Mission: Impossible

It reviews better than it plays — admired more than it is enjoyed.

• “In the past I have been agnostic and a nay-sayer about M:I, but the pure fun involved in this film, its silly-serious alchemy, and the way the franchise seems to strain at something crazily bigger with every film, as opposed to just winding down, is something to wonder at.”

  Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian · 100

• “Disguises, time bombs, runaway trains: Cruise, his director Christopher McQuarrie and their collaborators are very consciously working in a century-old tradition here, perhaps to show the business and art of stunning audiences can – if we choose – be much the same now as it ever was.”

  Robbie Collin, The Telegraph · 100

• “At nearly every turn, Dead Reckoning aims for something more than the sum of its Evel Knievel parts. In an already strong year for breakneck, throat-kick, punch-out cinema, this adrenaline-pumped fever dream from Cruise and his regular enabler-slash-director Christopher McQuarrie represents a brutally thrilling action-film apotheosis.”

  Barry Hertz, The Globe and Mail (Toronto) · 94

• “The team behind this new “Mission: Impossible”—like the makers of all the installments that came before it—seem to know on a deep level why viewers flock to this group of action movies: the indispensable big-screen proficiency and collective soul of the series first and the plot of individual chapters, second.”

  Tomris Laffly, TheWrap · 92

• “The fact that McQuarrie and Cruise routinely set and then raise the bar for the gold standard of action movies is the lure of the franchise — but it's the characters, their foibles, their wit, and their deep humanity that are Mission: Impossible's secret weapon.”

  Entertainment Weekly · 91