Since the ascension of the Mission: Impossibe series made the switch from Tom Cruise Vanity Project to legitimate contender for action franchise alpha (around about Ghost Protocol, by my reckoning), the death defying adventures of Ethan Hunt and his devoted acolytes of espionage has seemingly been reaching critical mass.
Glowing reviews and a morbid fascination for whatever ludicrously dangerous stunt Cruise will attempt next has driven matters to Bond-like proportions as the missions have gotten ever larger and more complex; however, with the latest installment, Dead Reckoning, even Cruise apparently admits there’s too much here for merely one film.
Hence we have Dead Reckoning Part 1, the latest (and possibly penultimate) excuse for its fear-resistant star to give his insurance firm a shocking case of the collywobbles; can the filmmakers pull off their own impossible mission and maintain the high quality the series has set since Hunt spectacularly scampered up the side of the Burj Khalifa?
After a mysterious incident in the Bering Sea that involves a Russian Submarine accidentally committing hari-kari with one of their own torpedoes, a malevolent A.I. known only as the Entity is unleashed onto the world and the global race is on in order to wrestle it into submission before it puts in effect what essentially be a new world order. However, while common decency would dictate that the Entity should be destroyed, the world’s superpowers realise that if the Entity could be controlled, whomever holds its leash would be the more dominant nation on the planet.
Ethan Hunt, however, doesn’t see it that way and has already taken steps to ensure that he gets their first in order to kill this godless mixture of Skynet and Blofeld and to do that, he’s going to have to get two halves of a crusiform key that unlocks… well, he doesn’t actually know what it unlocks, or even what the location of what needs unlocking is, but first things first, eh?
After encounters in the Arabian desert and a bomb scare in an airport in Abu Dhabi that sees the usual suspects of Isla Faust, Benji Dunn and Luther Stickell amassing to aid Hunt on his quest, two new players enter the game in the form Gabriel, the Entity’s human liason and opportunistic professional thief Grace who immediately throws everyone’s plans into chaos when she pinches the keys for a mystery buyer.
Thus the usual hijinks ensue which sees Ethan and his team frantically criss crossing the globe as they try and out think an algorithm that can predict everything they’re planning to do before they do. Cars are smashed, stakes are raised and death is routinely defied, but when the dust has temporarily settled from a climactic face/off on the Orient Express, who will be left standing to participate in Part 2?
For a sprawling epic that clocks in at a beefy 163 minutes, Dead Reckoning Part 1 has not only got a lot of plot to shift, but it also technically doesn’t even have a definitive ending due to the story being halved, however, despite the fact that Dead Reckoning leaves a lot of threads still twisting in the wind, it thankfully doesn’t leave you feeling like you’ve been short changed or agonising like the type of agonising cliffhanger that would just ruin your night. Currently enjoying his third time at bat for the notoriously tricksy franchise, Christopher McQuarrie now has the beats for an M:I movie down cold and thus is free to try and wring every bit of tension and surprise he can out of endless rug pulls and ever changing dynamics. Does it he does, primarily by adopting Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible 1 tactic of using super close ups twinned with some Dutch angles to ramp up the atmosphere while characters are spouting out guff about artificial intelligence and over-designed keys. However, as every M:I fan knows, all the grandstanding and jaw clenching are merely a prelude to some senses smashing action sequences and its here where Dead Reckoning gets extra interesting.
Whether by accident or some sort of weird design, almost all the action beats feel awfully reminiscent of either set pieces that Cruise has done before (the Arabian chase in horseback feels like The Mummy while Hunt and Grace trying to avoid CIA agents in an airport invokes thoughts of Minority Report), or hue closely to moments from other films released this summer. Fast X also had an extended car chase through Rome this year, while the fifth Indiana Jones boasts a fight scene on a train that ends with it hurtling off and bombed bridge – however, before people start yelling that the franchise has finally run out of ideas, it’s also important to note that Hunt’s seventh rodeo smokes each and every one of them at their own game. An impressive flex, or sheer coincidence? Either way, we’re the once who benefit thanks to superlative acts of stunt work and second unit work that even could eclipse the more spectacular offerings of James Bond.
What sells the vast majority if this extended carnage is, unsurprisingly, Cruise himself who, instead of painting himself as an indestructible demigod, actually continues to make Hunt look genuinely upset into being forced and coerced into such endeavors by either fate or the overzealous goadings of Simon Pegg’s Benji.
Elsewhere, some legitimate shocks aside, the core cast do well with a welcome return of Vanessa Kirby’s White Widow, but Hayley Atwell’s debuting Grace is a breath of fresh air as it means that we have an unwilling team member who doesn’t trust Hunt’s willingness to sacrifice everything in order to protect his friends and it leads to some great, handcuffed-couple-on-the-run type stuff, like a coked up Thirty Nine Steps. Elsewhere, Esai Morales is suitably threatening as Hunt’s velvet-voiced nemesis, Pom Klementieff joins fellow Guardian Of The Galaxy, Dave Bautista, by playing a memorable henchperson in a blockbuster spy franchise and Shea Whigham makes a feast of such lines as describing his quarry as a “mind-reading, shape-shifting, agent of chaos”.
Despite the sheer majesty of those action sequences (the bike-off-the-mountain bit is still wondrous, even though the clip has been already been replayed to infinity in various trailers) and the nerve-gnawing set ups, the fact that this is only half of the story means there are deliberate gaps in the narrative. Both Whigham’s exasperated CIA agent and Morales’ villain have murky histories that will no doubt be fleshed out next year and some of the details concerning the Entity are somewhat vague – however, aside from the typical half-a-story issues that failed to stop Avengers: Infinity War and Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse from becoming stone cold instant classics, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1 is prime, blockbuster entertainment that routinely achieves the improbable.
Now, waiting patiently for Dead Reckoning Part 2? That’s the impossible mission right there.
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