Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One: Tom Cruise at 60 appears implausibly comfortable

The latest episode in cinema’s second-most-robust action franchise begins with terrible things happening to a Russian submarine. A good while later – this is all over the publicity, so don’t write in – our hero sports off a cliff and survives thanks to a convenient parachute (though not one emblazoned with the Union Flag). Ring any bells?

It is not unreasonable to wonder if Mission: Impossible is moving into its Spy Who Loved Me phase. After all, Tom Cruise and the series itself are more than a decade older than, respectively, Roger Moore and the Bond Cinematic Universe at the time of that film. Have we reached cosy pastiche? Is it now all just one big guffaw?

On balance, no. The exhaustingly titled Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is certainly aware of its own occasional ridiculousness. The highlight of this indecently exciting film finds Cruise and newcomer Hayley Atwell speeding a yellow Fiat 500 through the streets of Rome while handcuffed to one another. A triumphant melange of practical stunts – juddering cameras bolted to clattering bodywork – and not-too-intrusive CGI, the chase shares as much DNA with (what else?) The Italian Job as it does with The French Connection.

Cruise does his famous “running”. The stuff with masks is still played for laughs. An early bit of pompous exposition casts comic actors such as Mark Gattis and Rob Delaney in the roles of US security big wigs. You could be forgiven for expecting the entire film to play like an extended nudge in the ribs. Wink, wink!

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Not quite. Christopher McQuarrie, taking a third crack at the sequence, maintains impressive levels of mock sobriety throughout. This is a little too apparent in the overly anxious jawing about a McGuffin that must surely have tested the actors resistance to rolling of eyes. Do you really want to know? It seems there is a key, formed from two intersecting crosses, that may unlock a potentially self-aware computing “entity” with the capacity to take over the entire world. Nobody lives beneath a dome at the bottom of the sea, but, at such times, we really do appear to be drifting into Roger Moore territory. Irish Times Loo Guide can reveal that one such conversation begins in a Venice disco at about the 90-minute mark. There is easily time to get to WC and back before the action restarts. You’re welcome.

Anyway, those outbursts of jawing allowed, McQuarrie puts enough bloody crunch into the action to dispel any suggestions of creeping comic decadence. Top-flight supporting performances help. Early on, Atwell turns up as Grace, a resourceful thief, apparently hired by someone-or-other to track down the key before Cruise’s Ethan Hunt gets his paws on it. The lunatics who stuff social media with complaints about women taking over franchise movies may blow a temporal artery at Dead Reckoning.

While good old Ving Rhames and good not-quite-so-old Simon Pegg remain in the van, distaff talent carries out the majority of the secondary ass-kicking. Rebecca Ferguson is back behind the sniper rifle as old chum Ilsa. Vanessa Kirby reprises her role as statuesque princess of malignity. Newcomer Pom Klementieff, best known from the Guardians of the Galaxy flicks, strips layers from the screen as an all-purpose henchperson of the old school.

All four are excellent, but the gender shift does pose an interesting moral dilemma. Does Ethan Hunt have the same freedom to smash a woman villain in the face as he is allowed with a male antagonist? PhD theses have been structured around less. The character himself seems unsure.

Cruise, still knocking on 60 during the shoot, appears implausibly comfortable throughout a film that, at 2¾ hours, somehow manages to seem only about 15 minutes too long. Hollywood will, however, be concerned that the most satisfactory blockbusters of 2022 (you know what this is) and 2023 hung around a man born during the Kennedy administration. There is, of course, a bit more to come. Be warned. As the title implies, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One ends practically in the middle of a…