mission: impossible - dead reckoning part one

Is Mission: Impossible the best currently ongoing studio franchise? You could certainly make that argument. The Tom Cruise-led series was initially a fascinating haven for A-list filmmakers to leave their own distinct creative stamp - Brian De Palma’s retro-flavored espionage… John Woo’s sleek pyrotechnics… JJ Abrams’s grounded and gritty emotional stakes… Brad Bird’s dazzlingly fleet-of-foot escapism - but has, in recent years, stabilized under the stewardship of director Christopher McQuarrie, who has arguably struck an appreciable balance between all that came before. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning - the first half of a two-part blowout that may or may not serve as the franchise denouement - sees McQuarrie continuing comfortably in the same vein as Rogue Nation and Fallout… though his narrative grip feels slightly more tenuous this time. The spectacle remains as ambitious and adrenaline-jacked as ever, though the architecture underneath the hood doesn’t invite much poking or prodding. 

But let’s be honest here - the plot in a Mission: Impossible film is, more often than not, beside the point (typically it boils down to Ethan Hunt and his IMF gang going rogue in order to avert global catastrophe)… and Dead Reckoning is no exception. All you really need to know is that there’s a rogue sentient AI known as “The Entity” and Ethan (joined, once again, by Ving Rhames’s Luther, Simon Pegg’s Benji, and Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa) is amongst several interested parties trying to acquire both halves of a cruciform key that can supposedly be used to control or destroy it (the jokes about Cruise - patron saint of theatrical moviemaking - targeting a streaming algorithm as the ultimate antagonist all but write themselves). The Entity is aligned with Gabriel, an ominous figure from Ethan’s past… and while Esai Morales has a slippery and pleasingly cultivated menace in the role, it’s surprising how firmly the movie keeps him at arm’s length from the audience - even taking into the account the revelations all-but-certain to come in the next installment. There’s a clear emotional wedge to his animosity towards Ethan (and vice versa)… we’re just not privy to it yet.

Integral to the proceedings is Grace, a professional thief played by Hayley Atwell in yet another performance that begs the question of why she hasn’t been a bigger star. The franchise has largely been stripped of sexual tension at this point (Ethan now operating with an almost monk-like devotion to the job), but she and Cruise have an effective working rapport. McQuarrie stages a madcap car chase through Rome with the two of them handcuffed together (awkwardly shifting between vehicles and trading places behind the wheel on the fly) that almost feels like it’s been injected with a strand of screwball DNA from The Pink Panther, or one of Roger Moore’s sillier James Bond entries… but, as was the case with Ghost Protocol, the action never quite succumbs to the cartoonish. It maintains a gigglingly gleeful, kinetic momentum.

Not everything is pulled off with quite such aplomb. There’s a key character death, and while it makes narrative sense, the moment doesn’t feel maximized; what should be emotionally shattering instead manages only a muted impact, frustratingly (some have suggested that the death will prove to be a fake-out in Part Two, but that feels even more cheaply manipulative). Pom Klementieff of Guardians of the Galaxy has a pleasingly feral ferocity as Gabriel’s henchwoman (her sociopathic, borderline orgasmic glee during the aforementioned car chase is a definite highlight), but the movie attempts to foist a character arc onto her late in the game that feels forced. There are arguably too many characters. It’s hard to have too much female awesomeness (anymore than you can have too much pizza), though Atwell, Ferguson, Klementieff and Vanessa Kirby’s deliciously posh arms dealer Alanna Mitsopolis are a lot to juggle… on top of Henry Czerny (making a welcome return from the original) AND Cary Elwes as intelligence bigwigs of ethically uncertain motivation, as well as Shea Whigham and Greg Tarzan Davis as US agents fruitlessly chasing Hunt and his team (and starting to question why they’re doing so).​

But Dead Reckoning ultimately delivers in all the ways a Mission: Impossible entry should. Like John Wick: Chapter 4, the movie navigates its eyebrow-raising 165-minute runtime with a cool, well-calibrated propulsion. McQuarrie’s climax aboard the Orient Express is an absolute banger, particularly when Ethan and Grace are forced to chart a gravity-defying path through a string of train cars suspended terrifyingly over a chasm (it’s ironic that the craft of someone who began his career writing the densely labyrinthine script for The Usual Suspects has become almost entirely visual; McQuarrie has few peers in terms of technically audacious staging). Is the Entity an effective antagonist? Debatable. There is, of course, something inherently chilling about an opponent you literally can’t outthink (there’s a great early sequence in which Benji must unravel a set of riddles the Entity devised for him), though fairly or unfairly, the parallels to Hollywood’s current labor issues put a comedically meta slant on things that's hard to shake. At any rate, let’s put a pin in it until Part Two. The series, as usual, comes down to Cruise. The star has achieved an admirable equilibrium at this phase of his career - keeping his personal life compartmentalized and focusing on big, theatrical crowdpleasers that indulge his love of envelope-pushing stuntwork, rather than chasing awards season validation. At age 61, Cruise hasn’t lost a step. If Harrison Ford can still be reprising Indiana Jones when he’s 80, there’s no reason this still fully-juiced franchise can’t go another decade or more.