Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

Essential if you are going to the end, and do not start it without the next film available. It was conceived and shot as the first half of one story, it ends with the central problem unsolved and the key object only half recovered, and watching it alone is watching an opening.

The antagonist is an artificial intelligence that has gone beyond anybody's control and can predict the behaviour of almost everyone it observes, which is a smart choice for a series whose whole appeal is elaborate planning. The Entity knows the plan. What it cannot predict is a man improvising badly, so the film's best sequences are the ones where everything collapses and Ethan has to do something stupid at speed. The pursuit through Rome in a tiny yellow car, handcuffed to somebody who does not want to be there, is the funniest thing the series has done.

The motorcycle jump off a Norwegian cliff was filmed on the first day of principal photography, before anything else, in case it went wrong. The train sequence that closes the film is a long practical set piece with carriages going over an edge one at a time, and it is as good as anything in Fallout.

The problems are length and exposition. At a hundred and sixty-three minutes there is a great deal of standing in rooms explaining what the Entity is, Esai Morales's Gabriel is given a backstory with Ethan that the previous seven films never mentioned, and the attempt to retrofit a personal history is the weakest idea in the modern run. It was also released into a crowded summer and underperformed, which is why the second half arrived with its subtitle quietly changed.