If they defeat the bad guy in part two by spamming Studio Ghibli requests, I am going to increase my score.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023): 8 out of 10: The world is, once again, teetering on the edge of chaos, which must mean it’s time for another Mission Impossible movie. This time, we find ourselves diving headlong into Dead Reckoning Part One.. The action kicks off with all the familiar trappings, shadowy organizations, double-crosses layered like an overcomplicated trifle, and a sense of global doom that only one man and his penchant for running can prevent. The globe-trotting begins early, and the film zips from high-tech bunkers to sun-soaked European streets with the kinetic flair we expect from this franchise.
At the eye of the inevitable storm is, of course, Ethan Hunt, played with the usual death-defying sincerity by Tom Cruise, who continues to treat each installment as a personal challenge to cheat mortality on screen. Ethan is joined by his ever-faithful crew Benji (Simon Pegg), Luther (Ving Rhames), and a few new faces, notably Hayley Atwell as a slick, enigmatic thief who may or may not be trustworthy, depending on which minute of the movie you’re in. The crew is tasked with stopping a rogue artificial intelligence known only as The Entity. So, our villain is ChatGPT. (If only the Mission Impossible crew had waited for the 5.0 update for the villain to nerf itself. Well, it is a two-part movie, so maybe that is the climax)
The plot, if you squint, is fairly straightforward: find the MacGuffin, chase the MacGuffin, lose the MacGuffin, and repeat with increasingly dangerous stunts and fancier wardrobes. Dead Reckoning Part One isn’t here to reinvent the genre. It’s here to strut through it in a leather jacket while riding a motorcycle off a mountain. The action is predictably dazzling, with Cruise launching himself off cliffs, sprinting through airports like it’s a cardio competition, and engaging in tense close-quarters combat on (and in) elegant European trains. The pace has some issues, and while the exposition may occasionally creak under its own techno-babble weight, the sheer momentum of the thing usually keeps it upright.
Thematically, the film flirts with the notion of free will versus determinism, but let’s not pretend we’re watching this for a philosophy lecture. At its core, Dead Reckoning Part One is about loyalty, trust, and Tom Cruise running a lot. Plus a lot of meeting between characters that could have been an email… or perhaps a Zoom call.
There is an inevitable Part Two. It’s not quite all build-up and no payoff. But I have a feeling that there is only enough actual plot here for one movie.
The Good
The Good: Pom Klementieff’s character needs her own damn movie. She is that good in this. Henry Czerny is also hitting above the weight of his character. Honestly, throughout the film, the acting in Dead Reckoning is solid across the board. Tom runs way too much (see pacing complaint below) but he is excellent, and his sidekicks seem more fun this time around. His love interests are both extremely well played. Really solid casting with no misses. Also, a shout-out to Vanessa Kirby playing as someone pretending to be her and knocking it out of the park with just her eyes.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is a notoriously expensive film, but you know what? The money is on the screen. They crash actual trains, run around and on top of real airports and are not afraid to get fancy with the style or camera work every once in a while. Dead Reckoning is an excellent travelogue that holds its own against any recent Bond film. The practical effects and stunts are also top-notch.
The Bad
The Bad: Pacing. Dead Reckoning Part One is too long. Well, to be more specific, the scenes in Dead Reckoning Part One are too long. Disobedience (which coincidentally starred the wife of Daniel Craig, Mr. James Bond) is my go-to measurement for this issue. In my Disobedience review, I complained, “Every scene also seems to take a minute longer than it needed to.”
In Dead Reckoning Part One, while slightly more action-packed and focused than a drama about infidelity among Hasidic Jews, every scene seems to take about ten minutes longer than it should. We spend seemingly forever at the airport while various plots unfold. We are on the train for a very long time. We go to a dance club in Venice where all the characters good, bad, and soon to be dead are all sitting together, and the movie just stops for a fifteen-minute conversation. Who has a conversation inside a dance club?
And that is not the only time Dead Reckoning seems to sit back and just regurgitate plot. Part of the issue is the bad guy really is ChatGPT. I mean, in Fallout you have a nuke, and if the nuke blows up bad things will happen. Is it an original plot?… well, no. But I can follow it without a TED Talk every half hour.
In universe, a computer using, I assume, magic can change or control any digital device in the world. So we are all analog and using typewriters again, and governments are all vying for the key to this magical computer.
Unfortunately, Dead Reckoning is very inconsistent with this premise. So we will have a scene where the computer can fake Luther’s voice to send Ethan down the wrong path. But then later in the alps Benji is using a self-driving car? We can’t trust our phones but the police computer in Italy has no problem pulling up a criminal’s international record. At no point does the evil computer program just crash a jumbo jet into our heroes, a talent our bad guy clearly should possess.
The genuine issue with Dead Reckoning (besides the bad guy having a subscription service) is I occasionally looked at my watch while viewing Dead Reckoning. I may have even yawned a few times. It seems a step down from recent entries.
The Ugly
The Ugly: (SPOILER ALERT) They kill off Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) to make room for Grace (Hayley Atwell). I think these is supposed to be a theme for the movie (at least according to Henry Czerny’s voiceover at the end of the film). I just don’t like it.
Hayley Atwell is fine, but she simply does not have the same chemistry with Tom Cruise as Rebecca Ferguson does. It is more of a character issue (he barely knows her, and she is of dubious character) than an actress issue. The entire scene where this takes place is overlong and strangely staged, almost like a Giallo rather than a realistic action film.
It felt manipulative and out of place in the film. What is strange is that Mission Impossible handled this extremely well with the love triangle between Michelle Monaghan and Rebecca Ferguson and managed to do this in an adult manner without fridging anyone.
In Conclusion
In conclusion: I loved Fallout. In fact, I have loved quite a few of the recent Mission Impossible films. The stunts are impressive in Dead Reckoning but not jaw-dropping as we have come to expect. During the train scene, I was thinking I wonder if they took this from Uncharted 2: Among Thieves? Previous Mission Impossible films really never gave my mind the opportunity to wonder like that.
A very solid film, just not up to the extremely high quality of some of the more recent entries. A really poorly thought out antagonist and some serious pacing issues bring it down a few notches.
