Having pulled off a miraculous multifaceted mission with 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick—which revitalized the post-pandemic box-office, reconfirmed its headliner’s eternal youthfulness, and bested its illustrious ’80s predecessor in thrills and charm—Tom Cruise returns to the spy game fold with Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, the first installment of a two-film franchise finale that aims to demonstrate that the 60-year-old leading man can still do it all.
That includes, of course, executing astonishing stunts on his own, which Cruise does in the third act of this summer-season sequel, driving a motorcycle off a ramp-like cliff in the Austrian Alps and parachuting onto a moving train. It’s yet another testament to his enduring virility, as well as the latest in a long line of daredevil feats designed to take moviegoers’ breath away and raise the blood pressure of the tentpole production’s insurers.
Cruise is an analog star fighting the good fight against CGI unreality, and whereas his prior blockbuster pitted his ace pilot against unmanned drones, Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One has his IMF super-agent Ethan Hunt square off against an even greater digital foe determined to make man obsolete: artificial intelligence.
That sentient computer program is known as the Entity, and because it can infiltrate and seize control of every electronic system in the world, it’s a most fearsome adversary, capable of manipulating not only Hunt’s gadgets but the truth itself—thereby constantly calling into question everything he thinks he knows. Moreover, despite its fundamental incorporeality, the Entity is posited by Christopher McQuarrie’s film as an evil mirror image of Cruise’s hero, both of them figurative “ghosts” that have an instinctive habit of going “rogue.”
McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen’s script has characters repeatedly explain the apocalyptic threat facing Hunt, his eye-in-the-sky comrades Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), and his ex-MI6 ally Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson), whom Hunt seeks in the UAE desert at the outset of Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, given that she’s in possession of one half of a mysterious key sought by the Entity and every major global government.
What this interlocking crucifix-ish mechanism precisely does is unknown to everyone, but its importance is inarguable, and once Hunt acquires Ilsa’s portion of it, he and his team attempt to acquire its matching piece. Their efforts, however, are immediately thwarted by an airport run-in with Grace (Hayley Atwell), a master thief who turns out to be an unexpected player in this espionage game, and whose presence creates chaos that’s amplified by the appearance of Gabriel (Esai Morales), a nemesis from Hunt’s past who likewise covets the key—and seems to be in league with the Entity.
“Whatever it takes!” screams Hunt in Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, and while the pronouncement explicitly refers to the protagonist’s commitment to his civilization-saving task, it also resounds as Cruise’s statement of artistic principles. Whether speeding through Venice’s narrow alleyways on a motorcycle, careening down that city’s streets and public steps in a tiny Fiat that he steers with one hand—all as he evades pursuers led by an armored police van—or battling baddies in a claustrophobic corridor and on the roof of a runaway train, the actor wholeheartedly commits to walking his proverbial walk. That McQuarrie and Jendresen’s story eventually has Hunt employing outdated equipment, and his own flesh-and-blood athleticism, to get the job done—and prioritizing others, and his objective, ahead of his own safety—is now par for Cruise’s cinematic course, as his films have become outright expressions of his forever-young DIY ethos.
Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One boasts a grab-bag of shout-outs to its forerunners, in particular Brian De Palma’s original Mission: Impossible, via the reappearance of Henry Czerny’s pain-in-the-ass intelligence community bigwig Eugene Kittridge and McQuarrie’s preference for intense canted-angle close-ups in which faces and bodies are packed into one side of the frame. Yet unlike the nostalgic Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny—which, coincidentally, stages a number of similar set pieces—McQuarrie’s spectacular doesn’t incessantly rely on computer effects for its jaw-droppers. Instead, its action is bruised, battered and borderline concussed, with Cruise suffering the lion’s share of the abuse, including inside a variety of flipping, tumbling, crashing vehicles. There’s a thunderous brawniness (and goofy wit) to the director’s showstoppers, which expertly up the ante, culminating with a massively inventive and suspenseful climax that puts the loco in locomotive.
Even at 60 years old, Cruise looks as spry as ever while going toe-to-toe with villains decades his junior and (per his trademark) running, running, and running some more. As the beginning of the series’ end game, Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One features genuine stakes, as illustrated by its willingness to dispatch some of its long-standing characters. Simultaneously, it gives its veterans requisite time in the spotlight (with Ferguson remaining these films’ charismatic secret weapon) and introduces two compelling new figures in Morales’ Gabriel, an Entity pawn whose arrogance comes from his AI-facilitated belief that he can see the future, and Atwell’s Grace, a career criminal whose sleight-of-hand skills speak to her deceptiveness and, with it, her inability to trust others. Cruise and Atwell have gangbusters chemistry, and McQuarrie surrounds them with an assortment of compelling collaborators and opponents, from Shea Whigham’s Hunt-hunting federal agent Jasper, to Vanessa Kirby’s seductive arms dealer Alanna, to Pom Klementieff’s Gabriel-hired assassin Paris, who’s as adept behind the wheel as she is with a blade.
Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One isn’t quite as dynamic as McQuarrie’s preceding Fallout, but it’s not far off that standout’s pace, and it finds a way to concoct a satisfying resolution to its tale even as it sets up its closing 2024 chapter. That Hunt’s missions will soon be a thing of the past is a depressing reality to contemplate, considering that no other big-budget franchise has consistently matched its bloody-knuckled scale and ferocity. Nonetheless, Cruise makes sure that his penultimate Hunt outing is just as vigorous as its predecessors. And in its remarkable conclusion, he proves that that by risking life and limb to cling tightly to the things he most loves, he continues to be Hollywood’s old-school action-movie savior.
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