise fatigue (sorry, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Little Mermaid and Fast X) and remind viewers—who’ve gotten just a little bit too comfortable with at-home streaming—why they should love the big screen?

It’s a bit early to know for sure, but I’m ready to predict: Mission: Accomplished!

—Neil Pond