Tom Cruise is sixty-one years old and he is still doing this. That fact alone deserves some kind of acknowledgement before any review of Dead Reckoning Part One begins. The motorcycle-off-a-cliff sequence is not a stunt in the traditional sense. It is a statement of intent — about what cinema can be when someone is prepared to be genuinely, physically, consequentially reckless in service of an audience's pleasure.
Christopher McQuarrie has now directed three Mission: Impossible films and his grip on the franchise is total. He understands that these films live or die on their set-pieces — not just the spectacle of them, but the spatial logic, the stakes, the way each one raises the temperature before the next arrives. Dead Reckoning does this better than any entry since Ghost Protocol. The train sequence in the third act is a marvel of practical filmmaking — chaotic but never incoherent, dangerous-feeling in a way that CGI simply cannot replicate.
Hayley Atwell is a genuine discovery as Grace — quick, watchable, given actual things to do rather than simply exist in Ethan Hunt's orbit. The film's concern with artificial intelligence as a villain — an entity without motive or mercy — feels genuinely contemporary, not grafted on.
The "Part One" in the title is the one caveat. This is half a story. The other half arrives eventually. But half a McQuarrie Mission: Impossible is still better than most complete films.