'Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One' review: Cruising to thrilling absurdity

Why settle for an ordinary bike tour of the mountains when you can enjoy a flying Cruise? — Photos: Handout

Seven movies into the Mission: Impossible series, let’s just acknowledge a couple of things: 1) Obviously the mission is possible. 2) The true hero of this franchise is whoever fills out the insurance forms for Tom Cruise, who in this movie rides a motorbike off a cliff, like that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

It’s no spoiler to say that Cruise and his hardworking parachute survive the jump (unless he didn’t, and a very impressive ghost is now doing all of his red-carpet appearances, and that is a movie I would very much like to see), but watching it in the movie, time truly does seem to stop for a second.