What is it with action movies and stairs this year? First, there was Keanu Reeves bounding up the flights leading to Paris’ Sacre Coeur basilica only to bounce back down with echoing, bone-rattling thuds in John Wick: Chapter 4. Now, in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1, IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) hurtle down Rome’s Spanish Steps in a tiny yellow Fiat pursued by Humvee intent on flattening it. It is a thrilling scene – and the most prosaic action sequence in a movie that constantly one ups itself with bigger, flashier, and more daring stunts.

The plot revolves around a pair of keys that threaten not only world order but humanity itself should they fall into the wrong hands. Ethan and his team are tasked with securing both keys to prevent worldwide catastrophe and possibly Armageddon. The film evolves into a kind of “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” – although substitute “airport” for “planes,” which is where Ethan meets Grace – with motorcycles and base-jumping parachutes throw in as bonus features. That there is a plot at all is one of Dead Reckoning’s biggest feats. So jampacked with stunts it is, had director Christopher McQuarrie and his co-screenwriter Erik Jendresen simply forgotten about creating a story, it would have been understandable.

Instead, in those quiet moments between chases, combat, and explosions, Dead Reckoning becomes a kind of meditation on the loneliness of spies that can never come in from the cold. This is true of Ethan’s confederates Luther Stickell, comic relief Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), and assassin Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson). And it’s true of Ethan. True, in a kind of Three Musketeers all-for-one-one-for-all kind of way, the four have each other with maybe Grace making a fifth, but even in that, they are isolated. They exist in the shadows, their work never acknowledged and knowing that there will be no prisoner exchange should they ever face capture and that they will be disavowed completed in the event an operation goes sideways. Ethan and his cohort are ghosts.

Ghosts that nevertheless make a considerable about of noise, clanging their chains out in the open as subtlety is certainly not among the IMF team’s talents. And so, we are back to the chase through the streets of Rome and yet another through Venice. This is a film that will ignite serious FOMO in those that love to travel. But all the beautiful backdrops are in the service of the stunts that render Cruise, famous for doing his own stunts, a kid in a candy store. The work is breathtaking. It’s exciting with a climax that truly inspires awe at both the predicament facing Ethan and stunt/effects wizardry at play. Those final scenes beautifully set up the cliffhanger, which isn’t how will Hunt and his IMF team prevail in the next chapter but how will Cruise – now over 60 – top himself yet again after the one-two punch of Top Gun: Maverick and now part one of Dead Reckoning? – Pam Grady