Over the course of the six movies and nearly 30 years leading up to this one, Mission: Impossible's Ethan Hunt has fought double agents and shadowy terrorist networks, scaled skyscrapers, and thrown himself out of planes. But he's never fought an adversary like the Entity, the rogue artificial intelligence he takes on in Dead Reckoning Part One. For one thing, it has no physical form, which means Tom Cruise can't catch it no matter how fast he runs. And for another, the Entity doesn't just want to defeat Ethan: It wants to replace him. In a briefing of the U.S. top intelligence officials in which exposition is passed from one actor to the next like a red-hot baton, one alphabet-agency higher-up describes the Entity as a "godless, stateless, amoral" being that can infiltrate any system in the world--not unlike the Impossible Mission Force itself, which, though nominally a branch of the U.S. government, doesn't take orders from the military-industrial complex so much as consider its suggestions.

For almost three decades in the Mission: Impossible franchise, Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt has gone head to head in high-speed motorcycle battles, climbed Dubai's Burj Khalifa, and hung from the side of a plane during takeoff. Oh, and he also died at one point (following an extended free dive into an underwater data bank). But in the latest film, Dead Reckoning Part 1, Ethan Hunt faces his toughest opponent yet: an omnipotent AI that could reshape geopolitics as we know it. After defying the laws of physics, it only makes sense that he has to defeat a god. As ludicrous as that may sound, it also fits perfectly within the Mission: Impossible series, a universe where Ethan Hunt has been described as the "living manifestation of destiny," and everyone is well aware that the "Impossible Mission Force" sounds like something pulled out of a comic book.

On July 3rd, Tom Cruise will be sixty years old. The fact that he does not look it, at all, even in IMAX closeups so tight you can study the grain of his tooth enamel, adds a note of cognitive dissonance to "Top Gun: Maverick," the long-aborning sequel in which he's called back to mentor a squad of younger stick-jockeys who address him as Pops and Old-Timer until he wins their respect in the air. Even for a physical performer like Cruise, sixty is no longer an expiration date. Mick Jagger blew by that milestone in 2003, as did Sylvester Stallone in 2006, and, thanks presumably to healthy habits and/or medical technology dreamt of only by science fiction, they're both still out there, doing a version of the kind of thing they've always done. But the level of performance expected of a Rolling Stone or an Expendable is one thing, and the work that Tom Cruise appears to demand of himself is something else entirely.