And who they are up against.Īll that you need to know, though, is that Hunt is racing around the world tracking a master thief named Grace (Hayley Atwell) in order to recover two halves of a special key. government officials, including spy chief Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), who hasn’t been seen since the very first M:I film back in 1996, explain to the new Director of National Intelligence (Cary Elwes) just what Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his M:I team are up to these days. This includes one comically long scene in which various U.S. Which explains why the first 20 minutes of Dead Reckoning involve unloading a heavy heap of expository dialogue. It won’t kill you, or Cruise, but it will make you, and Hollywood, stronger. In an already strong year for breakneck, throat-kick, punch-out cinema, this adrenaline-pumped fever dream from Cruise and his regular enabler-slash-director Christopher McQuarrie represents a brutally thrilling action-film apotheosis. But at nearly every turn, Dead Reckoning aims for something more than the sum of its Evel Knievel parts. No narrative, characters or dialogue needed. Which makes the iron will of Tom Cruise the most extraordinary stunt of the film – and of contemporary blockbuster filmmaking.Īt this point in the series, no one could legally complain – it’s true, I checked with the courts – if a Mission: Impossible sequel was just a hastily edited collection of scenes in which Cruise jumped from one danger to the next. (That last feat took a year of rehearsals, with 500 skydives and 13,000 motocross jumps.) There are no green screens, no shortcuts, no clones of Cruise waiting in the wings, Prestige-style. He runs atop a terminal at Abu Dhabi’s airport, races a Fiat 500 through the slippery streets of Rome, engages in a knife fight while standing on the top of a speeding train, and rides a motorbike off the edge of a cliff before ditching that bike to execute a high-risk BASE jump with only a six-second window before impact. This seventh spy spectacle features Cruise – not a stunt double or an AI-engineered deep-fake facsimile – double-daring himself to near-death. Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt and Rebecca Ferguson is assassin-but-also-hacker Ilsa in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.

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