So here we go again, with Christopher McQuarrie at the helm for the fourth time in a row, and, on the other side of the camera, Tom Cruise, alias agent Ethan Hunt, 61 years old, in fine, charming form. Barely out of the limelight for Top Gun: Maverick, the sexagenarian returns with the seventh installment of Mission: Impossible, once again showcasing ultra-personified, ultra-spectacular, ultra-physical action cinema, not to mention its seductive appeal. In this respect, it’s likely that this hint of reality, now rare in Hollywood, is boosting the ratings of films that would have been viewed with more reluctance in the past. It’s all very human.

It is the same formula since the original 1996 film. Not so much a flaw as a key to its enduring appeal. Self-destructing message. Ambivalence of hierarchy. Hunt’s stubborn solitude, in spite of the friendly duo who help him with the technical side of things. The inexorable death of loved ones. Sadistic, slimy villain. Phenomenal chases. Fifteen-cushion billiards-style infiltration of a social gathering. A series of hide-and-seek and plot twists and turns. A tour of the world’s capitals. A finale that defies all the laws of physics. And, of course, there’s always a MacGuffin: after a floppy disk, a list, a virus, a rabbit’s foot, a file, and three cores of plutonium, today, by virtue of simplicity, it’s the two halves of a key that have to be put together.

A certain virtuosity to the storytelling

The action unfolds somewhere between a submarine, Abu Dhabi, Rome, Venice, and a speeding booby-trapped luxury train. Among the familiar and unfamiliar are a charming pickpocket (the aptly named Grace, Hayley Atwell), a distraught MI6-trained ally, an ever-cynical widow who offers her services to the highest bidder, two hard-nosed CIA agents hot on their heels, a pair of Bergman-style villains (a messenger of death and a white clown), all the more frightening given that they are on the payroll of an artificial intelligence that has become autonomous and sets out to supplant humankind by driving it to self-destruction. The mission – which continues in the next volume of this two-part series – is to defuse it.