Movie review - Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Pt One

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One - is Tom Cruise finally winding up the Impossible Missions crew? Co-starring Vanessa Kirby (The Crown), Rebecca Ferguson (Dune) and Hayley Atwell (Captain America).One thing you've got to hand Tom Cruise and his regular director Christopher McQuarry is they never skimp. The mission they always choose to accept is to give us something even bigger, more spectacular and, frankly, more downright dangerous than the last one. The audience is king, they say, and what the audience wants apparently is Olympic-sized thrills and spills.And backing up the dazzling stunts, there's often an equally dazzling cast, usually with very little to do.Look at the women in Dead Reckoning Part One. Vanessa Kirby from The Crown, Indira Varma from Game of Thrones, Pom Klementieff from Guardians of the Galaxy and Rebecca Ferguson, the modern-day Ingrid Bergman...And above all sparky Hayley Atwell. She's best known, perhaps, as Peggy Carter, the love of Captain America's life, but she's been a favourite, if underused, presence in movies for years, and here finally she's given her head as an international jewel thief called Grace.Well, I say given her head... Everyone knows in most Tom Cruise movies - and all Mission Impossible ones - there's only one person front and centre. And apart from the very first of the series - directed by Brian Di Palma no less - where it looked as if Tom's character Ethan Hunt was a mere sidekick to Jon Voight's Jim Phelps - as if ! - it's been the Ethan Hunt show ever since.After Voight, Mission Impossible villains tended to be a little underwhelming. It's rarely Tom versus a worthy adversary, because, frankly, who could be a worthy adversary to Tom Cruise?Instead, Ethan Hunt is often pitted against intriguing minor villains - often glamorous women - temporarily employed by a shadowy Mastermind before they see the error of their ways.That was certainly the case with Ilsa Faust - Rebecca Ferguson - who returns in Dead Reckoning as part of Ethan's inner circle, along with Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames as computer nerd/cheerleaders.After we blow up a Russian submarine as a pre-titles palate-cleanser, Ethan is summoned in a new mission involving a gold key. Actually, it's two gold keys that together will open...Well it's not absolutely clear what it will open, but it's clear who - or rather what - wants to get its grubby paws on it. It seems that the computers of the world have ganged together to form a super-sinister entity called The Entity…Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details