'Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One' PEOPLE Review: Tom Cruise's New Stunts Are Stunners

Tom Cruise's new action blockbuster, 'Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One,' gives new meaning to the word 'cliffhanger'

Does Tom Cruise ever worry — as you might on occasion — that maybe he shouldn’t have eaten something past its sell-by date? Who could ever say or know? He’s not a movie star you identify with or empathize with. You simply get out of his way.

Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One is another colossal but expertly engineered vehicle, like 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, that knows exactly how to deliver the maximum Tom Cruise experience. Two hours and 36 minutes long, Reckoning spends too much time on expository blather, but you can just tune that all out as you watch Cruise being put through his paces (and his paces are faster and better than yours) in two phenomenal action scenes.

One is a breathless, battering car chase through the streets of Rome (partly in a tiny yellow Fiat). The other, even better, involves a train barreling out of control while Cruise, holding onto a motorcycle for dear life, plunges down toward the rogue choo-choo from a high, high cliff. If you have vertigo, it's a potential barf-bag moment.

According to production notes, Cruise rehearsed for this particular stunt by completing more than 500 skydives and 13,000 motocross jumps. That probably answers the question about whether he worries about sell-by dates.

In the course of Dead Reckoning, number 7 in the M:I franchise, Cruise’s agent Ethan Hunt suffers some genuine sorrow — he all but clutches his heart after one key twist — and even loses his cool, but mostly he sizes up every situation with that same wily, cocky Tom Cruise look, as if he could outplay and outfox doomsday itself. Which, actually, is Ethan’s assignment here: His new enemy is a near-omniscient AI program — nameless, faceless and (one hopes) odorless — that basically wants to hack the entire world. It’s so colossal a threat, Dead Reckoning will spill over into a second installment in June 2024.

Related: Tom Cruise Pokes Fun at His Running in 'Mission: Impossible' Movies for Global Running Day

Hayley Atwell is the major new addition to the franchise. She plays Grace, a thief who keeps trying to steal a key — part of a key — that’s crucial to stopping the AI nemesis. If you admired the gravity and intelligence that this British actress brought to the ABC Marvel series Agent Carter or to STARZ’s adaptation of Howards End, you may be puzzled by her first, flirtatious scenes with Cruise: She’s glossy and empty-eyed, with a faint smile on her lips. She looks as hollow-headed as a Team America puppet.

However, she’s giving precisely the one-to two-note performance that’s required here — the same could be said for returning players Vanessa Kirby, arrogant and kittenish as Alanna (she occasionally crinkles her nose), and Rebecca Ferguson, noble and watchful as  Ilisa. Anything more would distract from the bold, cold mechanisms of the action. Their performances all interlock and flow with the narrative seamlessly, unlike Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s more idiosyncratic performance in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. 

As summer action blockbusters go, for that matter, Reckoning is certainly the more impressive of the two movies: Harrison Ford’s return was like a gift from an old friend making a surprise visit out of the dusty past — if his gift had gotten a bit banged up from all that time in the saddle bag and the wrapping paper was torn, so be it. Cruise is more like some new form of man rocketing in from the future, combining a primal will to survive with a gleaming indestructibility. He’s like the evolutionary union of Bear Grylls and Buzz Lightyear.

In the long run, neither of these films deserves to be as well-remembered (or taken as seriously) as the year’s third ginormous action fantasy, John Wick: Chapter 4, a dreamlike quest for both redemption and death in which Keanu Reeves, his dank black hair framing his face like a broken-winged raven, serves as the tale’s woeful knight. It’s the martial-arts equivalent of The Lord of the Rings.

At the moment, though, Tom Cruise is running in a straight line down the middle of a long air-terminal rooftop, pumping his arms like a windup toy. No one will catch him. Only an idiot would try.

In theaters July 12, rated PG-13

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