ission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One being waylaid for years by a global pandemic only to ultimately hit theaters at a time when the public's becoming more attuned to the spread of AI tools does a lot to make the film feel eerily prescient — not about the state of the technology itself but the degree to which it's on people's minds. In his latest outing as Ethan Hunt, Tom Cruise delivers exactly the kind of seasoned, charismatic, and more-than-put-upon performance necessary to sell the seventh installment of an action franchise about an aging super spy whose longtime team of allies are all getting on in years. 

But for all of Cruise's pitch-perfectness as a stunt-oriented action hero and director Christopher McQuarrie having a keen eye for crafting spectacular action set pieces that genuinely feel like they'd be impossible to survive, Dead Reckoning Part One can't stop getting in its own way with an overreliance on self-referential jokes, and pre-chewed cliches.

Set some time after the events of Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Dead Reckoning Part One tells the winding and often rather circuitous story of how Impossible Mission Force operative Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his team of fellow agents are tasked with saving the world from a sentient, Machiavellian artificial intelligence that has the power to set off the next series of global wars. Throughout the film, no one seems to fully understand just what "The Entity" — Dead Reckoning's deeply unimaginative name for its amorphous, faceless, mostly-digital antagonist — is or what it was originally meant to be used for. But after a mysterious accident unleashes the program into the wild along with the two halves of a physical key necessary to control or destroy it, a covert international arms race is set off with multiple world powers — including the US — vying to get their hands on it in hopes of shaping the future in their favor.