Edge of Tomorrow, the Tom Cruise-Emily Blunt team-up movie in which Cruise time-travels back to the same day over and over again a la Bill Murray in Groundhog Day to kill invading aliens, was a lot more fun than I ever suspected it would be. I don’t like time-travel movies much any more; they’ve pretty much been done to death. Edge of Tomorrow is an enjoyably surprising exception.

Unlike Bill Murray, who wakes up every morning on Groundhog Day, Tom Cruise jumps back in time only when he gets killed. This happens to him a lot, the first time after an alien bleeds acid on him, and after that by being shot, immolated, exploded, crashed upon by a transport aircraft and run over by a truck, which, by the way, is something you don’t want to miss even if you’re the half of the world who thinks you can’t stand Tom Cruise in big or small doses.

Each time Cruise dies, he wakes up on the tarmac at Heathrow Airport where Bill Paxton flashes his smarmiest grin at Cruise and gives him a lecture about the virtues of battle that would make R. Lee Ermey weep with joy. Paxton gets blown out the sky the next morning but, thanks to the wonder of time travel, we get to see him over and over and over (repeatedly tormenting Cruise, by the way. Really, Cruise-haters, it wouldn’t kill you to watch this!).

Shanghaied by the general commanding the last-ditch invasion to crush the advancing alien scourge, Cruise realizes that he can not only remember what killed him last time, he can avoid it. Of course, then he gets killed by something else, but he remembers that, too, and avoids the first two things, then gets killed by the third thing. And the fourth thing. And so on, and on, and on.

This would all be too much if, in the middle of the invasion, he hadn’t met Emily Blunt, a woman so badass that she doesn’t shoot aliens with the ray guns everyone else is using because she’s got a machete. A BIG machete. She agrees to show Cruise how to kill aliens with the help of her killer robot alien droids that can, and often do kick Cruise’s ass, or at the very least break his arms and legs, forcing Blunt to shoot him in the head so they can start over. Yeah. She knows he can time travel. She used to do it, too.

Together, Blunt and Cruise set out to redo the invasion as many times as it takes to figure out how to defeat them, and I’ve got to say that Blunt is every bit the kick-ass action star that Cruise is. I can’t think of a single movie off the top of my head that I’ve seen her in outside this one, but I hope she can find more movies where she gets to match the strong male lead the way she did here, because she’s terrific at it.

And of course they beat the aliens. No spoiler there, I think. It’s only a matter of figuring out how, right?