Tom Cruise’s middle-aged pivot from thrice-Oscar-nominated movie anchor to full-time action star and Olympic-grade stuntperson can be traced roughly back to the 2006 release of Mission: Impossible III. The first-rate thriller bombed so hard (relatively speaking) that it soured Cruise’s long-standing relationship with Paramount Pictures for several years. That year, the world’s most famous Scientologist was starting to have PR problems on multiple fronts, from his over-the-top declarations of love for then-partner Katie Holmes to deepening scrutiny of his adopted religion. It was in this era that he began what would become an apparently permanent filmmaking partnership with Valkyrie screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, who script-doctored 2011’s franchise-rejuvenating Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol. After that, Cruise promoted McQuarrie to writer-director of the most reliably thrilling derring-do franchise of them all.

I mourned the loss of the series’ former approach of hiring a wildly different director for each installment—an objection quieted by the fact that each McQuarrie Mission has been an unqualified banger. The new Dead Reckoning Part One continues on this path.

Dead Reckoning is the seventh entry in this series and at least the 10th (!) Cruise-McQuarrie collaboration. If it’s not quite as mercilessly amusing as 2018’s rapturous Mission: Impossible — Fallout, it’s in the same rarefied ballpark. It preserves the winning formula of the prior three films: 1) harrowing stunt work that relies far less on digital fakery, and far more on the obsession of its producer-star than any of its contemporaries; and 2) goopy mouthfuls of exposition slowly intoned by some of the best character actors in the game. But it adds a new wrinkle that one might’ve called science fiction as recently as early 2020, when this much-delayed, closely watched mega-production began shooting. 

The Impossible Mission Force’s new foe is a sentient AI worm referred to throughout as The Entity, which can seize control of any networked electronic system. But unlike SkyNet, the self-aware electronic demon of the Terminator films, this one doesn’t seem nearly as interested in ridding Earth of its human infestation as much as just messing with folks. (Simon Pegg’s IMF agent Benji Dunn is called on to defuse a bomb at Abu Dhabi International Airport by answering intimate questions about himself, for example.) The Entity has a devout human servant in Esai Morales’ Gabriel, a Cruise contemporary who brings gravitas and menace even when you don’t know what the hell he’s talking about, which is frequently the case. We learn in blink-and-you’ll-miss flashbacks that Gabriel’s habit of tormenting Cruise’s Ethan Hunt character predates Hunt’s recruitment into the IMF. Part Two, due next summer, will presumably clear up whether Gabriel truly works for The Entity or vice versa, though the character’s name feels like a major clue.

Because The Entity has a penchant for sending specific human persons on individually tailored quests, Dead Reckoning’s resemblance to this year’s Peacock series Mrs. Davis is more than casual. It also shares with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny a bifurcated McGuffin (a cruciform key that can supposedly destroy The Entity somehow), an alluring brunet thief of uncertain allegiance (the marvelous Hayley Atwell, the MCU’s Agent Carter herself!), and a foot chase on top of a steam train, this one with two uncommonly spry sexagenarians, Morales and Cruise, punching it out.

Given Dead Reckoning’s long genesis, it can’t rationally be accused of pilfering. This has always been a series that looks backward and forward at once. Brian De Palma’s 1996’s Mission: Impossible contained an homage to Jules Dassin’s 1955 noir, Rififi, and culminated in what at the time felt like a huge stunt involving a helicopter and a bullet train. Twenty-seven years later, the new film builds up to an extended homage to Buster Keaton’s The General, as McQuarrie and Cruise launch a runaway Orient Express locomotive off a crippled bridge—this time without a greenscreen in sight. But the Mission pictures always give you more: The remainder of the sequence, wherein Cruise and Atwell must clamber up through several train cars dangling off a cliff before the cars separate themselves one at a time, has antecedents both in 1969’s The Italian Job and 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park. McQuarrie just does it more vividly, more thrillingly, and better.

McQuarrie has spoken candidly about the chaotic process of making these films. Each entry in the series, even the early ones with The Last Detail and Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne’s name on them, has been rewritten as it was shot, with major set pieces moved around during the editing process and sometimes even deleted altogether. The Mission pictures are increasingly giddy in the pile-up of reversals and betrayals—and mask-pulls!—that loosely string some of the most brilliantly executed stunts in cinema history. As with the latex-mask con jobs perpetrated by the Impossible Missions Force, the greatness of these movies is enhanced by their hair’s-breadth proximity to failure, and by the microns-thin membrane that still separates Ethan Hunt, weird, maniacally driven superspy, from Tom Cruise, weird, maniacally driven movie star. For all the press devoted to the 61-year-old actor’s stubborn, eerie youthfulness, these movies have gotten richer as he’s aged.

You feel the adrenaline and the exhaustion more palpably than ever here. I saw Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One a week ago and found it bloated, talky, and generally confounding. I saw it again and it seemed almost as thrillingly propulsive as all the other McQuarrie-era Missions. The difference, I suppose, is that the second time I chose to accept it.

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One opens in theaters nationwide on July 12.