Review: Mission Impossible, Dead Reckoning Part One

Mission: Impossible
Dead Reckoning, Part One
Cert: 12A / 163 mins / Dir. Christopher McQuarrie / Trailer

Things have finally heated up inside the cinema as well as out and the war is truly on for Summer box-office dominance, as the major studios triumphantly present their long-planned showcases for audiences who stopped going to the pictures in 2019. You love to see it. Paramount's saviour is, once again, Tom Cruise - perhaps the last of the great bankable movie stars who manage to get bums on seats purely by being themselves again in a slightly different hat. Anyway, there's a new Mission: Impossible flick out...

This penultimate instalment sees Ethan Hunt and his ragtag IMF team trying to prevent various world- and criminal-powers getting their hands on 'The Entity', a lengthily described yet sketchily defined self-learning, fake-news generating Artificial Intelligence, which could either destroy humanity or just convincingly swap-out the faces of everyone on ITV (whichever is the most inconvenient), activated by a two-part interlocking key*¹ that's been stolen from a Russian nuclear submarine. As McGuffins go, this one is nailed so firmly onto the zeitgeist that it's actually kinda quaint...

NOTED

Before we get into specifics, it should be noted that Dead Reckoning is incredibly solid. It's just never more than a Mission: Impossible movie. And while it's certainly arguable that it doesn't need to be, the whole thing plays out with breathless adrenaline and surgical flair, yet no real emotion at all. There's never the sense that this is leading to anything bigger than in previous entries (no matter how much Lorne Balfe's score swells), and for a screenplay which spends so much time harping on about its past, you'd be forgiven for expecting it to mean more, somehow...

There are slightly too many characters for the (admirable) simplicity of the story, each set-piece is slightly too long, and every rubber-unmasking is unintentionally funnier than the last.

Simon Pegg gets the lion's share of the comedic quips (delivering them perfectly, it has to be said) and a high-speed chase across the Italian cobbles in a yellow Fiat 500 brings some much needed silliness to the mood, but overall Christopher McQuarrie has gone for brooding intensity over fun. Again, whether levity should even be necessary is a debate for more scholarly viewers, but Dead Reckoning is far more slick in the moments when it's got a grin on its face.

GOODYEAR

Cinematographer Fraser Taggart puts in solid work all round with framing, composition and deftly following the action, plus capturing the immersive yet distinct colour palettes of the many locales. Unfortunately his work is slightly undone when it comes to the melee scenes (of which there are many), where Eddie Hamilton's editing fast-cuts between angles so quickly that the whole thing loses coherence rather than adding excitement. And because these physical sequences are often used to move the story along, the script then requires regular industrial-sized injections of exposition from Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames, as they sit in front of generic nonsensical laptop displays and explain to other characters where we're all at and what's happening next.

The choreography and stunt work itself is - it should go without saying - beautifully executed of course, huge in its scope and minute in its detail. At this point in 2023 however, the thought occurs that since Fast X has already shown us pseudo-family-bonding and destructive car chases, Mr John Wick has brawled and shot his way through half of Europe and Indiana Jones has had a prolonged train-top fight for a powerful golden artifact on a steam engine which is hurtling towards a bombed viaduct... well, what is Ethan Hunt bringing to the party exactly, except for all-of-those-again?*²

ANCALENDAR

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning is great on a technical level, but unambitious on a narrative one. There's plenty in there to come to the cinema for, and yet little take away. Since the audience only trusts four characters at the start of the movie (and that only really raises to five), there's little jeopardy in tantalising that others 'might be a bit shady'. They're all a bit shady mate, that's why we're here. But Esai Morales going full Bond-villain as the marvellously camp Gabriel lifts that end of things considerably.

Decent, but the series has been better than this*³, so next year's finale has its work cut out.

Oh, and I'm taking points off for McQuarrie chickening out of a potentially brilliant and literal-cliffhanger ending, instead resorting to a damp squib of a decompression coda accompanied by another two minutes of expository voiceover...

*¹ SPOILERS, highlight-to-read: Apparently the powers-that-be are desperate to get their hands on both halves of this key, even though they're shown in the first act as having an exquisitely detailed 3D model of it, so they could just print that and then cast their own copies. There's something about some red and white 'dragons egg' jewels in the key's handle which light up when it's assembled, probably acting as a verification system, but this isn't explained in any practical sense either. We see two guys using it at the start of the movie and they literally insert the key into a lock and manually turn it. Lads, Timpsons are open until 6, they can run one of those out for you...
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*² Look, I know it's not Bruce Geller's, Erik Jendresen's or Christopher McQuarrie's fault that the action sequences of Dead Reckoning have been undercut by its own release-date but seriously: we've already seen most of this, and in films which weren't afraid to also make us laugh. I mean if they'd had Ethan Hunt punching a giant prehistoric shark at the end, at least he'd have got his foot in the door before Jason Statham...
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*³ The first two Mission: Impossible films are the best ones and for wildly different yet complementary reasons thank you I will not be taking questions at this time.
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• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
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