Review: “Mission: Impossible- Dead Reckoning Part One”

Tom Cruise is the 21st century’s Buster Keaton. That Cruise is one of the last true movie stars is certain: his name— and his outspoken devotion to cinema— alone drives audiences to movie theaters in droves, despite his often unsavory personal life that typically draws more fascination than ridicule. That first statement might provoke more of a question mark, but Keaton— the slapstick comedy star of the silent film era whose humor stemmed from his frequently elaborate, death-defying stunts— is the most apt comparison to where Cruise’s career and screen persona is currently situated. A lot of my thinking on that matter is derived from the fact that Mission: Impossible— Dead Reckoning Part One—the seventh installment in the series that began all the way back in 1996 with Cruise in the lead as Impossible Mission Force agent Ethan Hunt— culminates in a stunning recreation of Keaton’s most acclaimed feat from one of his most enduring films. Cruise’s awareness of his physicality and how he harnesses that in his performances on screen stretches all the way back to the beginning of his career, when he slid into the living room on his socks in 1983’s Risky Business. But where he used to use his body to enhance his matinee idol status, his career over the last decade or so has turned toward pushing his body in the most extreme manners imaginable, insisting on performing his own daredevil stunts other big name stars (or any sane human, for that matter) wouldn’t dream of touching. It’s what Keaton did all the time: put his life on the line for our entertainment, conceiving of bigger, more complex, and more dangerous stunts as his influence and popularity grew. We’ve now seen Cruise scale the side of a skyscraper, jump out of a plane, and—in what was hyped as the big stunt of Dead Reckoning nearly a year before it was even released—drive a motorcycle off the top of a mountain, all sans CGI. The Mission: Impossible franchise, under the guidance of recurring director Christopher McQuarrie, has evolved hand-in-hand with Cruise, with the films increasingly centering around massive action set-pieces, the pressure on to push for bigger and crazier stunts with each installment. The sixth film in the series, 2018’s Mission: Impossible—Fallout is considered by many to be the pinnacle of these accomplishments, so it’s fascinating that for round seven—billed as the first part of the supposed phasing out of Cruise’s character—Dead Reckoning reaches back: back toward Keaton and early action cinema, back toward the mission-of-the-week structure of the original television series that ran from 1966-1973, and back toward the more intellectual espionage-based first movie, directed by one of the all-time great genre filmmakers, Brian De Palma.

In fact, Dead Reckoning—Part One is really the first Mission: Impossible sequel to really recognize that first movie in any substantial way. We open underwater: a Russian submarine has been fooled by a powerful new A.I. technology referred to as “the Entity” into firing a torpedo at itself. As the Entity gains sentience, its power to infiltrate systems worldwide places all of humanity at stake, and the IMF’s Ethan Hunt is tasked with locating the other half of a key that can control it somehow—although just what the key unlocks or what the extent of that control remains unclear. The mechanics of the plot and the MacGuffin Ethan is chasing are particularly convoluted here, and it ought to be reiterated that this is “Part One”; any concrete resolutions or answers to lingering questions are held over for the next movie, slated to be released next summer. But where this movie loses the viewer in technicalities, it engages them with evidence of the strength of the Bond between Ethan and his team: former MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson, a standout since her first appearance in 2015’s Rogue Nation), and IMF tech wizs Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg). And there’s a new face thrown into that mix as well: Grace (Hayley Atwell), an accomplished thief and con artist who unwittingly gets caught up in Ethan’s quest for the key. Character development may not be the sharpest tool in this franchise’s arsenal—when the characters get together, they’re always breaking down the mission, not their lives otherwise—but the series is adept at crafting fun and engaging personalities that play to the actors’ strengths, their care for each other shining through in moments of peril and the brief snatches of quiet between action scenes.

And it’s the fact that the film—and by extension, the characters within it—is so self-aware that it works, too. There’s a sort of winking at the audience inherent in the tone of the conversations surrounding the Entity, a recognition that this is all a little bit silly that never comes at the expense of the gravity of the mission at stake. And there’s a recognition of Ethan’s mortality; he’s always allowed a hesitation, a moment of uncertainty or protest before a big stunt that brings him down to Earth—even if he’s still a highly-skilled agent who pulls off every move with aplomb. This meta commentary conceals some of the narrative’s flaws as well: it’s repeated throughout the film, perhaps a tad bluntly, that every woman who gets close to Ethan dies. The female characters in the series aren’t typically the most compellingly written, but even Ilsa is given the short shrift here. It’s hard not to feel like with the addition of Grace, the writers were merely swapping out one female lead for another.

But despite a nearly three-hour runtime (again, for only one half of the story), McQuarrie and team maintain a steady and engaging pace that briskly alternates between intrigue and action. The narrative refers back quite a bit to Ethan’s pre-IMF life, and ties more closely in to the 1996 film than any of the more recent installments, even bringing back Henry Czerny as Director Kittridge for the first time since that movie. Among the capable new additions to the cast are Esai Morales as Gabriel, a figure from Ethan’s past who seems to be working with the Entity and who imbues his villain character with chilly stoicism. He’s the polar opposite of his henchwoman Paris (Pom Klementieff), who steals the show with her bursts of feral rage, even if her character ultimately faces the same issues the other women of the movie do. The scope of the finale and the obstacles thrown at Ethan and Grace is giddily entertaining, but so is the expansive mid-movie chase set in Venice, which utilizes high-end stunts equally for humor and thrills. As the Entity evolves, Ethan and his team are forced to backtrack, relinquishing new tech in favor of old spy tricks that never get old: disguises, sleight of hand, and good old hand-to-hand combat.It’s all so relentlessly entertaining that the bothersome holes that normally accompany most part ones are barely perceptible here. It’s possible that for a lot of fans, Dead Reckoning Part One won’t quite live up to the mind-boggling stunts of Fallout. But this movie is doing something different, and something kind of remarkable in terms of sequels nowadays: referencing what came before not by playing the greatest hits or stuffing itself with cameos, but by baking it into the filmmaking and performances themselves, using something old to create something new. Bring on Part Two.

Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One is now playing in theaters. Runtime: 163 minutes. Rated PG-13.