Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
“I'm going to need a few more details.”
“They just get in the way.”
This exchange between characters played by Hayley Atwell and Simon Pegg takes place roughly two hours into the 160 minutes of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, and I'm not sure I've ever before heard dialogue that so wholly encapsulated the experience of its movie.
The seventh outing in the franchise initiated in 1996, and the seventh to star the apparently immortal Tom Cruise (though cracks – or rather, creases – in his armor are blessedly beginning to show), Dead Reckoning Un is, like its predecessors, profoundly silly. While its central conceit of sentient A.I. scheming to take over the world probably isn't as ludicrous as we might like to believe, the spine-cracking yet mostly fatality-free physical assaults certainly are, to say nothing of the grandiose action sequences that may abide by the laws of physics but remain steadfastly preposterous. And don't get me started on the maddening contrivance of those latex masks that Cruise's Ethan Hunt evidently carries around in a duffle bag, and that turn every M:I entry, for a few seconds, into an extremely pricey episode of Scooby-Doo. How does Ethan manage to always have the exact right face at the ready for every possible scenario? Dunno. I'm going to need a few more details.
But on second thought, nah – they'd just get in the way. While you won't necessarily believe in Dead Reckoning for an instant, it's hard to imagine anyone not having fun, or at least enough sporadic fun to make its two hours and 40 minutes feel like time well spent. It doesn't seem like five years have passed since we last encountered super-spy Hunt, his Impossible Mission Force allies, and the series' rotating team of psychopaths bent on global domination, possibly because we've been seeing the film's trailers for the better part of a year-and-a-half. (A couple months ago, in the third-season premiere of Max's hysterical, sadly canceled The Other Two, Cary Dubek's indie drama Night Nurse finally screened after “the most COVID delays of any movie!” Well … maybe second-most.)
Yet from the intense and inventive pre-credits sequence to the inevitable return of composer Lalo Schifrin's “DUN … dun dun dun dun DUN” theme to the now-crinkly twinkle in Cruise's eye, everything here feels happily familiar from the start. Though Brad Bird did a zippy job with 2011's entry, the best thing that ever happened to this series was the recruitment of writer/director Christopher McQuarrie beginning with 2015's Rogue Nation, and Dead Reckoning extends the cinematic kick that continued through 2018's Fallout. The title's “Part One” suggests that this new experience won't be entirely fulfilling, and it did leave me wanting more (and, in some cases, less). Still, McQuarrie gives us our money's worth and then some, especially in regard to set pieces that are as hilarious as they are thrilling,
That opener, one that would've also been appropriate for Bird's M:I titled Ghost Protocol, sets a sensational scary/funny tone, with the crew of a Russian submarine effectively hoodwinked by an experimental A.I.'s devious game of “Made ya look.” Yet while you can count on this franchise to deliver no end of cat-and-mouse hijinks and oversize spectacle, two scenes, in particular, feel worthy of awed praise – and one of them isn't the effective but overexposed bit with Hunt/Cruise driving his motorcycle off a cliff. (Another one isn't the mano a mano between Hunt and Esai Morales' terrorist Gabriel that takes place on the roof of a speeding locomotive. It's well shot and all, but weren't we just given this routine in Indiana Jones & the Dial of Destiny? And in every action movie ever?)
Beginning at the (near) end, we've all seen big-screen train catastrophes before. Until Dead Reckoning, however, I had never witnessed one that lasted quite so long, nor one that made me laugh with the same fervor with which I was clenching my armrests. Considering the disaster's particulars don't in any way spoil the plot, I can reveal that this climactic sequence finds the legendary Orient Express slowly, but not slowly enough, tumbling off the edge of a demolished bridge, with Ethan and his pickpocket ally Grace (Hayley Atwell) having to traverse one train car at a time to reach safety. This task wouldn't be so demanding if the train cars weren't all dangling vertically. With Ethan and Grace forced to climb upward while bar-car necessities, pieces of furniture, and even a freaking grand piano rush toward them – oh yes, and with one car at a time breaking apart from the train proper and crashing thousands of feet to the ground – this may be the most riotous, ingenious, purely pleasurable example of Mission: Impossible mayhem in the series' history.
Or maybe not, because halfway through Dead Reckoning, there's a scene that just might top it. Given that the action in question takes place in Venice, I was mildly surprised that at no point were gondolas employed. But they no doubt would've just slowed down one of the most joyously speedy, breathtaking chases we've been treated to in ages: a lengthy showcase of frenzied delirium involving narrow city streets, staircases, multiple switched vehicles, a sporty yellow Fiat 500 that Ethan doesn't know how to operate, and Ethan and Grace driving handcuffed – and then driving handcuffed from opposite seating positions. I frequently giggled during this year's comedies Asteroid City and You Hurt My Feelings. But barring that insane set piece at the 222 Montmartre steps in John Wick: Chapter Four, nothing in 2023 movies has made me roar quite like this M:I show-stopper. That the sequence was also thunderously exciting was a mere bonus.
Given the brilliance of the choreography and stunts, I suppose you could call Dead Reckoning's cast a mere bonus, too – though there's nothing “mere” about the film's female talent. Cruise, it should go without saying, is totally in his element here (and very funny when pathetically trying to start that Fiat), and solid-or-better turns are offered by Morales, Shea Whigham, Gregory Davis Jr., Cary Elwes, the very welcome series returnee Henry Czerny, and the Mutt-and-Jeff team of Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg. It's the women, however, who handily walk off with the picture. Atwell, prickly and enticing, appears to be having a ball with her inscrutable thief, and she and Cruise share dynamic chemistry. (Their initial airport rendezvous percolates with the promise delightful mischief.) Rebecca Ferguson again lends gravitas to her sketchily conceived MI6 agent Ilsa Faust. Pom Klementieff makes an excellent argument for M:I spin-offs with her lithe assassin Paris; her perversely sinister gaze implies that she knows dirty little secrets about everyone. And Vanessa Kirby, reprising her role as the “White Widow” arms dealer Alanna Mitsopolis, is sardonically, deliciously cunning before pulling off the movie's performance coup de grâce when she's required not to play Alanna, but to play someone playing Alanna.
As you may gather, that subterfuge involves those ridiculously hyper-realistic masks. But given how much visible fun Kirby is having with the bit, I wasn't even bothered by the conceit's employment. (The masks also pay off in a fabulous running gag for Whigham, whose government crony keeps trying to peel presumed latex off characters' all-flesh faces.) Nor was I all that annoyed by other Dead Reckoning elements that should've really irked me: the early, relentless closeups on a character, and an actor, we don't recognize making it painfully obvious where Ethan Hunt is hiding; the overabundance of genre-mandated red-clock countdowns; the frequency with which reams of complex exposition are followed by people saying, “So what you're telling me is … .” (While McQuarrie's and Erik Jendresen's script is perfectly serviceable, it does have a nagging tendency to dumb itself down.) Taken overall, this latest Mission: Impossible is such a massive hoot that it nullifies your complaints even as they're coming to you. Choose to accept them.
