Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning

By Joanna Langfield

Strap yourself in for this irresistible force. Because Ethan Hunt and team are back on a mission to save the world and, from the looks of things, the box office. And with what they’re delivering, who wouldn’t choose to accept that?

At a boffo two hours and 43 minutes, this latest chapter could have felt bloated and repetitive. It does not. Bouncing off a script and story that feels as if it could have been written by the AI it purports to warn us about, the action is fulfilling enough to almost make us forget about the illogical details Simon Pegg’s Benji warns us are not important anyway. Because this movie just uses the story of an artificial intelligence driven weapon, out to control us all, as a starting point. What the movie is truly all about is crowd pleasing jaw drops. And there are, indeed, great stunts and almost non-stop action. Led by the astonishing Tom Cruise, for most people, that will be more than enough.

I mean, sure, there are other actors around who say things. Hayley Atwell makes a nice addition to the MI group. Nice to reunite with Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and Henry Czerny, too. And I was particularly pleased to see Shea Whigham join up. Because he can do with his face what this monosyllabic script omits. Almost everybody gets to run, kick and break a sweat. But it’s Cruise who does the heavy lifting, or, in a few scenes, flying. And he, performing those stunts himself, is amazing.

I don’t want to be one of those “you must see it on a big screen” people, but director Christopher McQuarrie and his own team were clearly on their own mission to draw a crowd to the box office. There’s terrific stuff to not just watch, but hear and feel. Literally. Your seat will vibrate. And, even for those of us with our own big set ups, cool effects en masse are a treat you can’t duplicate at home.