‘Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One’ Review: Real Tom Cruise, AI Enemy

“Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One” has been in the works for years, and yet it arrives with a startling timeliness. With its nefarious Russians, a disaster deep underwater and, most of all, an artificial-intelligence theme, it smartly illustrates how to build the foundations of an action thriller out of the concrete of grim reality. Few more bone-chilling phrases will be heard at the multiplex this year than “the Entity”—the film’s name for the AI that is on the verge of taking command of the world.

The series (whose next installment is slated for June 2024) perhaps reached its apotheosis five years ago in the sixth chapter, “Mission: Impossible—Fallout,” which with relative elegance interlaced spectacle and storyline on the way to a literal cliffhanger of a climax that was as expertly engineered as any action sequence of the 21st century. “M:I 7,” again directed and co-written by Tom Cruise’s longtime collaborator Christopher McQuarrie (who also co-wrote last year’s “Top Gun: Maverick”) isn’t quite as neatly presented, but this all-you-can-eat thrill buffet easily bests most of the recent big-budget movies and reminds us that Mr. Cruise remains a showman par excellence.

A prologue takes us under the polar ice cap, where the Russian submarine and super-weapon Sevastopol is bedeviled by a phantom attacker. Half of a cruciform key is lost in the process, and Mr. Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his Impossible Missions Force (IMF) choose to accept the challenge to find both halves and put them together. Hunt does not, however, know what to do with the key once assembled. Somehow, it will lead to the control of the Entity, the AI program that has already infested all of the world’s online security systems and can not otherwise be interrupted. The U.S. government, and apparently all others, believes it can form an alliance with the Entity and achieve world domination, but Hunt vows to use the key to destroy the Entity, meaning he has gone rogue before this mission even starts and will be pursued by American and other agents while he and his tech-maven teammates Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) use their trademark trickery to stay one step ahead. Hunt’s sometime friend, sometime rival from the British secret service, Ilsa ( Rebecca Ferguson ), also joins the action, as does a new character, a gorgeous pickpocket named Grace (Hayley Atwell) whom Hunt meets in an airport. Among the others fighting to get the key for profit and/or ultimate power are the wicked British arms dealer we met in “M:I 6,” the White Widow ( Vanessa Kirby ); a mysterious hired assassin whose employer is unknown (Pom Klementieff); and the Entity’s morally challenged human ambassador, Gabriel (Esai Morales).

Here I pause to catch my breath before issuing a qualifier applicable to the entire series: My summation is merely an ultra-simplified version of events. Few franchises revel in exposition more than “M:I,” and in order to break it into a few lines of dialogue at a time, Mr. McQuarrie has taken the unusual (and distracting) step of repeatedly placing a bunch of people in a room and having everyone finish one another’s sentences or paragraphs to provide a user’s manual to the movie. Some viewers will be baffled, or bored, by all of this interstitial material.

But crowds will eagerly pack theaters this weekend anyway. The chases and stunts are robust, the European locations glamorous (none of the skulduggery is ever consigned to the Chuck E. Cheese in Akron, Ohio) and there is an occasional slapstick undertone reminiscent of the Roger Moore James Bond movies. (Desperate for an IMF-linked car in the immediate vicinity of his position in Rome, Hunt gets stuck with a yellow two-door Fiat 500 and has to take the passenger seat for a wild ride because his left wrist is handcuffed to Grace’s right.) The climax, aboard the Orient Express while it speeds over the breathtaking gulfs of the Austrian Alps, is also grand-scale fun that, while it makes heavy use of digital effects, nevertheless has a satisfying old-school feel, alive with crunching metal, screaming engines and fingertip saves. All the excitement we hope for at this type of movie is here, and then some.

As he did with last year’s “Top Gun: Maverick,” Mr. Cruise, as producer, is very much calling his own shots, and seems determined to make awe-inspiring, full-throttle throwback entertainment without fretting about recent cultural developments. Now about to enter his fifth decade as a major presence at the movies (“Risky Business” arrived in August 1983), he is already one of the most enduring stars in the history of movies and yet remains in peak form. Recently he floated the notion of continuing to make “M:I” movies until he’s 80 years old. Would anyone like to bet against him? That’s not a mission I’d choose to accept.