I don’t know if anyone has ever clocked whether Tom Cruise is faster than a speeding bullet. The man has legs and guts. His near-void sprints have defined and sustained his fame, becoming his unique superpower. He racks up more mileage in “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” the seventh entry in a 27-year franchise that repeatedly affirms a movie as truth. That is to say, there are few images more cinematic than a human trumping danger and even death on screen – it’s the ultimate wish-fulfillment!
Much remains the same in this latest adventure, including the series’ reliable entertainment quotient and Cruise’s stamina. Once again, he plays Ethan Hunt, the leader of a silent US spy agency, the Impossible Mission Force. Alongside a rotating roster of beautiful kick-ass women (most recently Rebecca Ferguson and Vanessa Kirby) and loyal handymen (Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames), Ethan sprints, flies, dives and races around the world as he battles enemy agents, rogue cops, garden terrorists and armies of minions. Along the way, he’s regularly delivered some stomach-churning wows, like jumping out a window and climbing the world’s tallest building.
This time the villain is the very au courant artificial intelligence, here called the Entity. The whole thing is complicated, as these stories often are, with interests as catastrophic as recent news headlines have trumpeted. Or, as an open letter signed by 350 AI authorities put it last month, “Reducing the risk of AI extinction should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” In the face of such a disaster, who are you going to call? Analog Man, that’s who, aka Mr. Hunt, who receives his usual mysterious directives, this time recorded on a cassette tape, an amusing addition to a film about the threat posed by a divine digital power to the material world.
That’s all well and good, even if the most memorable villain turns out to be a Harley Quinn-esque agent of mayhem, Paris (Pom Klementieff), who’s racing after Ethan in a Hummer and looks ready to take on her own franchise. She tries to squash him during a seamlessly choreographed chase around Rome – the stunt coordinator, Wade Eastwood, is also a race car driver – that combines excellent wheeling skills with scares, laughs, thoughtful geometry and precise timing. At one point, Ethan ends up behind the wheel while handcuffed to a new love interest, Grace (Hayley Atwell, another welcome addition), driving and drifting, flirting and burning rubber in what is basically the action movie equivalent of a sex scene.
