Film Review — Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE — DEAD RECKONING PART ONE IS ACTION CINEMA AT ITS FINEST
With Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, Tom Cruise’s crusade for analog supremacy finally becomes text and the results are unbelievable - the last movie star, fighting God and gravity in one of the best action movies ever made. Barreling through sequence after exhilarating sequence of some of the most nerve-jangling stuntwork you’ve ever seen, Ethan Hunt and his IMF team return to face their most dangerous foe yet to reach an immutable truth: there is nothing like walking into, and out of, a Mission: Impossible movie.
“Your life will always be more important to me than my own.” Ethan Hunt, like the iron-willed movie star that portrays him, is a truthsayer. Delivering the line with steely conviction when things have inevitably gone pear-shaped in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, Tom Cruise summarizes the compassionate ethos of not only his super spy alter ego, but his own legacy as one of our last movie stars. As Ethan Hunt, risking life and limb across seven Mission films, Cruise has taken a real knife millimeters from his eye, scaled the Burj Khalifa, and dangled from a helicopter, all for real and for our entertainment. As an actor and producer, he is a crusader for the analog; he and frequent collaborator Christopher McQuarrie have championed the theatrical experience, battled motion smoothing, and taken up arms against artifice and digital trickery in favor of in-camera, death-defying stuntwork. With Dead Reckoning Part One, that subtext - the pulsing lifeblood of the Mission: Impossible franchise and last year’s Top Gun: Maverick - finally rises to the surface as Hunt and his IMF team face their most dangerous foe yet: an unfeeling, uncaring rogue AI whose penchant for misinformation, illusion, and sabotage has turned it into the most powerful weapon in the world.
Taking place after the events of the sixth Mission installment, Fallout, Dead Reckoning once again finds the Impossible Mission Force back on their heels. Just like Tom Cruise is the last bastion of practical cinema, Ethan Hunt is the only pillar standing between every intelligence agency in the world and the misuse of an AI superpower, dubbed “The Entity.” The latest Mission blurs the line between an actor and his role more than ever: both are warriors for the human touch, railing against out-of-control algorithms and the self-replicating miasma of ignoble tech; for Hunt, it’s to save the world - and more importantly - the friends he’s made along the way, for Cruise, it’s to preserve big-screen action and the artistry that comes with it.
“Tom Cruise’s crusade for analog supremacy finally becomes text and the results are unbelievable.”
From the film’s breakneck opening moments aboard a Russian sub, the Entity’s near-supernatural ability to manipulate and obfuscate seems to be pulled straight from a sci-fi yarn circa 2000, but in the year 2023 - the year ChatGPT and AI art have upended entire industries - it feels no less unbelievable than a gun-toting Dougray Scott or a bicep-reloading Henry Cavill. The algorithm itself is a formidable enemy for Ethan and friends, pitting them against sinister riddles, mind games, and misinformation to ensure its own survival, but Dead Reckoning also knows that faceless ones and zeroes make for a boring adversary. Enter Gabriel (Esai Morales), the Entity’s own herald and mouthpiece. A cool, cruel operator with an affinity for knives, Gabriel shares a secret past with Ethan from before his intelligence days, and acts as the rogue AI’s emissary. There’s a mystique to Gabriel that’s undercooked, perhaps by design since this is only Part One, but Morales still gets chilling ways to differentiate himself from the slithery menace of Sean Harris and the brutish savagery of Henry Cavill. It also wouldn’t be a Mission movie without Hunt and the team on the lam from misguided bureaucracy, so McQuarrie and company pull out all the stops to bring back a blast from the past: Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny, having every bit of a ball as he did back in the 1996 De Palma entry). The new IMF director following Alec Baldwin’s exit from Fallout, Kittridge and his morally dubious machinations make a welcome return, this time fiending to possess the Entity for the good ol’ Red, White, and Blue. Of course, for Hunt, the Entity is too dangerous for any nation to have, so it must be destroyed.
A smattering of other, less surprising familiar faces are back as well, and at this point - now the third partnering of Cruise and McQuarrie in the franchise - the IMF team works like a well-oiled machine: Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames) round out Hunt’s crew of crack problem-solvers, lithe assassin Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) is now more team player than the wild card she was in Rogue Nation and Fallout, and the unpredictable White Widow (Vanessa Kirby) once again throws a wrench in the increasingly convoluted spy game as an untrustworthy power broker. But perhaps shining most brightly are Dead Reckoning’s new ladies: Haley Atwell’s charming thief deuteragonist, Grace, almost gets the entire third act to herself, fully reminding us just how captivating the First Avenger actress can be; and Pom Klementieff’s psycho enforcer Paris does some surprisingly heavy lifting, stealing the whole show from the film’s wildest setpiece and garnering - by far - the biggest cheer from the audience at my showing.
“…there is no deception capable of mimicking Cruise’s very real - and therefore very convincing - trepidation: the glint of fear in his eye, the gulp of courage down his throat.”
There’s a whole swirl of exposition, plot mechanics, and MacGuffins within the core of Dead Reckoning, but it never feels bogged down thanks to the fiery pistons of its action scenes - it is an action movie, after all. Those expecting Tom Cruise to once again sprint, jump, leap, and dive into real-life danger just to plaster some grins on the audience’s faces will not be disappointed: Dead Reckoning continues to prove that analog is best when it comes to outrageous, barn burner spectacle. It’s true that there is no green screen or VFX in the world that can ape Tom Cruise’s brazen stuntwork, but perhaps even more importantly, there is no deception capable of mimicking Cruise’s very real - and therefore very convincing - trepidation: the glint of fear in his eye, the gulp of courage down his throat. Every time he barrels down the streets of Rome in a supercharged Fiat, every time he motorbikes off a cliff, every time he has knife fight atop a speeding train, knowing that he’s doing it for real makes all the difference in the world.
There’s nothing quite like walking into - and out of - a Mission: Impossible movie. At the climax of Rogue Nation, Alec Baldwin’s late director Hunley waxes poetic: “There is no secret he cannot extract, no security he cannot breach, no person he cannot become. He has most likely anticipated this very conversation and is waiting to strike in whatever direction we move. Sir, Hunt is the living manifestation of destiny - and he has made you his mission.” Over the course of the Mission: Impossible franchise, this has quickly become Cruise’s credo as well: there is no peril he won’t put himself in for our entertainment, or to make a near three-hour movie feel like it’s 15 minutes long. Our lives will always matter more to him than his own. In Dead Reckoning, Grace is incredulous: “You don’t even know me.” Tom Cruise, as Ethan Hunt, replies: “What difference does that make?”
