‘Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning’: Tom Cruise Will Entertain the F-ck Out of You or Die Trying
Modern movies can now be slotted into five distinct categories: Comedies, dramas, horror/sci-fi, superhero films and Tom Cruise. The 61-year-old actor has gone beyond being a marquee-name star to becoming his own movie genre, a sort of one-man blockbuster flavor that borrows liberally from those other types and adds in a special sauce that’s equal parts charisma, salesmanship, daredevil action, nonstop running and teeth. As the industry-saving success of last year’s Top Gun: Maverick reminded us, Cruise is still the closest thing to a sure thing, the occasional Mummy misstep be damned — he’s become an embodiment of both the past and the future of moviegoing as a public pastime, a throwback to the days when giants roamed the red-carpeted earth and a protector of big-screen entertainment as a continuing viable entity. Hollywood desperately needs him. They may as well change the sign on the hill to Tommywood.
And the Mission: Impossible series has been Cruise’s 21st century cornerstone, not to mention a surprisingly reliable delivery system for spy-vs-spy action, choreographed set pieces, and honest-to-Tom thrills. The franchise once flirted with high-functioning auteurism early on, enlisting Brian De Palma and John Woo to call the shots; even J.J. Abrams added in several signature flourishes. The star remains the real author here, however, and these M:I entries are less intellectual properties than his personal passion projects. Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie may now be the director-in-residence — it’s his third time at bat — but Cruise owns the venue. You don’t see The Way of the Gun filmmaker scaling real mountainsides with his bare hands and holding his breath underwater for six minutes and leaping out of planes at 25,000 feet. Or, say riding a motorcycle off a cliff and base-jumping into the pastoral abyss below.
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That’s the signature D.I.Y. stunt that Cruise pulls in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One, a title designed to set up an epic espionage extravaganza and cause writers’ cramps en masse for critics. You’ve likely seen the advance promos of the star practicing endless runs at it, repeatedly revving down a road to nowhere and hovering in the air like Wile E. Coyote before dropping. Even if this centerpiece isn’t the highlight for what turns out to be an extremely busy adventure, the completely bonkers notion of Cruise forcing himself to up the ante one more time in the name of putting asses in seats remains impressive. The commitment to this ongoing M:I bit — what’s a little danger to life and limb if it keeps audiences enraptured? — is total, and goes back to the dawn of the art form. These movies owe as much to Buster Keaton as they do to Bond or Bourne. They’re steroidal spy flicks infused with silent-comedian death wishes.
And like every Mission: Impossible before it, Dead Reckoning sticks to a tried-and-true formula that essentially acts as a string to connect one action-sequence bead to the next. The set-up: A stealth Russian sub gets attacked by its own torpedoes. The MacGuffin: One cruciform key that the sub’s chief officer has in his possession, and which goes missing; once this item is slotted into an identical counterpart, the composite key will unlock…something. The mastermind culprit behind all of the world-threatening shenanigans: An artificial-intelligence program dubbed “the Entity” that’s become sentient, highly sought after and incredibly unstable. (You gotta give up to Cruise: There’s hating what streaming has done to the movie industry, and then there’s making the supervillain of your new movie an actual killing-machine algorithm.) The only person who can stop an A.I. Armageddon: Oh, we think you know who that is.
It’s a mission that Cruise’s Ethan Hunt chooses to accept, and after a few clandestine meetings, some requisite unmaskings and several scenes best classified as Exposition: Inevitable, the Impossible Mission Force’s favorite son gets most of the gang back together. Thanks to Hunt’s longtime cohort Ilsa Faust (god bless you, Rebecca Ferguson), they already have the first key. They just have to locate and procure the second one, preferably before a number of other interested, less well-meaning parties get their hands on it, and figure out the items’ purpose. If a professional pickpocket named Grace (Hayley Atwell), who palms the contraband they’re chasing during a potential rendezvous at an airport, can help Ethan and the I.M.F. out, all the better.
“Whoever controls the Entity controls the truth,” one character says, establishing the insanely high stakes from the get-go. But in terms of summarizing this Mission: Impossible’s plot-line modus operandi, we’d point to the exchange in which Grace asks for more details regarding a plan and Simon Pegg’s perpetually stressed sidekick replies, “They tend to just get in the way.” You can try to untangle where supporting characters like Shea Wigham and Greg Tarzan Davis’ intelligence agents fit in. Or wrack your brains over whether Esai Morales and a punked-out Pom Klemntieff, a.k.a. Mantis from the Guardians of the Galaxy films, are A.I. zealots or simply superior thugs-for-hire. You’re never quite sure whether familiar faces, some of which are ripped off to reveal other familiar faces underneath — the mask thing never gets old — show up for what feels like nostalgic reasons rather than narrative ones.
All of which feels secondary to the Mission at hand when you remember that these movies have rarely been about the story itself. It may take a quick Wiki glance to recall what the “plot” of the previous M:I joint, 2018’s Fallout, is. (Don’t even bother.) But you probably remember that HALO jump, the bathroom fight in which Henry Cavill cocks his Howitzer-like arms, and the white-hot stare that Vanessa Kirby’s White Widow gives Cruise before she compulsively kisses him. Dead Reckoning never rises to that best-in-series movie’s level, though McQuarrie (and cowriters Bruce Geller and Erik Jendresen) concocts set pieces and the cast carves out stand-alone moments that stick with you past the credit roll. There’s a car chase through the streets of Rome involving handcuffs, endless staircases, and a thimble-sized Fiat 500 that plays like a screwball 39 Steps in miniature. A typical two-on-one fight gets a makeover by taking place in the narrowest alley ever. The climax aboard a runaway train starts by paying homage to the original M:I’s big-bang ending and ends with Cruise and Atwell fighting gravity, one slowly plummeting car at a time.
There’s also that heavily hyped motorcycle jump, a surprisingly so-so affair compared to Cruise’s past, potentially terminal stunts; blame the presentation, which doesn’t quite do the heavy preparation and execution of the sequence justice. You still react to it, of course, because you know it’s the world’s most try-hard movie star flying through the air with the greatest of ease. And that’s what these films are really about — not geopolitical unrest, not bleeding-edge gizmos and gadgets, not IMF teamwork making the rogue-intelligence-operatives-save-the-world dream work. They’re not about nods to the TV show that inspired the franchise, as the source material has long been eclipsed at this point, nor is it about Trojan-horsing commentary on current events through a multiplex lens lightly. (This long-in-the-making entry is hitting theaters just as handwringing over A.I. hits maximum velocity, but the tease for Part Two revolves around a missing Russian submarine — a plot point carbon-dated from the same decade that Cruise’s career began.)
They are all about Tom, the man who is trying to achieve the impossible: make blockbusters fueled by star power in an age where I.P. is king, via action movies that attempt to feel both highly artisanal and globally accessible. There are two hypercompetent alpha males stuck in a ecosphere of beta bureaucrats, egocentric villains and scared second-guessers in the overall M:I universe. Only one of them happens to be fictional. Dead Reckoning Part One is merely the latest installment in Cruise’s visionquest to not only keep moviegoing alive but to protect an entire decades-old definition of what a certain kind of movie is from dying. Whether Part Two makes good on either the macro- or micro-promise of this chapter is, not unlike Ethan Hunt’s motorcycle, still up in the air. All we know for certain is that Cruise will keep risking his life to channel that vintage “Wow!” for as long as he can draw breath, should we choose to accept his mission. This review will now self-destruct in five, four, three, two….
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