Two hours 43 minutes of pure entertainment is what Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One delivers. The only real question it’s raised by the end of its breathless 200-odd minutes is how is Part Two going to top it?
There’s even a plot, the usual one of something that needs tracking down, Ethan Hunt and his team working in the shadowy “disavowed” realm, good bad guys ostensibly from their own side and bad bad guys keen to get their hands on the thing, which this time around is a key that will disarm a rogue AI superbrain with plans for world domination.
Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt. Now looking decidedly middle aged – not bad for a guy entering old age – Cruise bows out with the next, last, M:I movie (though watch this space) but is as lithe and limber as ever here. The mad stunts he does himself. The Tom Cruise running bit. The Tom Cruise on a motorbike bit. The Tom Cruise launching himself into space bit. Check, check, check and check.
Ving Rhames, increasingly a father confessor/eminence grise, Simon Pegg a bit less needily nerdy, Rebecca Ferguson not in it as much as some might like – all present and correct. Good bad guys are Shea Whigham (again) and Greg Tarzan Davis – “Tarzan” is a family nickname and marks him out doubly as a “watch this space and face” new addition. He was also in Top Gun: Maverick, so has Cruise previous.
Bad bad guys get a bit more screentime. Vanessa Kirby returns as the White Widow, blonde and icily beautiful but in most respects the identikit mastermind. Esai Morales, grey and ruggedly handsome but in most respects the identikit mastermind (male version). Pom Klementieff, an impressive badass henchperson adept at fighting in tight spaces, who gained the nickname “Pom Cruise” because of her willingness to throw herself at physical challenges.
In the grey area are Hayley Atwell as a pickpocket who’s generally dressed in a way that emphasises her figure and who might go either way when things get mean. And, a real blast from the past, Henry Czerny, who played an Impossible Mission Force director in the first movie in 1996 and returns to more or less the same role here. Suits have a tendency to be a bit flaky in the M:I series. He could also go either way too.
Atwell is the best thing in it this time around, as a crook who’s hot and smart but most of all devious. Klementieff would probably be the best thing in it with more screentime, even though she only utters about one line, in French. Her impassive deadpan and physicality bring to mind Buster Keaton.
As do some of the stunts, particularly the one where a steam train takes a dive off a bridge, the climax to a stunt-filled movie that’s switched from the Arctic to the Arabian quarter to Rome to Venice, while Cruise and co don the latex masks to wriggle into spaces they shouldn’t be in.
Here and there director Christopher McQuarrie – through his career he’s primarily been a writer but you’d never guess – drops in callbacks to the early parts of the series. And when not referencing Keaton and even Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps he also throws in some noirish shadows and even expressionistic camera angles to situate the M:I franchise even further back than its origins in the 1990s, as part of the gritty crime genre.
To describe this movie – choppers and tech, shiny-floor locations in exotic parts of the world, the soaring Bond-meet-Bourne soundtrack of Lorne Balf – is to describe any M:I movie.
But an M:I movie with an upgrade. They started out almost as the Tom Cruise Show, with the Mission Impossible Force almost as an afterthought. But as the years have gone by and Cruise has become more of a player as a producer he’s taken his foot off slightly in terms of screen presence. From roughly about the time of 2011’s Ghost Protocol he’s graciously ceded space to his co-stars. It’s improved the movies – a canny bit of dead reckoning.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
