It’s no secret, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is easily one of our most anticipated movies of the year. Coming off the success of Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie are back to save the summer blockbuster after both The Flash and Indiana Jones misfired financially. The franchise is now known for delivering some insane action sequences, featuring Cruise’s IMF agent Ethan Hunt putting himself in harm’s way for our entertainment. So how does this seventh entry and technically, half a movie, fair? Let’s find out!

Dead Reckoning Part One features a plot that would’ve seemed like science fiction only a decade ago. An A.I., known in the movie as The Entity, has discovered sentience and has gone rogue. It’s now a major threat but can be controlled and even destroyed thanks to a pair of keys. Naturally, this leads global powers and nefarious agents to seek the keys, while Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt elects to destroy the A.I., believing that it offers far too much power for any one nation or faction to control. What follows is a thrilling and wildly entertaining summer blockbuster in that the biggest threat is doubt and uncertainty, as The Entity is capable of rewriting code, so while before we couldn’t always trust a person due to the masks, now our heroes can’t even trust each other over coms or the satellite data they’re using. Everything is compromised and considering the rapid growth of A.I. this year alone, it’s certainly if nothing else, eerie.

The movie boasts some great action set pieces. From a creative car chase in Rome, to the much-advertised cliff jump sequence, Dead Reckoning has scenes that are inventive and thrilling. That said, I was surprised to see some noticeable green screen in the finale, especially in the Uncharted 2-esque portion, considering this is a franchise that prides itself on practical effects, with VFXs used to enhance the in-camera footage. Case in point, using VFX to erase the ramp that Cruise uses to jump himself and a motorbike off a mountain. The green screen never compromised the entertainment though and the thrill, it just registered in my brain. That said, I thought the best sequence in the movie wasn’t actually an action scene but a tightly edited cat-and-mouse sequence in an airport. Great scene, and it’s also where we meet the latest edition to the franchise, Hayley Atwell’s Grace.

Grace is a professional thief but is by no means a spy. She doesn’t have any concept of the world she inadvertently enters, making her inexperience rather refreshing. Atwell also has great chemistry with Cruise and is a genuinely interesting character. On paper, her character shares quite a bit of similarity with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Helena from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a thief in it for herself, but I thought Grace’s vulnerability and inexperience made her a much more compelling character than Helena ever was.

Returning are Simon Pegg as Benji, Ving Rhames as Luther and Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa, collectively the closest thing Ethan has to a family. Likewise, Henry Czerny as Kittridge, last seen in the first Mission: Impossible movie, returns along with Vanessa Kirby’s White Widow (last seen in Fallout). Newcomers include the film’s primary antagonist, Gabriel (as in the archangel, played by Esai Morales), a former friend of Ethan’s who seeks to use the Entity for his own gains. Gabriel serves more as a physical threat in the place of the invisible A.I., but he wasn’t as menacing or effective as Sean Harris’s Solomon Lane from Rogue Nation and Fallout. But I liked that the Entity had a champion and noticed there was quite a bit of Christian subtext, with Gabriel, the key looking like a cross and making leaps of faith.

The movie is also surprisingly funny. Dead Reckoning boasts the most laughs in the franchise, but it never comprises the drama or the plot. McQuarrie co-wrote the film with Erik Jendresen, who will also write Dead Reckoning Part Two and has previously worked on the likes of Band of Brothers. There were a few moments where I had to suspend disbelief though, considering the stunts in this franchise that’s a bit of a surprise. A Deus Ex Machina near the end of the movie took me out of the experience even. I also noticed a few instances of poor ADR, where the lip-syncing didn’t match the actors’ mouths. The movie is two and a half hours long but thanks to tight editing and pacing, it really didn’t feel like it.

In the end, I don’t think the stunts in Dead Reckoning Part One matched the jaw-dropping helicopter sequence from Fallout, but I found the hunt for a rogue sentient A.I. to be a timely and eerie story and one that was much more interesting than the previous entry. It’s a Mission: Impossible movie and it’s a seriously fun time at the movies, what more could I say? Go and see it!