★★★★★

For a film four years in the making, Dead Reckoning doesn’t half land with peculiar resonance. This is the seventh in the Mission: Impossible film saga and first of a two-part extravaganza. It’s a blockbuster concerned with the perils of artificial intelligence, released in sync with the launch of Hollywood’s biggest strike in sixty years. A strike pitted against exactly that threat. Moreover, here is a feature driven, in part, by the hunt for a mysteriously missing submarine. This mere weeks after the Titan’s disappearance gripped the globe. It’s enough to make even Tom Cruise wrinkle an eyebrow, were he not behind a picket line somewhere, of course. And yet, for all this talk of contemporaneous thematic severity, where Dead Reckoning really proves itself in step with audiences of the here and now is in its recognising today’s want for escapist spectacle. That it delivers in spades.