MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - DEAD RECKONING opens July 12th.

The trick of the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE franchise lies in raising the bar, movie after movie. Which legitimately becomes harder and harder with each new sequel. When you have Tom Cruise racing around the Arc de Triomphe on a motorcycle, free-falling out of an airplane, or climbing up the sides of the Burj Khalifa building, it’s difficult to come up with new and surprising stunts that can continue to thrill the audience. With that in mind, Paramount took the stage at CinemaCon 2023 in Las Vegas with a 20-minute chase sequence from the upcoming MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - DEAD RECKONING PART ONE. And trust us when we tell you, Cruise and his director Christopher McQuarrie have done it again.

The footage shown during the Paramount panel will not be the opening of the film. And as we saw, we were catching up with Hayley Atwell’s character, Grace, for the first time. And the law was catching up with her, as well. Grace was being interrogated by Italian law enforcement, who had found a half-dozen fake passports in her possession. Several groups of intimidating officials are pursuing Grace, including a sinister spy (Esai Morales) pretending to be INTERPOL. But lucky for Grace, one man manages to get to her first – Ethan Hunt (Cruise).

With the authorities closing in, Ethan and Grace attempt to escape using an assortment of cars. She starts in a police car, with Ethan on a police motorcycle. After a crash and a shootout, the two escape in an Italian sports car that has had its door ripped off. Only here’s the catch: Grace and Ethan have become handcuffed together, and their positioning means that Grace has to be in the driver’s seat.

And she’s not the best driver.

Your heart slowly crawls into your throat as you watch Atwell and Cruise try to maneuver around the limitations of their handcuffs, all while racing around the streets and alleyways of Rome. They dodge tourists, other cars, landmarks and more as they try and stay one step ahead of their pursuers. And the action-comedy bit takes on an even greater level of difficulty when Cruise and Atwell transition into a pint-sized yellow Fiat, and do their best to increase their speed as law enforcement bears down.

If you have seen any of the previous MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movies, you know that Christopher McQuarrie understands exactly how to stage a chase to wring the maximum amount of thrills out of the sequence. You will not believe where the cars end up during this exercise. And the fact that Cruise and Atwell managed to pull this off all while handcuffed to each other is a jaw-dropping spectacle that we often only see in the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movies.

The films in this franchise are something special, and they deserve to be seen on the biggest screen possible. That’s what you need to make sure that you have signed up for an alert, so you can grab tickets for opening weekend the moment they go on sale.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - DEAD RECKONING opens July 12th.

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