Tom Cruise is back to defy age and gravity in the best M:I movie yet
Is it a bird, is it a plane . . . ? No, it's an A-list movie star riding a motorbike off a craggy mountaintop in the Austrian Alps and parachuting onto the Orient Express.
Talk about risky business.
Tom Cruise (for it is him) is back in the best M:I movie yet (Part One). This is a hugely entertaining caper with the best action scenes in decades and 61-year-old Cruise defying age and gravity as he once again uses tech and cunning to save the world.
As the Fast and The Furious franchise (which always sounded like an American daytime soap) shudders to an ignoble halt and Marvel goes on eating itself in an infinity pool of cliché, the Mission Impossible movies just keep getting better and better. And after nearly thirty years and seven movies, Cruise as dashing (and yes, he dashes a lot in this one) secret agent Ethan Hunt still has that same manic intensity.
We start as a Russian sub, shielded by some kind of Romulan cloaking device, runs silent and deep under the Arctic Circle only to encounter an enemy vessel armed with even greater powers. Yippee, you may think, this new M:I is bang up to date and is about to cast those damn Rooskies as the baddies again.
However, an even greater challenge awaits Hunt and his crew of tech bros, Luther (Ving Rhames, back with a voice like an imploding gravel pit) and human GPS Benji (Simon Pegg).
For a franchise that has always played with out of this world tech innovations, Dead Reckoning fully embraces a storyline all about AI and a new threat in the form of a sentient, parasitic artificial intelligence known as The Entity, which threatens governments all over the world and the very concept of reality.
Hunt’s job is to locate the other half of a cruciform key which can unlock this pandora’s box of AI and the script plays with the notion of deep fakes and misinformation with wit and flair. Dead Reckoning runs on sleight of hand and nothing or nobody seems to be what or who they are.
Hunt teams up with an international thief played with class and action chops by a very good Hayley Atwell as he races to stop a shadowy figure from his past. Yes, this time it is very personal, and Hunt is dealing with his own demons as well as life or death situations.
Mask pulls become even more comical, and you won’t be waiting long for hugely entertaining action set piece. Even the talky scenes are great value, including a top-secret CIA meeting which sees the return of Henry Czerny is as the duplicitous Eugene Kittridge.
Rebecca Ferguson is back as ex-MI6 agent Ilsa, Vanessa Kirby is just great as White Widow, the wily and coolly detached arms dealer, but Pom Klementieff steals the show as taciturn martial-arts expert Paris, who is in league with baddie Gabriel (Esai Morales).
Hunt's globetrotting takes him from a shootout in a sandstorm in the Arabian desert, a frenetic chase in an airport and best of all, a car chase in Rome during which Cruise and Atwell find themselves handcuffed together as they try to outrun the Italian police in a canary yellow Fiat 500. And maybe we’re back in Italian Job territory with that truly spectacular closing sequence set on the speeding Orient Express.
All of this is done with convincing realism; there is no sickly lacquer of CGI here. Not so impossible after all, this is the best action movie in years. Choose to accept.
Alan Corr @CorrAlan2
