After his save-the-movie-business heroics with "Top Gun: Maverick," saving the world seems like a relatively simple task for Tom Cruise in "Mission: Impossible -- Dead Reckoning Part One." Happily, he has some splendid help this time around, in that rare 2023 summer movie that has the scope and heft -- with a timely AI threat -- to support its "To be continued" framework.
Although this "Mission" reassembles plenty of familiar faces from the 27-year-old theatrical franchise's history, there are new key supporting players in Hayley Atwell, already a proven espionage presence thanks to Marvel's Agent Carter; and Pom Klementieff, here cast as what amounts to a Bond villain far removed from her "Guardians of the Galaxy" persona, continuing to stock the "Mission" team with European talent in key roles.
As for the aforementioned mission ("should you decide to accept it"), it's introduced by way of an opening that feels plucked from "The Hunt for Red October," involving a nuclear submarine with stealth capabilities. The ship runs afoul of an AI known only as The Entity, an artificial intelligence that has become sentient and a dire danger to the entire world -- as well as an opportunity for whoever controls it.
Enter Cruise's Ethan Hunt, who has enough experience to recognize the inherent risks in trying to tame that technology, enlisted to find an old colleague, Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson), who may hold the key (literally, in this case) to unlocking its secrets. But the hunt for that potentially priceless object also involves a skilled thief, Grace (Atwell), as well as a baddie (Esai Morales) who ties in directly with Ethan's introduction to the IMF, a.k.a. Impossible Mission Force, whose top-secret existence itself provides one of the several clever jokes about how ridiculous this all is, along with a reference to Hunt's "habitual rogue behavior."
Credit that balance between massive-action derring-do and winks toward the audience to director/co-writer Christopher McQuarrie, who, in an improvement over this summer's other part ones, "Fast X" and "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse," provides a fully realized movie spanning 160-some-odd minutes, while still leaving room for what comes next.
Granted, the two-part format does allow the filmmakers to indulge some of their limited-series impulses, from the time spent plotting out Ethan's mission to a chase scene through Rome (also the setting for a "Fast X" sequence that didn't know when to hit the brakes) that, while entertaining, drags on far too long.
Still, the requisite thrills are there, as well as the flourishes that audiences have come to expect from the "Mission: Impossible" franchise, from the ornate masks and disguises (a staple of the original show too) to the death-defying stunts (clearly a made-for-the-movies upgrade to the formula).
For anyone expecting Cruise to slow down, even a little, as he nears AARP eligibility, forget it, as "Dead Reckoning" -- the seventh movie in a series deftly reinvented from the ashes of a TV show steeped in Cold War sensibilities -- features several positively jaw-dropping aerial maneuvers, many of them staged during the climactic encounter in and around a moving train.
The explosive success of "Top Gun" might have stoked unreasonable expectations for Cruise's follow-up, but like that film, this is big, muscular filmmaking with an almost throwback feel in terms of its refreshingly overt desire to entertain.
Whether that's the antidote to what has thus far been a pretty blasé summer box-office-wise remains to be seen, but while Hunt doesn't exactly buy a ticket, like the train that he boards the best advice is to hang on and enjoy the ride.
"Mission: Impossible -- Dead Reckoning, Part One" premieres July 12 in US theaters. It's rated PG-13.