Before we get to the latest good-but-not-as-great-as-the-franchise-peak-previous-one seventh Mission: Impossible film, first, a round of applause. Good on you, Fiat Bambina product placement department. You’ve certainly outdone yourselves with one tiny car whizzing around Sicily in the new Indiana Jones movie and another careering around Rome in the penultimate film of M: I’s 27-year-old movie series.
The latter car is an electric one too – perhaps Cruise is carbon-offsetting for all that jet fuel in last year’s Top Gun: Maverick.
Cruise’s latest action vehicle is keeping up with Jones in other ways. It too has fights atop runaway steam trains chuffing their way across Europe. Yes, there is a steam train in this otherwise high-tech, artificial intelligence-focused film. It’s the Orient Express and (spoiler alert) there are some murders on it.
Given that the mothballed luxury trans-Europe service is returning next year, take a bow train-marketing department too. Though having all your art deco wagons undergoing a conscious uncoupling on a wrecked bridge somewhere in the Alps may not be quite the advertisement you had hoped for.
But the steam train is just part of M: I-DRP1′s video-game-level plausibility setting. The one where each question comes with the answer: it just is and, besides, it looks cool. Like why, at the beginning, is Rebecca Ferguson’s returning British spy Ilsa Faust in the middle of a Saudi Arabian sandstorm with a sniper rifle? Or why is Tom Cruise doing his Tom Cruise run across the roof of that airport?
Sure, every M: I film has been created as a set of creative excuses for the next big set-up usually involving Cruise hanging onto things – cliff faces, tall buildings, airborne cargo planes, wires, dear life – but in this one you can see the joins a little more.
Yes, the much-ballyhooed motorcycle-powered base jump in this is up there with Cruise’s previous M: I stunt spectaculars. But it feels a little shoehorned into proceedings. It also arrives late in a movie that doesn’t hit any action buttons for much of its first hour.
Still, this one’s script is on the money with its AI threat capturing the paranoia of the times. Plus the mask thing it inherited from the original 1960s television show is a reminder that the IMF (yes, there’s a joke about the International Monetary Fund in this) has been doing deep fake for quite some time and they were getting those mission orders by voice mail back then too.
This one adds British actor Hayley Atwell as Grace, an expert thief who becomes a newbie to Hunt’s team, alongside a returning Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames, whose character makes his excuses and leaves half-way through. Yes, you can quietly quit the IMF.
The film touches on something in Hunt’s past causing him some regret that isn’t quite clear in the shadowy flashback. It’s possible that having made Hunt the American James Bond, Cruise and regular M: I director-writer Christopher McQuarrie are taking some cues from the soul-searching that marked the Daniel Craig era of 007.
Predictably, as many two-part franchise finales have done before, this one is designed to leave you hanging, making for a frequently thrilling but slightly unsatisfying 160-odd minutes in the cinema.
It’s telling that part one’s McGuffin – the thing everyone is chasing – is two interlocking keys. Maybe part one combined with next year’s part two will turn all the tumblers.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One directed by Christopher McQuarrie, in cinemas now.
