That trauma was formative it explains why, in movie after movie, Hunt has repeatedly put his life on the line for his friends. Here, he seems to be paying sly tribute to that 1996 original, even evoking its horrific early setpiece in which Hunt watched helplessly as his IMF teammates were murdered, one by one. That said, the director and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie has done a snazzy job with the most recent ones: Rogue Nation, Falloutand now Dead Reckoning Part One. This is notably the first time we've seen Kittridge since Brian De Palma's 1996 Mission: Impossible - the first and still, to my mind, the best movie in the series. government, which wants to control the Entity and the new world order to come. But his old boss, Eugene Kittridge, played by the sinister Henry Czerny, warns Hunt to fall in line with the U.S. Hunt and his IMF team are determined to destroy the Entity before it becomes too powerful or falls into the wrong hands. It's an invisible menace, everywhere and nowhere it can wipe out data systems, control the flow of information and bring nations to their knees. In an especially timely twist, the big villain this time around is AI - a self-aware techno-being referred to as the Entity.

The plot that connects these sequences is preposterous, of course, but reasonably easy to follow.

And so we see Cruise's Ethan Hunt, an agent with the Impossible Missions Force, or IMF, tearing up the streets of Rome in a tiny yellow Fiat, riding a motorcycle off a cliff and - in the most astonishing sequence - hanging on for dear life after a deadly train derailment. In this seventh Mission: Impossible movie, the now 61-year-old actor and producer still insists on risking life and limb for our viewing pleasure, doing his own outrageous stunts in action scenes that make only minimal use of CGI. Now, with the box office still struggling to return to pre-pandemic levels, Cruise has become a kind of evangelist for the theatergoing experience, urging audiences to buy tickets not just to his movie, but also to other big summer titles like Barbie and Oppenheimer.Ĭruise's save-the-movies spirit goes hand-in-hand with his self-styled reputation as the last of the great Hollywood stars. Earlier this year, Steven Spielberg publicly praised Cruise for saving Hollywood with the smash success of Top Gun: Maverick. Back in 2020, when Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One was shooting in the U.K., Cruise was recorded screaming at crew members who'd violated COVID-19 lockdown protocols, all but claiming that the industry's future rested on their shoulders. For some time now, Tom Cruise has been on what feels like a one-man mission to save the movies.

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