Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who wrote it with Erik Jendresen, this is the sequel to Mission: Impossible – Fallout and the seventh installment in the Mission: Impossible film series. I have no real affinity or knowledge of these, so I went in cold.

A rogue AI known as The Entity has destroyed the Russian stealth submarine where it was housed, the Sevastopol, in the hope that it can be released into the world. IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team have been called in to retrieve it for the U.S., as any government that uses this AI will be ahead. Or so they think, as it is already self-aware. After all, it can manipulate cyberspace itself to control global defense intelligence and financial networks. 

This brings Ethan into the orbit of rogue MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), who has a price on her head thanks to CIA director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny). The battle to destroy the AI takes the team all over the world, as they chase Grace (Hayley Atwell), an agent who has already stolen the part Ethan had, while disarming nuclear bombs in airports. That means that you get Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Beni Dunn (Simon Pegg) as Ethan’s fellow agents, as they also go to war with the CIA, who want to arrest them, and the soldiers who work for The Entity, like Gabriel (Esai Morales) and Paris (Pom Klementieff).

The start of Cruise’s last films in this series is the kind of high-action epic that delivers on all fronts. It feels like this series has taken the ball from Bond and run with it, pushing the stunts beyond the Bourne movies and turning them into roller coasters all their own. Even without knowing the characters and their backstories, the car chase in Italy and the airport scenes are so full of twists and turns that I found this an entertaining watch, liking it way more than I thought I would.