mission impossible: dead reckoning
I love Mission: Impossible. Every time I boot one up and watch Ethan Hunt and his crew prepare for a mission, talking about their plan while putting on glasses with secret cameras or booting up their laptops, I get this excited, heart-racing feeling. Quite possibly my favorite thing about the franchise, however, is that each individual entry is so incredibly different from the others. Up until six, they each had a different director, giving six distinct styles, and they all have their own strengths so that there's a legitimate reason to come back to each and every one- the new ones don't ‘replace’ the old. #1 has the best mystery and paranoia, #4 has the best stunt, #6 has the best action, #2… #3 has the best villain and the best heist.
And 2023’s Mission: Impossible- Dead Reckoning (previously subtitled Dead Reckoning Part One), in addition to possibly dethroning Ghost Protocol for the best stunt, is the one that feels the most like an event.
After a terrific opening that sets up the dramatic tension of the plot perfectly and pits Kittridge and Hunt’s values against each other, followed by an electric preview of what's to come during the intro credits (a series tradition), viewers are treated to a grandiose and epic thrill-a-minute action spectacular that builds upon the groundwork laid by Fallout. It’s tightly edited, professionally scored and extremely tense at just the right parts. However, there are some slip ups that cause this otherwise fist-pumping experience to fail to reach the heights of some of its predecessors.
If I could jump to the film’s climax for a bit, though, the film’s undisputed strong suits are its choreography, stunt work and set pieces. On a scale undreamt of in the Mission: Impossible franchise, Tom Cruise’s dedication to his craft and to doing his own practical stunts is culminated in this film’s nail biting finale. As a recap, in order to get onto a train that is already moving and won’t slow down, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt must drive a motorcycle off of a cliff, ditch the motorcycle in midair, activate a parachute and chute onto a moving train. That is the coolest thing literally ever- and it’s not even the big finale. The train crashes and slowly edges itself off a cliff, into a ravine, car by car, so Ethan and newcomer Grace, played by the wonderful and energetic Hayley Atwell, must climb from car to car, narrowly escaping death. The set pieces used here are insane, and they remind me of a big budget, triple A video game like Uncharted. High stakes, hugely scaled and extremely cool. Another side note, I loved Grace’s tiny little moment where Ethan comically tries to shake her off him so he can jump to another part of the car, but she won’t let go. It’s easy to think of actors like Cruise as fearless, stoic heroes, so it's really nice to see the characters afraid of their surroundings like this. Ethan and Benji do it a bit as well.
The decision to hinge the antagonistic force on an all-knowing, omnipotent artificial intelligence program isn’t a particularly new idea, but it’s a natural evolution of the franchise. The opening sequence on the submarine, showing how the Entity can force an allied group to dismantle or sabotage itself, reiterated later in the movie with Benji’s voice being replicated, is a great way to showcase this “new” power Ethan and his crew must deal with over the next two movies. However, the worst thing the Entity brings into Dead Reckoning is unnecessary and expository dialogue. There is a several-minutes-long sequence at a gala that brings the film’s momentum to a screeching halt, in which characters literally sit in a room and discuss the Entity’s power and the moral dilemma that they’re in (specifically, that one among them must die) for a very long time. Unfortunately, that approach makes for an uninteresting sequence that the following chase through the Venice canals must attempt to pick the pace up from.
My least favorite part of Dead Reckoning, however, is the aforementioned Venice chase and the resulting death. For some reason, this chase sequence is scored- I don’t want to say incorrectly, just very strangely- resulting in a confused tone in a very drawn-out sequence. The rest of the score is fantastic, so I don’t know what happened here, but when the result of the sequence is the death of a main character, it severely undermines her impact. The most controversial part of this movie, by a landslide, is the death of Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust. It’s frustrating that they killed off, unceremoniously, the major mainstay female team member, and more so that they did it in the same movie they seemed to want to ‘replace’ her. The decision to have a fake-out death at the very beginning, reveal that she’s alive, and then kill the exact same character an hour and a half later is baffling, tone-deaf and justifiably controversial.
The storyline is also clearly Part One of two. During production, this film and its upcoming sequel were referred to as Dead Reckoning Part One and Dead Reckoning Part Two, filmed together initially but separated midway through due to production complications. As a result, this is very obviously half the picture, ending on a satisfying note action-wise, but on a big cliffhanger storywise. However, most people watching aren’t caught up on the lore and goings-on of Ethan Hunt and his team (if they can even remember the character’s names) and simply don’t care about the minute story details. They just want to see the action, big set pieces and Cruise’s big stunt (and no heist- seriously, why is there no heist in this movie?). On that front, a cliffhanger ending is really not all too offensive. It is strange, however, that they essentially changed the name of this picture after it was released, scrubbing the ‘Part One’ from all the marketing and titles on streaming services. That is insane.
It’s starting to sound like I’m dogging on this movie, but it really is terrific. It’s not as good as III or Fallout due to its relatively small misfires, but Mission: Impossible- Dead Reckoning “Part One” is an extremely fun and satisfying action blockbuster for a wide, yet passionate audience. It’s tense and well-crafted with a great lead, great production value and stuntwork to die for, and it’s an entry in a franchise that’s maintained its trust with its audience for over twenty years while still shifting and morphing genre over time, and still moving the goalpost forward each and every single time. This is a big, yet supremely satisfying movie.
