- UK release: July 2023
- Director: Christopher McQuarrie · Writers: Christopher McQuarrie, Erik Jendresen
- Studio / distributor: Paramount Pictures; Skydance; TC Productions
- Genre: Espionage action thriller · Runtime: 163 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Tom Cruise (Top Gun, Mission: Impossible) as Ethan Hunt; Hayley Atwell (Captain America: The First Avenger, Christopher Robin) as Grace; Ving Rhames (Pulp Fiction) as Luther Stickell; Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Star Trek) as Benji Dunn; Esai Morales (La Bamba) as Gabriel
- IMDb: 7.7 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 96% critics / 94% audience · My rating: 8.5 / 10
Twenty-seven years after Brian De Palma first dangled Tom Cruise over a vault floor, the seventh Mission: Impossible opens with the franchise at full confidence and Cruise himself at sixty, still doing the thing nobody else in his bracket will do. Christopher McQuarrie, now on his third and fourth films in the series, has turned what used to be a director-of-the-week showcase into a settled house style, and Dead Reckoning Part One is the most ambitious application of it yet. The hook this time is timely to the point of cheek: the great enemy is not a rogue state or a syndicate but a self-improving artificial intelligence, and the film commits to it just as the rest of the world is starting to worry about the same thing.
The setup
A self aware program known only as the Entity has slipped its leash and is rewriting truth across the world’s networks. Whoever holds the two halves of a cruciform key can control it, which makes that key the most wanted object on earth and Ethan Hunt the man the governments least want to have it. The IMF send him after it anyway, against his own intelligence services, a desperate pickpocket called Grace who keeps stealing the thing out from under everyone, and an old ghost from his past who now serves the machine. The chase runs from a desert airfield to Abu Dhabi, Rome and Venice and finally onto a train in the Austrian Alps, with the usual proviso that nobody can quite trust what they are looking at when the adversary controls every screen.
The cast
Cruise plays Hunt as he has for a decade now, less a character than a register of total commitment, and the film knows the appeal is watching a real man do real things at speed. Hayley Atwell is the find. Her Grace is quick, funny and genuinely slippery, an outsider who keeps recalculating her own odds in real time, and she gives Cruise something to play off that the recent films have lacked. Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg settle back into Luther and Benji like a long marriage, Pegg carrying most of the comic relief and a surprising amount of the exposition. Rebecca Ferguson returns as Ilsa Faust, still the most interesting fighter in the room, and Vanessa Kirby’s arms dealer is all silk and menace. Esai Morales has the harder job as Gabriel, a villain asked to be both a flesh and blood reminder of Hunt’s past and the human face of an inhuman thing, and he lands the menace even when the writing keeps him deliberately vague.
The craft
McQuarrie and editor Eddie Hamilton build the film as a series of escalating set pieces stitched with just enough plot to keep you oriented, and the craft on the big sequences is exceptional. A car chase through Rome with Cruise and Atwell handcuffed together in a tiny Fiat is the funniest action scene of the year, and the climax, a fight on top of a runaway train followed by Cruise riding a motorcycle off an actual cliff, is the sort of thing the marketing has spent a year promising and the film actually delivers. Fraser Taggart shoots it all with clean, legible geography, so you always know who is where and what they want, which is rarer in modern action than it should be. Lorne Balfe’s score leans on Lalo Schifrin’s old theme without drowning in it. The one real cost is length and shape: at over two and a half hours this is only the first half of a story, and the film stops rather than ends, holding its resolution back for a part two.
How it stacks up
Within its own series this sits just below Fallout, McQuarrie’s previous entry and the high-water mark, and comfortably alongside Rogue Nation. It has the same virtues, practical stunts, a clear villain, a strong new woman at Hunt’s side, and the same faint weakness, a plot that exists mostly to move everyone to the next location. Against the wider field it plays as the anti-Bourne: where Paul Greengrass shredded the geography into adrenaline, McQuarrie wants you to see every join. The Entity itself invites a comparison the film cannot quite earn. As an omniscient digital adversary it is closer to the paranoia of Person of Interest or the abstractions of Tenet than to anything the series has tried before, and while the idea is the most interesting thing in the script, the film is more comfortable when the threat has a face and a knife than when it is a voice in the wires.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have been close to unanimous, with the Tomatometer up around 96% and a string of reviews calling it the best blockbuster of the summer; audiences are a shade cooler at 94% but still firmly on side. The grumbles are real and worth stating: the runtime, the part-one structure that withholds an ending, and an AI plot that gestures at big ideas it has no intention of resolving here. I share the reservations and still came out grinning. The gap between the rapturous notices and the slightly more measured audience score is the gap between a film that is technically and physically astonishing and one whose story is, by design, unfinished.
Verdict
This is a franchise that long ago worked out what it is for, and Dead Reckoning Part One does that job about as well as the form allows. The espionage plotting is serviceable rather than clever and the AI premise is more flavour than substance, but the surveillance paranoia gives it a contemporary edge, Atwell is a genuine addition, and the set pieces are the best practical action going. It loses a little for being half a story told at full length. It is hugely rewatchable, it works completely as the spectacle it sets out to be, and it is the clearest case this summer for getting off the sofa and into a big cinema. 8.5⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now. See it on the largest IMAX screen you can reach; the cliff jump and the train were built for it.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the cliffhanger paid off in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025), which resolved the Entity story and was sold as the close of Hunt’s run, and along the way the film quietly dropped the “Part One” from its own title on home release, becoming simply Dead Reckoning. It is now widely available on 4K disc and digital, and streams on Paramount+ depending on your region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence, threat. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: It is implied that one man cuts another’s throat. There are knife fights in which people are slashed and stabbed. There are regular fight scenes in which fists, guns and heavy objects are used.
Threat and horror: A hero seems as if he means to stab a villain’s throat, but he masters his emotions. In a city at night, a woman is lured by a villain to her fate. There are tense sequences in which submariners prepare to meet their doom. A man attempts to defuse a bomb against the clock.
Language: A man says, ‘What the f…’, but doesn’t finish the exclamation. There is use of mild bad language (such as ‘bastard’), as well as other terms such as ‘God’, ‘damn’ and ‘hell’.
Injury detail: There is occasional bloody detail in the aftermath of violence. There is sight of uninjured and bloodless corpses.
Nudity: There is brief sight of dancers performing in skin-tight bodysuits.
Sexual violence and sexual threat: It is implied that a man gropes a woman, but he immediately comes to regret his actions. As a ruse, a woman pretends a man has behaved inappropriately.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
