Hooray for Tom Cruise! At the very moment the movies could be turned into textureless gunk by artificial intelligence, the actor has gone off on a one-man crusade to destroy it. The main villain of the stupendously entertaining new Mission: Impossible film is neither a rogue agent nor a terrorist state, but an all-powerful AI construct known as the Entity, which spiders out from a Russian stealth submarine and strip-mines the secrets of every intelligence service on Earth.
This deific construct has its own earthly messenger: a suave and deadly assassin known pointedly as Gabriel (Esai Morales). But as an enemy itself, it’s invisible, invaluable and invulnerable – and during a prologue that spells out its powers in the deadliest terms, you can almost hear Cruise’s Ethan Hunt cracking his knuckles offscreen.
His mission, whether we choose to accept it’s within the remotest bounds of possibility for a mortal human or not, is to track down the master key to its mainframe, which comes in two interlocking parts, then turn off the flow of deadly ones and zeroes at the source. Finding the key requires running, punching, shooting, driving and parachute-jumping through Abu Dhabi, Rome, Venice and both the interior and roof of the Orient Express: a reassuringly old-fashioned solution to a newfangled threat.
You might describe the film like that too. Like last year’s Top Gun: Maverick, Dead Reckoning Part One feels like an attempt to save the blockbuster by blasting it back to first principles, at a time when the form is sunk in self-inflicted crisis. And while it lacks Maverick’s flawlessly sleek finish and unexpected warm touch, it matches it for action that’s both stunningly executed and strikingly classical in its approach.
A cat-and-mouse chase in an airport tips its hat to Brian De Palma, director of Carlito’s Way, Dressed to Kill – and the first Mission: Impossible film. A police pursuit through Rome has Cruise handcuffed to Hayley Atwell’s master thief, just as Robert Donat was to Madeleine Carroll in Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps – though they didn’t have to drive a turbo-charged vintage Fiat 500 round various landmarks. (“The producers wish to stress that in no way, shape or form were any vehicles driven down the Spanish Steps”, an end credits disclaimer helpfully clarifies.)
