In a summer where tentpoles are flopping left and right (did you know The Flash was already going to streaming this month? I’d expect the new Indiana Jones to follow suit pretty quickly), Hollywood needs Tom Cruise more than ever. It’s not a surprise, I’ve said it before, he’s our last movie star. The one guy you can count on to fill up the seats on his name alone. And while last year’s Top Gun: Maverick was a real surprise, literally saving theaters and getting a Best Picture nomination in the process, it’s the Mission: Impossible franchise that’s really made Cruise vehicles one of the last reliable big-screen events.
Frankly, it’s been a steady uphill climb for the franchise since its fourth entry, the Brad Bird-directed Ghost Protocol, which saw its culmination with 2018’s Fallout. The latter Cruise-Christopher McQuarrie collaboration went beyond just standard action-spy thrills and entered the duo into the same rarefied air as films like Mad Max: Fury Road, Police Story, and Die Hard. Action movies as balletic entertainment of the highest order.
There’s no question that their partnership (which also includes work together in creative capacities on that Top Gun sequel, the excellent Edge of Tomorrow, and the Jack Reacher films) is one of the most exciting in the industry. And when word hit that their next Mission: Impossible efforts would be a two-parter, it seemed certain this would be the Cruise action epic of all epics. The rapturous response the first trailer received backed up that hypothesis with aplomb, and if you visit Rotten Tomatoes right now you’ll see that the film is sitting pretty with a score in the high 90’s.
But, I have come to tell you a different tale, one of curbed expectations and slight disappointments.
No, no, no, don’t get me wrong, “Dead Reckoning Part The First” is not a bad film. It is, as a singular experience, actually pretty fun. But it’s the comparison to what has come before that causes it to falter, that is to say that Cruise and McQuarrie’s own incredible success has worked against them this time. Damn you, success!
To tiptoe around the plot, unlike Fallout which carried a strong follow-on point from Rogue Nation, Dead Reckoning is largely its own beast. Sure, different characters from other installments return, like the first film’s Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) and Alanna Mitsopolis (Vanessa Kirby), along with the usual crew (Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Rebecca Ferguson). But, the story pivots away from any kind of criminal cabal and instead deals with a insidious AI named “Dead Reckoning” that everyone wants to get their hands on. Leave it to good old Ethan Hunt, who knows better than even the US government that this thing has be shut down before it lands in the wrong hands. But, the AI has its own plans, which involve the mysterious Gabriel (Esai Morales), the tangible antagonist throughout.
AI is a timely foil, especially in the creative space, which the long-range consequences of replacing flesh and blood artists and writers with is all too transparent. But it’s the way the film executes this threat that falls flat. There’s surely a nuanced and interesting take on this technology, so advanced it could crumble nations through just a few algorithmic patterns. As presented here though, it’s a villain that’s really no more complex than Skynet. Oh, you’re telling me AI is going to become self-aware? Wow, what a revelation James Cameron had 40 years ago.
Still, we can put aside a dumb threat for these, it’s the set pieces that we come for. They do largely deliver with the caveat that they do tend to play like pale echoes of the same stuff we already saw in Fallout. Oh look, another car chase through a beautiful European city, another action beat in a flashy nightclub, here’s Tom Cruise almost killing himself again for you fools, etc etc…none of it is *bad*, but it feels staler than it should. Again though, in the moment none of that will occur to even the most discerning audience-goer. You’ll get the thrills you’re looking for, and the addition of both Hayley Atwell (playing a Catwoman-like thief and becoming a new potential amorous interest for Ethan) and Pom Klementieff (as Gabriel’s manic sidekick) bring a lot to raise any potential flagging interest. It’s also notable that this might be the highest quotient of women taking center-stage in the series, as Ethan’s “men behind the desk” are happily sharing more of their screentime.
To the film’s credit, they also make terrific use of these leading ladies in its two most standout sequences, which see Atwell’s Grace playing cat and mouse with Ethan through Abu Dhabi International Airport and Vanessa Kirby doing double duty as two characters on the Orient Express. No matter how dopey the script plays at times, with a couple of glaring and regrettable decisions, it’s tough to walk away from this not feeling like you got what you paid for. Though I hope Part Two doesn’t fall further down the rabbit hole that afflicted the later James Bond films, where the “mythos” of its central character overtakes what actually is putting our butts in the seats: Tom Cruise doing apeshit stunts and Chris McQuarrie staging them impeccably. I can already feel an unfortunate tide turning, please guys I’m begging you, resist the urge!