By John Corrado

★★★½ (out of 4)

Following the release of Ghost Protocol in 2011, the Mission: Impossible series has turned into one of our best and most reliable action movie franchises, building on the promise of sequels that either match or exceed their predecessors.

That trend continues with the seventh film in the series, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, another exciting sequel where the main attraction is once again Tom Cruise doing his own stunts. As was the case with last year’s Top Gun: Maverick, this film reaffirms his status as our last true movie star.

The film finds Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his IMF (Impossible Mission Force) team members Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) in a race to find both halves of a cruciform key, and stop an artificially intelligent entity that has the power to control the world.

Also after the key – and what it unlocks – is Gabriel (Esai Morales), who has put a French assassin (Pom Klementieff) on Hunt’s trail. It’s a James Bond-esque plot, that unfolds with various twists and double-crossings, while tackling prescient themes of AI taking over in a post-truth world. The cast of characters also includes new addition Hayley Atwell as international pickpocket Grace, and the returns of Rebecca Ferguson as former MI6 agent Ilsa Faust and Vanessa Kirby as arms dealer Alanna Mitsopolis.

Like the previous two films in the series (Rogue Nation and Fallout), Dead Reckoning Part One is directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who has become the perfect orchestrator of Cruise’s madness. The film unfolds as a proper globe-trotting espionage thriller, allowing McQuarrie and Cruise to stage set-pieces in various locations, from a tense foot chase through the Abu Dhabi airport to a wildly fun car chase involving the Spanish Steps in Rome.

At the centre of it all is Cruise, who does every stunt with the fervour of a man on a mission to save cinema (and, judging by the responses from the nearly sold out crowd at the special fan event screening on Monday night at the Scotiabank IMAX , he may have just succeeded, again). The film’s centrepiece is a jump off a cliff on a motorbike that Cruise performed himself and has been hyped up in the marketing, and watching it play out on the biggest screen possible is immensely satisfying.

The stunts themselves are the main attraction here, with Cruise’s willingness to put himself in death-defying situations for the sake of entertainment cementing his place in a league with old silent film stars like Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. McQuarrie and Cruise even pay elaborate homage to Keaton’s The General, with an incredible grand finale involving a runaway train that harkens back to that silent film classic from a hundred years ago.

While the story very much feels like a first half, ending on a note that will tie directly into the next film, Dead Reckoning Part One still offers a completely entertaining and wholly satisfying experience in its own right. The film is long at 163 minutes (making it officially the longest one yet in the series), but this running time mostly flies by. The final hour alone is thrilling and demands the big screen experience, as the film continuously finds new ways to top itself while steadily maintaining suspense. Expect nothing less from an old school movie star like Cruise.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One opens exclusively in theatres on July 12th.