Josh Reviews Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One

In Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his allies Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg) and Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson) find themselves the world’s last hope against an AI system nicknamed “the Entity” that has been spreading across the globe.  The Entity has infiltrated intelligence and military databases worldwide; the possibility for global havoc looms large.  However, a pair of “cruciform keys” exist that, when paired together, can access the Entity’s original source code and, hopefully, defeat/disable it.  Ethan and his team must find the two keys, whatever the cost.

I’m a huge fan of the Mission: Impossible film series.  I don’t love the second one; other than that, I’ve enjoyed all of the films, and this is the rare film series that I think has been getting better and better over the years.  The most recent film, 2018’s Fallout, is my favorite of the series.  I think it’s one of the best action movies of the past 20-30 years.

Dead Reckoning Part One does not live up to Fallout for me.  I wasn’t really expecting it to.  I thoroughly enjoyed it nonetheless.  The team of Tom Cruise and writer/director Christopher McQuarrie feels pretty unbeatable at this point.

The film is jam-packed with incredible set pieces.  No one does action like Tom Cruise these days, and when paired with Mr. McQuarrie’s great writing and directing the result is a film that is thrilling and entertaining in a way far different from most other movies these days.  There’s a giddy thrill to knowing that Tom Cruise and his team achieved what we’re seeing on screen for real — not with CGI fakery — that’s key to my enjoyment of these recent Mission films.

In the negatives column, I think the film is too long.  I’m all for a long movie.  I’m not usually someone who complains about a film’s run-time.  If the film is great, I’m happy to spend more time in that world!  But two hours and forty minutes is too long for a film like this, especially considering that this “part one” film is just half the story.  I also felt the film made a several narrative missteps that bothered me and impacted my enjoyment.  (I’ll discuss these below.)

Shall we dive in?  Beware SPOILERS ahead!!

The idea of Ethan Hunt vs. Skynet is a terrific idea.  I didn’t feel the film dug as deeply as I’d wanted it to into the terrifying idea that this AI entity could rewrite truth and reality to its whim, right under humanity’s feet and without our knowing about it or being able to do anything about it.  The murkiness of “truth” in today’s world (in which the internet is filled with lies and disinformation; deep-fake technology can create perfectly-believable but entirely-fake video footage, etc.) is scary, and using that as the basis for the villain of a film like this is a spectacular idea.  But that didn’t land as hard as I think it should have in this film.  There’s one moment in which the Entity fakes Benji’s voice to lead Ethan into trouble.  I wanted more of that.  (And frankly, I’d guessed something like that would have happened about a half hour before it did, so I was surprised Ethan and Co. didn’t think that the Entity would be able to corrupt their coms and digital signals.)  Because the AI “Entity” is non corporeal, the film leans on a human character as the face of villainy: Esai Morales’ Gabriel.  This decision is understandable, but Gabriel didn’t fully work for me as a villain.  Frankly, the Mission series has often had trouble with its villains.  I think only Mission: Impossible III’s villain, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, was truly successful as a scary and interesting villain.  Esai Morales is fine in the film, but there’s not enough to this character.  We don’t really know who he is, or what he wants, or why he’s allied himself with the Entity.  The movie hints that he and Ethan have a shared backstory, connected to Ethan’s life before becoming an IMF agent.  That’s an interesting idea, and I was particularly intrigued by the suggestion that Ethan was not a good person before being recruited by the IMF.  But the film doesn’t actually give us this story.  They save it for Part Two, which I think was a huge mistake.  If I understood who Gabriel was, and what the personal history is between him and Ethan, I might have connected to him more as the film’s villain.

The film’s second big mistake, in my mind, is killing off Ilsa.  I was not a fan of that at all.  I love this character; Rebecca Ferguson was a huge part of why the last two Mission films were so great.  I didn’t want to see her killed off.  (The Mission movies seem to think we need some character deaths to keep the audience involved — personally, I don’t agree.  I thought killing off Alec Baldwin’s character was Fallout’s one misstep.)  But I suppose a character death, if done well, could be moving and a worthwhile way to take the story.  But Ilsa is killed in a short mid-movie knife-fight with a villain we barely know?  This ignoble end was not worthy of her character.  Ilsa should have wiped the floor with Gabriel.  The idea of a female character’s being killed as a way to motivate the male main character is an ugly and outdated storytelling trope, and I didn’t like seeing it here.  Though this brings me to my next complaint, which is that it’s probably not accurate to describe Elsa’s death as being used to motivate Ethan.  The movie seems to forget about Elsa’s death two minutes later, which makes her death even more pointless and frustrating.  The movie had already established that Ethan has a grudge against Gabriel because he killed a woman in Ethan’s past — adding Elsa’s death on top of that felt 1) pointless and 2) I didn’t feel any real change to Ethan’s attitude towards Gabriel after that event.  Ethan already hated him and had a personal grudge.  So the whole think felt pointless to me.  Then, really cementing my unhappiness with this story point, literally five minutes after Ilsa dies they replace her on the team with Hayley Atwell’s character, Grace.  I like Grace a lot (more on her in a moment), but the way the movie just swaps out one woman character for another, Ilsa for Grace, was very lazy and annoying to me.

(I also continue to wonder why Paula Patton’s Jane Carter, from Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, has never been seen again.  She was an awesome female character!!  I wonder why they’ve never brought her back??)

