Christian Black
Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) are on a mission.
Earlier entries have their admirable qualities — iconic set pieces, stunning camera work, Philip Seymour Hoffman — but Ghost Protocol (2009) ignited a new era of formal virtuosity and “how-did-they-do-that” audacity for the franchise. This solidified under the dual authorship of writer-director Christopher McQuarrie and producer-star Tom Cruise, who are ruthlessly committed to creating escapist multiplex pop art sans superheroes. Series protagonist Ethan Hunt might be capable of improbable acts of death-defiance, but his only superpower is that he looks very cool when he’s running.
Dead Reckoning Part One is the third entry in the series with McQuarrie at the helm, and as the title indicates, the first half of a two-part epic. The MacGuffin for this outing is a bifurcated key salvaged from an experimental Russian submarine. What this key unlocks is not particularly important to the events of Part One. All that matters is that Ethan and his Impossible Mission Force team — Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg), and a newly resurfaced Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) — must recover the two halves before the Bad Guys. The Bad Guys in this case being the intelligence agencies of every nation on Earth (including their own), plus a terrorist cabal that seems to take its orders from a sinister artificial intelligence.
That latter plot point feels as if it had been lifted from a silly 1990s action movie, and much of Dead Reckoning Part One’s dialogue has a purple, faintly campy quality that harkens back to the Brosnan-era Bond pictures. It’s also relatively talky for an M:Ifilm, heavy on pre-heist exposition and vague, menacing repartee. Which is not to say that McQuarrie’s latest is in any way a slack, action-deficient experience. Like all the director’s contributions to the series, Part One possesses a fabulous sense of momentum. While there are no immediately obvious series all-timers, the new film’s action set pieces are characteristically fantastic. Highlights include a car chase through Rome — in which Cruise somehow drives a turbo-powered Fiat while handcuffed to Haley Atwell’s debonair pickpocket — and a climactic climb-escape sequence that feels like something from a Buster Keaton picture.
The most unexpected yet welcome aspect of Dead Reckoning is the way it deliberately echoes Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible, which kicked off the franchise in 1996. This extends beyond the return of Henry Czerny as delightfully slimy IMF director Eugene Kittridge. The new film’s set pieces often evoke those of the first feature in ways both subtle and overt, and the moral dilemmas that Hunt confronts feel like nightmarish variations of predicaments he’s faced before (usually, but not always, successfully). Here McQuarrie and his collaborators distinguish themselves from other franchise filmmakers, who are only too happy to strip-mine the past for vacuous, nostalgia-tweaking ends. Dead Reckoning evinces a lighter, more mature touch towards its protagonist’s history. As Hunt dashes full tilt through the streets of Venice to rescue an imperiled team member, McQuarrie trusts his star’s adrenaline-fueled desperation will take the viewer back to the 1996 film’s brutal opening act.
The death of Hunt’s entire IMF team in the first M:I feature has always been the bloody rite of passage that not only distinguished the films from Bruce Geller’s original 1966-73 television series but also truly birthed the character of Ethan Hunt. From that moment on, Cruise has embodied the fantasy of the righteous super-agent, a creature of the American military-industrial death machine who is also somehow above it, willing to go rogue at a moment’s notice to uphold the greater good. Yet the franchise has never truly reckoned with his character-defining loss as explicitly as it does in Part One. As goofy as the malevolent A.I. plot might seem in this outing, it is tailored to prod at Hunt’s foundational self-doubt: That there might come a time when he can’t save everyone. The result is maybe the most thoughtful and affecting M:I entry to date, and a Cruise performance that hasn’t been this raw since M:I III (2006).
Surprisingly, Dead Reckoning is also the funniest entry since Ghost Protocol, sliding in just enough knowing winks to acknowledge that while the film takes itself seriously, all this high-tech, cloak-and-dagger fantasy is, at bottom, a little silly. (There’s even a “no, not that IMF, the other IMF” joke that the franchise would never have cracked two decades ago.) Pegg, as usual, provides neurotic comedic relief, but the real standouts here are the women. Both Atwell as the freelance thief Grace and Vanessa Kirby as Hunt’s arms-dealing frenemy Alanna sparkle in roles that are unexpectedly entwined with one another. Pom Klementieff, meanwhile, runs away with the film by doing her best Xenia Onatopp impression, cackling with maniacal, almost sexual glee as she plows through police cruisers in an armored truck.
Klementieff’s femme fatale works for the film’s primary antagonist, an enigmatic free agent villain named Gabriel (Esai Morales) who likes to quote Cormac McCarthy and seems to have a connection to Hunt’s pre-IMF past. Here Dead Reckoning Part One is on its weakest footing, shoehorning in a traumatic history (and, naturally, a dead love interest) for Hunt that the series has never previously mentioned. It’s a rare misstep in an otherwise characteristically excellent entry in Hollywood’s last true blockbuster star vehicle. While it’s doubtful that Part Two will be able to retroactively shore up this weaker facet of the story, McQuarrie and Cruise have never failed to deliver on the promise of bigger, bolder, never-done-before spectacle.
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Written by Bruce Geller, Erik Jendresen and Christopher McQuarrie. Opens July 12.
This story first appeared in the Cleveland Scene, an affiliated publication.
