‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’ Review: A Stunt-Loving Tom Cruise Takes on AI … and Big-Screen CG Rivals
variety.comPeter Debruge Chief Film Critic Sooner or later, Ethan Hunt will face a mission he really ought not to accept. But for the time being, he remains the one man on earth willing to attempt the impossible without questioning the motives of those who require his services.
That’s the deal with America’s most dutiful boy scout, Tom Cruise, who’s carried the billion-dollar “Mission: Impossible” franchise across 27 years without losing steam.
Compare that with Indiana Jones, who’s failed to connect with a younger generation, or the Fast and Furious movies, which aren’t running out of gas so much as guzzling the laughing sort. “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” finds Cruise, now in his sixties, still running from one side of a very big, very wide screen to the other as if his life — and the lives of all 8 billion people on earth — depended on it.
This is Hunt’s seventh blockbuster outing, with a last franchise-capper set to release next summer, and while it can’t eclipse what came before (“Fallout” was the series high), director Christopher McQuarrie delivers a formidable concept and several hall-of-fame set-pieces while somehow also managing to tie the storylines back into these movies’ core mythology.
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