Director: Christopher McQuarrie

Stars: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Pom Klementieff, Esai Morales, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames

The seventh and penultimate instalment of the big screen franchise is as unwieldy as its title.

The opening scene sets out the picture’s modish theme as a high-tech Russian submarine is tricked into firing on itself by a sinister AI device. It is revealed that the device ‘The Entity’ has infiltrated pretty much everything everywhere and threatens to destabilise the world’s economy and turn the superpowers on each other. The only hope is to retrieve the two parts of a jewelled key which may be able to control it, but which were lost in the submarine incident.

IMF agent Hunt (Cruise) is despatched to retrieve the pieces. Also looking to procure the Entity is sinister terrorist Gabriel (a blandly suave Morales) and British master thief Grace (Atwell), looking to lines her own pockets, but later finding common cause with Hunt. Returnees include MI6 Agent Ilsa Faust (Ferguson), arms dealer the White Widow (Kirby), and Ethan’s old team, the wise-cracking field agent Benji (Pegg) and genius hacker Luther (Rhames).

The unnecessarily convoluted plot unfolding over two-and-three-quarter-hour running time takes in a great deal of slightly naff ‘glamorous’ James Bond-style travelogue globe-trotting, and lengthy exposition-heavy scenes concerning the Entity and it’s world-threatening power.

Still, the picture does deliver on the requisite analogue thrills, including a thrilling and crunchy, if exhausting car chase through Rome midway in which Hunt and Grace are pursued by single-minded and ruthless killer, Paris (a memorable mostly silent turn form Klementieff), and the much-trumpeted thrillingly vertiginous climactic sequence when Hunt leaps off a mountain on his motorbike onto the Orient Express. But there’s a lot to wade through to get to the thrills.

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One is out now.

David Willoughby

Follow David on Twitter @DWill_Crackfilm