It’s that time again. Time for Tom Cruise to pull another practical stunt that looks insane. Yes, another Mission Impossible has come out. After years of delays it’s finally come…well half of it has. The other half is still another year away. That’s right we’re going full Harry Potter with this. The movie is split into two parts instead of one. And yet it is the longest one to boot. The question is, is the first half of this story any good?

The story in this is solid. Which doesn’t mean much since all of the plots for these movies are solid. Except the second one, that one was dumb. It revolves around the usual McGuffin that these movies operate around. The main difference, though, is what the McGuffin unlocks. This is one of the movie’s strong suits.

This key that they’re trying to get is not just some generic nuclear codes, or some other big doomsday device. It unlocks the only means of defeating an AI. One that can rewrite whatever is supposed to be true to be different. Basically, it can change any information it wants. The villain already has the AI, so if he had the key, he’d be the only person who could stop it. This works much better than another nuke code, or that guy the used twice as a villain.

The biggest detractor of this movie is the length. These movies are usually a little over two hours, but this one is almost three. You would think that almost three hours would be enough time to nicely wrap up a story. But no, it ends on a cliffhanger. It spent this long getting here, only to end about halfway through the actual story. If they took out half of the Tom Cruise running scenes, they could’ve shaved off like thirty minutes.

This is basically the only thing wrong with the movie. It sets up a strong villain, a good race, and great stunts. It just missed delivering the ending. And also putting in a backstory for Tom Cruise that was never mentioned before. They just saw other movies doing the whole cgi actor faces and wanted to jump in on that. Here’s hoping that Part 2 gives it a good ending. And here’s hoping it’s a little shorter.