Film Review: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One 

• Paramount Pictures

Who is Ethan Hunt? And, perhaps more to the point, does it matter?

In much the same way that the Daniel Craig installments of the James Bond series tried to navigate a space between Agent 007, immortal superhero and James Bond, man with emotions and a history, the Mission: Impossible movie franchise has weaved back and forth between whether Tom Cruise's covert operative Hunt is a character or an icon. On the one hand, you've got a now-27-year history of Hunt's personal sacrifices, losses and commitment to his teammates. On the other hand, you've got stuff like Alec Baldwin's memorable line in 2015's Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation describing Hunt as "the living manifestation of destiny," which is about as close as you can get to defining someone as nigh-supernatural.

Do we want to worry about the fate of Ethan Hunt as a person? Or do we only just need movie-star Tom Cruise pulling off crazy stunts and anchoring ridiculous action beats?

It's kind of amazing that Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One finds co-writer/director Christopher McQuarrie continuing to try to have it both ways, and somehow managing to pull it off. The story finds Hunt and his now-regular team—Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg) and ex-British agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson)—trying to track down the two pieces of a key that might be the only way to stop an AI-gone-sentient referred to as The Entity. He's got competition, in the form of a mysterious thief called Grace (Hayley Atwell) who just wants to turn it around for a cool fortune, as well as a killer named Gabriel (Esai Morales) who is working for The Entity, and who has a particularly nasty history with Hunt.

Throw in Pom Klementieff as Gabriel's badass hired muscle, plus the return of Vanessa Kirby's arms dealer White Widow from Mission: Impossible – Fallout, and you've got a cast of characters ready to overload a movie poster, and threatening to make this franchise as cumbersome as the Fast and Furious movies have become. McQuarrie's smart enough, however, to realize that nobody should steal focus from Cruise, and his wisdom extends to the ingenious decision to make the movie's primary threat to the fate of the world not even a human—so, no need to worry about any international market getting salty over being demonized.

Mostly, though, McQuarrie has turned into an absolute master of crafting action set-pieces, and joins the John Wick series' Chad Stehelski as dependably able to send an audience out on a euphoric high. There are great moments sprinkled throughout Dead Reckoning Part One, like a car chase through the streets of Rome complicated by Hunt and Grace being handcuffed to one another, and Hunt's opportune entrance onto a moving train. But the giddiness-inspiring finale—involving the fate of various precariously-positioned train cars—somehow manages to top the cliffside helicopter ending of Mission: Impossible – Fallout for brilliant editing and peril built on a remarkable sense of geography. And it all works as part of something that openly announces itself as a cliffhanger for a coming-in-2024 finale, while still providing a satisfying conclusion in its own right.

Part of that satisfaction, unquestionably, comes from the ways in which Ethan Hunt is made more than a delivery system for thrills. Cruise and Atwell have a terrific instant chemistry, yet there's also a level on which Hunt's commitment to Grace's safety isn't about his unique attachment to her, but about the way he approaches existence—and his sense of duty—in general. "Your life will always mean more to me than my own," Hunt says to Grace at one point, and it's almost startling as a thesis statement about who Ethan Hunt is as a person, refusing to accept the potential human cost of him failing. It's not so much that Hunt is a manifestation of destiny, as that he's a manifestation of having a personal code dedicated to the preservation of life.

That's what's so unexpected about where we find ourselves, seven features and a quarter-century into a franchise created to cash in on a familiar TV brand: I want Ethan Hunt to keep manifesting his destiny because his adventures are so much fun, but also because I'm shocked at how much I've come to like this guy.