Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023, Dir. Christopher McQuarrie)
Tom Cruise, Hollywood savior? It certainly seemed so last summer when Top Gun: Maverick renewed Tinseltown’s fortunes at the box office. But one year later, we find ourselves in a season of discontent. Tentpole films like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny have gone belly-up, disgruntled actors and screenwriters are taking to the picket lines, and Hollywood has lost much of its luster as a dream and moneymaking factory. Carrying the burden of being a sequel in a hit franchise is pressure enough, but fair or not, studio execs have looked upon Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (aka M:I-7) with dollar signs in their eyes, hoping and praying that the Cruise machine will supply another surefire hit that will restore some balance to the ledgers (or at least stem the tide until Barbie and/or Oppenheimer arrive to save the day).
Not that Cruise minds playing a savior; as evidenced by his tirade against unmasked crew members during the making of the movie, he’s mindful of the responsibilities he carries, and in characteristic I-can-do-everything style, he’s chosen to accept them. Indeed, “choose to accept” has always been the catchphrase for Mission: Impossible, as Cruise and his fellow mission-ers willingly choose to accept assignments that throw their bacon into the fire, all in the name of world safety and giving audiences a good time. And yet, those same words now have an existential charge to them, and it’s only partially due to Hollywood’s recent woes.
Dead Reckoning, which continues the series’ fascination with pulpy titles that have little to do with the action on hand, does what it’s intended to do: as with the previous installments in the series directed by Christopher McQuarrie, it cobbles odds and ends together from previous entries while giving moviegoers crazy action set-pieces to gobble up. But while most M:I films have a cheekiness at their core, Dead Reckoning, like its slightly less dour predecessor Fallout, is more morose. Rather than kicking things off with the usual fun mask-pulling hijinks, we get a distended, chilling prologue. A Russian sub is tricked into torpedoing itself; a lengthy briefing back in Langley reveals an AI surveillance program (referred to as “The Entity”) has gone sentient and is on the verge of taking over all the world’s spy networks. (Eat your heart out, Skynet!) Naturally, everything boils down to a single doohickey (a key in two parts) that’s essential to accessing The Entity, with whoever controlling (or serving) the AI deciding the world’s fate.
Based on that exposition, all the elements would seem to be in place for a rollicking, beat-the-clock adventure yarn. But as Dead Reckoning settles into a trot rather than a full gallop, the mood remains decidedly sober. No longer are Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his merry band of confederates, including Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), simply government-trained do-gooders; they’re now revealed to be former loose cannons who “chose to accept” recruitment by the Impossible Missions Force as an alternative to prison, or worse. And with the looming threat of an intangible foe that can infiltrate any digital system in the world, paranoia and realpolitik are the order of the day, as helpfully explained by CIA bigwig Kittredge (Henry Czerny, as delightfully slimy and unctuous as ever): “Your days of fighting for the so-called greater good are over,” he advises Hunt. “This is our chance to control the truth. The concepts of right and wrong for everyone for centuries to come. You’re fighting to save an ideal that doesn’t exist. Never did. You need to pick a side.”
Luther: Ethan, what’s your ultimate objective?
Ethan: Your life will always matter more to me than my own.
Luther: None of our lives can matter more than this mission.
Ethan: I don’t accept that.
Naturally Ethan doesn’t accept that cynical worldview, but this time his boy-scout heroism comes with consequences. An emotionally heavy Mission: Impossible isn’t entirely unwelcome; for once, the stakes have some weight to them, especially when a long-time member of Cruise’s team meets an untimely end. A half-explained backstory involving Cruise and his primary nemesis Gabriel (Esai Morales) provides a bare minimum of extra motivation for our hero, and Cruise turns in a muted performance that’s appropriate given the higher stakes. It’s a good thing he’s not gurning too hard, because the years are clearly gaining on him. His cheeks puffy, wrinkles struggling to break through on his face, he’s beginning to more resemble a waxwork version of himself than the real thing.
Fortunately Cruise and director/writer Christopher McQuarrie are generous with the supporting cast, even if the movie doesn’t quite know what to do with all of them, especially Rebecca Ferguson’s cool-cat British spook Ilsa, who’s reduced to an awkward semi-hug with Cruise when she’s not lurking in the background. (Shea Whigham and Greg Tarzan Davis also aren’t afforded a chance to make much of an impression as special operatives who are forever two steps behind Ethan and his crew.) Taking Ferguson’s place in the spotlight is Hayley Atwell’s Grace, a fleet-fingered thief, and it’s an even trade: what the film loses in Ferguson’s physical precision, it gains with Atwell’s sparkle. Alternating between mischief and soulful hesitancy, she makes the most of her line readings when she’s not squeezing comic sparks out of a high-speed chase in Rome (reminiscent of Tomorrow Never Dies) in which she’s handcuffed to Cruise, her hair whipping into her eyes at inconvenient moments. As an added plus, the baddies are a bit juicier than usual: Morales brings urbane menace to his role, while Pom Klementieff is striking in her brief appearances as a near-mute assassin.
More than ever, Mission: Impossible has become a tribute to analog filmmaking, with practical stunts and old-fashioned star power taking precedent over hollow digital wizardry. (It seems like not only topical but fitting that the ultimate enemy this time around is a rogue AI.) And yet, a certain sameness has crept into the franchise, as if the movie is a digitized copy of a copy. How else to take all the blatant references to previous entries, whether it’s a hero shot of our team zooming down a canal in a speedboat (M:I 3), an action scene set in a sandstorm (M:I – Ghost Protocol), villainous deals carried out in a glitzy nightclub (M:I – Fallout), or a climax inside and atop a speeding train (M:I 1)? Whether one should regard all this as loving homage or evidence of the idea well running dry is up to the individual moviegoer, but what can’t be denied is that Dead Reckoning‘s action scenes lack the snap, crackle and pop of the franchise’s best moments. (The film’s signature stunt—Cruise zooming off a cliff on his motorcycle and into a skydive—cuts away from the moment in medias res, as if just the initial sight of Cruise launching himself into jeopardy is enough.) Perhaps sensing that he needs to work harder this time to compensate, McQuarrie finally cuts loose a bit with his filmmaking, framing his actors in cavernous close-ups or at cockeyed angles, mimicking some of Brian DePalma’s off-kilter camerawork from the first Mission: Impossible. Dead Reckoning may not be the most exciting M:I movie, but it’s among the most visually sumptuous.
Although Dead Reckoning aims for seriousness and gravity, the film works best when it doesn’t burden itself. Sure we’re meant to believe Ethan’s crisis of conscience when he’s given a good reason to kill Gabriel (even though by doing so, The Entity will win), but is there any doubt that Ethan, ever the boy scout, will do the right thing? And all the hushed commentary about The Entity, its purpose, and its existential threat tends to get a bit thick, as if we’re listening to coded references to Scientological scripture instead of exposition. But if you can tolerate the above, you’ll find enough kinetic mayhem to make Dead Reckoning a moderately entertaining time, especially during the concluding literal and figurative cliffhanger, which the films milks for all its worth. It remains to be seen whether Dead Reckoning Part Two will provide satisfying conclusions for Part One’s setups, but for now, we’re left with the hardworking professionalism of Cruise and his mates. They might not save the world (and the box office) with the same aplomb as they used to, but give them points for trying. Or to put it another way, one can choose to accept Dead Reckoning without too much of a guilty conscience. ■
