Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is the summer blockbuster at its best

The summer blockbuster has seen many iterations over the years, from the Will Smith era in the late 1990s to the Christopher Nolan Batman revolution, but it is Mission Impossible that has become the consistently brilliant jewel of recent years.

Tom Cruise is still flying high after the unprecedented success of Top Gun: Maverick last year and for an encore, he’s made one of the best Mission Impossible movies yet.

The Mission Impossible movies have ascended to a higher plane of action cinema ever since Chris McQuarrie stepped into the director’s chair with 2015’s Rogue Nation, and McQuarrie is just as much the star of this movie as Cruise.

McQuarrie draws inspiration from the likes of De Palma (with one sequence directly quoting The Untouchables) and Buster Keaton by employing death-defying stunts that leave you wondering just how did they pull it off.

2018’s Fallout represented the peak of the franchise with incredibly imaginative, blood-pumping set pieces mixed with a Frankenheimer/Lean sense of developing fleshed-out characters and placing them in absurd situations.

Dead Reckoning is just a hair away from matching the greatness of Fallout, and sits very comfortably among the best in the franchise, along with continuing Mission Impossible’s trick of doing James Bond better than James Bond himself.

The Cruise-McQuarrie partnership now represents an uncanny Lennon-McCartney style of two artists seamlessly combining their two styles.

McQuarrie brings an incredibly astute and shrewd director’s eye to proceedings, while Cruise continues to defy death for our entertainment. 

With Dead Reckoning Part One, the franchise is laying the blocks for a bolder, more sweeping sequel while also working brilliantly as a standalone movie.

The plot concerns the hunt for an incredibly powerful weapon that could change the world as we know it, and it’s up to Ethan Hunt and his merry crew of IMF friends to stop the weapon from falling into the wrong hands. 

Like a good football team, Mission Impossible has added some new signings to add more depth to an already title-winning squad, and new additions such as an inspired Hayley Atwell, a terrific Shea Whigham, a scene-stealing Pom Klementieff and a deliciously evil Esai Morales helping flesh out an already brilliant cast.

The addition of Atwell to the cast is the best bit of business the film conducted, and while Marvel fans will be well familiar with her talents, she blends so effortlessly with Cruise and the general mayhem of Mission Impossible you would swear she has been in every movie so far.

The franchise has generally had problems with its villains being forgettable, but Esai Morales’ Gabriel is so well-fleshed out and well-acted that your blood runs cold whenever he is on the screen – the mark of a great action movie baddie. 

All the hallmarks of a great Mission Impossible movie are there – mask antics, unbelievable technology, ridiculous stunts, beautiful locations – and seven movies in we have an innate sense of what makes Ethan Hunt tick. 

When the film takes a breather and sets up the rules and laws of the new situation Ethan Hunt finds himself in, we are treated to dialogue that would sound ridiculous in a Tom Clancy novel, but when the scene is framed like an Orson Welles film and has lines delivered by actors as if they are reading Shakespeare it somehow manages to blend together beautifully.

In any other blockbuster, the dialogue or exposition scenes are the cue for the audience to go to the loo or restock their popcorn, but in Mission Impossible, you’re having too much of a good time that you do not feel the runtime at all.

All told, the first part of what might be the final Mission Impossible movie (although Tom Cruise has indicated he wants to continue with the franchise for as long as his body lets him) is a symphony of some of the most thrilling sequences committed to film.

After Indiana Jones and The Flash only succeeded in helping audiences catch up on their sleep, Mission Impossible has given the summer blockbuster the shot in the arm it needs.