These Mission films rise and fall on their action set-pieces, and this film has some incredible sequences.  My favorite is without question the whole train sequence in the film’s final 30 minutes.  That sequence kicks off with Tom Cruise riding a motorcycle off a cliff and then free-falling down.  That was in all the trailers and it’s been a focus of the movie’s pre-release promotion.  It’s spectacular, though it’s hurt somewhat for me by the weakness of the set-up — I just don’t buy that there was no other way for Ethan to get on that train.  But it’s an audacious moment, and very cool to see on a big screen.  But for me that moment was blown away by the escalating craziness of the train sequence that follows.  We’ve seen a lot of fights in movies set on top of a moving train (there was just one in the recent Indiana Jones movie a few weeks ago!), but this was one of the best I’ve ever seen.  You can really feel the dizzying speed of that train!  But it’s when the train cars start falling off the bombed-out bridge that the sequence really shot into the stratosphere for me.  That was incredible, giddy fun for me as an audience-member, watching Ethan and Grace running/crawling/jumping from car to car as they tumble down into the abyss.  What an incredible sequence!!

I also really loved the early sequence in the Abu Dhabi airport, in which Ethan and his team try to intercept one half of the cruciform key, only to find themselves playing against both Gabriel and a group of U.S. intelligence agents, headed up by Jasper Briggs, played by Shea Whigham (True Detective, Kong: Skull Island, Vice Principals, and he voiced Captain Stacy in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse).  I love Shea Whigham and I’m thrilled to see him join this ever-expanding Mission: Impossible ensemble.  I hope we see a lot more of him in Part Two!

(By the way, every time I heard the phrase “cruciform key” in this movie, I found myself thinking about Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and the Order of the Cruciform Sword.  Was I the only one??)

There’s a long car-chase in Rome involving Ethan and Grace that is fantastic fun.  Tom Cruise and Hayley Atwell are a terrific pair, and the vehicle mayhem is tremendously well-executed.  While I hate the way the film callously replaces Ilsa with Grace, if I can put that aside, I love Hayley Atwell in this movie!  She made quite an impact as Sharon Carter in the original Captain America film, and she was the best thing about the otherwise-mediocre two-season Agent Carter ABC show.  I like that Grace is a thief who at first wants nothing to do with Ethan and the IMF.  (If anything, I wish the film had made her a little more of a selfish scoundrel, so her eventual team-up with the IMF would have felt like more of a journey.)  Ms. Atwell has tremendous screen charisma; she handles Mr. McQuarrie’s sharp dialogue with aplomb, and she’s also entirely convincing in the action sequences.

I was thrilled to see both Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) back in major roles for this film.  These two are basically indispensable for a Mission movie now.  They serve similar roles (they’re both tech guys); Mr. McQuarrie’s script did a good job giving them each their own space in the movie.  (I do wish Ving Rhames’ exit of the film was a little more graceful; I think it would have been better to give him more of a reason why he has to separate from the team.)

I was thrilled to see Henry Czerny back as Kittridge, who was such a memorable part of the first Mission: Impossible film!!  What a clever idea to bring him back!  It’s great fun to see him paired up with Tom Cruise’s Ethan again.  Mr. McQuarrie shoots their first scene together in tight close-ups, in a fun homage to the very strange way Brian De Palma shot their iconic “you’ve never seen me very upset” show-down in that first film.  I do wish the film had done a better job at establishing what Kittridge’s role was at the start of this film.  Back in the first Mission film, he was the head of the IMF.  I eventually gathered that he’s the CIA director now.  But I was confused for too long about that.  There was a briefing scene between Kittridge and a bunch of other people, including Cary Elwes, and I had no idea who anyone was supposed to be, which was a problem.  I love Cary Elwes (who played the Director of National Intelligence, something I only figured out after I saw the film by reading online); I wish he had more to do in the film.  That scene also featured Rob Delaney (Catastrophe), Charles Parnell (Top Gun: Maverick), and Indira Varma (Game of Thrones, Luther); I wish all of them had more to do in the film!!

I was delighted to see Vanessa Kirby back as the shady broker Alanna; she was a wonderful new character in Fallout, and I’m thrilled they found a way to bring her back.  (And I loved seeing her brother Zola back, too!)  It was also fun to hear Kittridge talk about her mother, Max, who was a major character in that first Mission: Impossible film.

Pom Klementieff is wonderful in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies as Mantis; and she was great here too as the far less chatty assassin Paris.  I loved her close-quarters fight scene with Ethan, trapped together in a tight alley.  (My only complaint is that her turn at the end didn’t really make sense to me.  I know the Entity predicted that, but I didn’t quite follow her sudden change of motivation.)

I was wondering how much of a cliffhanger this “Part One” film would end on.  I was braced for an edge-of-your-seat cliffhanger with the characters all in jeopardy.  Interestingly, Mr. McQuarrie & co. made a different choice.  They didn’t stop in the middle of a scene of action and jeopardy; they allowed the film to climax, and then set the stage for the next steps of what Ethan & co. need to do to save the world.  I have mixed feelings about this choice.  On the one hand, with the current strikes in Hollywood, I am dubious that Part Two of this film is actually going to arrive next summer.  So I’m glad we won’t have to wait a year, or maybe a lot longer, for the resolution to a nail-biter of a cliffhanger.  On the other hand, the film didn’t end on a note that left me chomping at the bit for the next installment.  I’d been expecting to be left on a bit more of a high than the film actually did.

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is an extremely enjoyable and well-made film.  I had a lot of fun seeing it on a big screen, and it’s a film I can’t wait to see again.  It’s a little shakier than the last few Missions, especially Fallout which I loved.  But I had a great time seeing it, and I can’t wait to see what Mr. McQuarrie and Mr. Cruise have up their sleeves for Part Two.  (Are they going to bring Ethan Hunt’s story to a definitive end??  I am curious to see where this all is going!!)

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