Although the seventh impossible mission isn’t quite as good as its predecessor, Fallout (2018), it only misses out on attaining the same greatness by a hair’s breadth. The franchise continues to confound expectations by being a string of mainstream blockbusters that has thus far kept most of its promises. For the seventh outing, Christopher McQuarrie returns from the previous two instalments, Rogue Nation (2015) and Fallout and his script, co-written with Erik Jendresen, splits its story in two with a further film due in May 2025.

Where previous entries in the series had tinkered with science fiction, largely through its James Bond-ian gadgets like the masks and other high tech gizmos, Dead Reckoning goes deep into genre territory with Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his Impossible Missions Force team taking on that most talked about of contemporary techno betes noir, artificial intelligence. A Russian stealth submarine, the Sevastopol, is testing an advanced AI system when it’s duped into attacking a phantom target and then destroyed itself, apparently by the AI. IMF agent Hunt rescues disavowed MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) from assassins in the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Desert, retrieving part of a cruciform key used to activate the AI. In Washington, Hunt learns from CIA Director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) that the AI, codenamed The Entity (voiced by Simon Pegg), has achieved sentience and can now manipulate major defence, intelligence and financial networks around the world. The race is on to gain control of The Entity as the world’s superpowers try to track down the two halves of the control key. Hunt, Benji Dunn (Pegg) and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) try to obtain part of the key from an agent at Abu Dhabi International Airport only to cross paths with professional thief Grace (Hayley Atwell). Hunt starts to suspect that a figure from his past, the sadistic Gabriel (Esai Morales), is involved with The Entity. Following a trail of clues, they arrive at a party being held in Venice by former adversary and arms dealer Alanna Mitsopolis (Vanessa Kirby) and with the world’s security agencies converging in them, the IMF team find themselves on the Orient Express speeding towards a bridge that’s been rigged to explode by Gabriel…

It’s a typically complex Mission: Impossible plot (the above is barely scratching the surface) with multiple agencies in pursuit of the villain (“is there anyone not chasing us?”), slippery allegiances and great holes in the narrative where the signatures stunts are allowed to take over. And thanks to the sterling work of second unit director and stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood and his team, they’re as breath-taking as ever. A dizzying car chase around the streets of Rome (the city had taken an automotive battering just before Mission: Impossible turned up by the stunt team on Fast X (2023)), a similarly breathless pursuit on foot around Venice and the astounding climax aboard the Orient Express (a call back to the Eurostar sequence in the first film) are all sequences that take familiar action set-ups and do the most extraordinary things with them.

The Entity is an intriguing nemesis with the unique ability to guess accurately how its opponents will behave and manipulate Hunt and co in a way that no human adversary had previously managed. The stakes feel higher than ever, with a villain that can’t be reasoned with and can’t even be physically located in the real world. There’s a real sense of desperation among the IMF team who seem to be just one step ahead on The Entity and it’s making ground on them fast. It’ll be fascinating to see how the second part of the story will resolve all this. It’s not entirely clear if the Dead Reckoning films will be Cruises’ swan song as Hunt (he initially said that they would but has since changed his mind) but it’s certainly clear from this instalment that he may be running out of luck, that even his razor-sharp cunning will save him this time. He always seemed like he was on the cusp of madness, but never more so than here when he suffers real loss and tragedy amid all the mayhem.

The film runs just shy of three hours, but crucially it never feels like it. Even the scenes of grey-suited intelligence agency types (among them Brits Mark Gatiss and Indira Varma) sitting in featureless rooms trying to work out the plot for us have an urgency to them, so the film gallops at full pelt through its increasingly complicated and absurd plot such that the time just flies by. The main credits are somewhat delayed but in that time, we get a submarine being sunk, Hunt rescuing Faust in the Arabian Desert and then turning up in disguise at a meeting of US intelligence bigwigs, enough business to fill many entire films in itself. There’s much backstabbing and plotting, some weird science and plenty of quality bickering between Rhames and Pegg (it’s a shame that Rhames exits the plot towards the end) to plug the gaps between those show-stopping action set pieces.

The regular IMF team are all on top notch form and get an interesting injection of new blood in the shape of Hayley Atwell who could easily take over from Hunt if Cruise (a still remarkably youthful 58 when production began on the film – and whatever you think of him, he really is undeniably excellent in the Mission: Impossible films) decides to hang up his self-destructing tape recorders. Henry Czerny returns as CIA man Kittridge, reprising the role that he’d last played in the very first film back in 1996 and not since while Pom Klementoff is terrific as an Entity-allied assassin having far too much fun haring about in stolen armoured personnel carriers and blowing things up.

McQuarrie had revitalised the franchise, initially as the co-writer of Ghost Protocol (2011) and under his stewardship, the series has never looked back. He seems to understand what the franchise is all about every bit as much as Cruise and together they keep cranking out crowd-pleasing blockbusters. Well… until now. Dead Reckoning Part One did well enough at the box office, but nowhere near as well as was hoped and some have attributed this to a marked drop-off in box office after that big screen phenomena of the summer of 2023 “Barbenheimer” (Greta Gerwing’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer) unceremoniously shoved the IMF out of many screens, especially IMAX showcases. Critics were generally very supportive and audiences were more than receptive to it, but the box office fates were simply against it.

Dead Reckoning Part One comes to a satisfying close – you can easily watch it as a standalone action thriller, but it promises a huge amount for the follow up which still has a great deal to sort out. Production on Part One had been disrupted by the COVID-19 outbreak and Part Two was put on hold thanks to the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. One can only hope that when the film, originally announced as Dead Reckoning Part Two but that subtitled was removed from all official references to it in October 2023, finds the audience that the first half really deserved.