Has Ethan Hunt finally met his match? The most indefatigable agent of American intelligence, played as always by Tom Cruise, has a formidable new foe in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh installment in the movie series based on the TV series. It’s not a who but a what: a computer virus with a mind of its own, crunching numbers so efficiently that it can anticipate the good guy’s every move. The deck seems stacked against Ethan. But then, doesn’t it always? Beating unbeatable odds is his whole thing. It’s an average Tuesday for him, and the ultimate appeal of this series, whose very title is a challenge Ethan always rises (and climbs, and runs, and sweats, and nearly plummets to his death) to meet.
The truly improbable victory in Dead Reckoning belongs not to Hunt, whose skin-of-his-teeth survival is all but guaranteed by the “part one” in the title, but to the Mission: Impossible franchise itself. More than 25 years after Cruise refashioned a small-screen spy story into a big-screen action vehicle for himself, how are these movies still so good? Dead Reckoning may not be the best Mission: Impossible, but that’s only because the bar has been set as high as the various skyscrapers and aircraft cabins from which Hunt inevitably hangs. It’s the best Hollywood franchise we have. And like its sixtysomething star, it’s showing surprisingly few signs of wear and tear.
