MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - DEAD RECKONING PART ONE

Mission accomplished. Mostly...

- JAMIE GRAHAM

The seventh instalment of the Mission: Impossible franchise sees Tom Cruise’s superspy Ethan Hunt face his most dangerous enemy yet: AI. This ‘godless, stateless, amoral’ foe is ‘everywhere and nowhere’, having infiltrated the Federal Reserve, the stock market, the national power grid, the world banks, the military and the intelligence network. It’s variously described as ‘a ghost in the machine’, ‘digital chaos’, a ‘worm’ and a ‘self-aware, self-learning, trutheating digital parasite’. Or, as Simon Pegg’s technician-turned-field agent Benji Dunn puts it, ‘Monday.’

Benji’s being flippant, of course. Because the mission Ethan accepts in Dead Reckoning Part One – to retrieve both halves of a mysterious key that is the means of controlling this untold power – really might be impossible. Yes, even for the guy who scales the outside of the world’s tallest building with more ease than most of us clamber up the stairs to bed.

The mission is, naturally, a race against time, with every nation in it for themselves. And as Ethan streaks across the Arabian Desert, Rome, Venice and the Austrian Alps, he encounters a host of familiar faces: old pals Benji and Luther (Ving Rhames), the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), and former IMF director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), the latter making his first appearance since clashing with Ethan in Brian De Palma’s 1996 original.