Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is as good as its title is long

INT. Paramount Studios – 2011
A group of board members sit around a table marveling at the box office receipts for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. At the head of the table is Tom Cruise, likely on a booster seat.

TOM CRUISE
…and that’s why I think I can do more push-ups than anyone in this room.

PARAMOUNT SUIT
This is true, Tom, but the fact of the matter is that you’re getting up in years. And although it was admittedly quite impressive to watch you zip around the exterior of Burj Khalifa on a wire, you just can’t keep doing this forever. You’re only human.

TOM CRUISE
What are you trying to say? And choose your next words carefully, Bill.

PARAMOUNT SUIT
Well, Tom, this Renner kid is about a decade younger than you, so we’re thinking of sorta phasing him in and moving Ethan Hunt to a more managerial role. It’ll give the series a bit more life. A Rennervation, if you will. But don’t worry, you can still do action movies. In fact, check out this script for Jack Reacher. Action packed, but smaller scale stuff. I think you’ll like it.

TOM CRUISE
Tie me to a plane, Bill.

PARAMOUNT SUIT
Excuse me?

TOM CRUISE
Bill, listen carefully. I’m not going to repeat myself: Tie me. To. A plane.

And the rest is history. They tied Tom Cruise’s ass to a plane and flew it in the air and it was fucking incredible. Two movies later and Jeremy Renner is gone from the series entirely and the whole world lined up again to see what batshit crazy stuff Tom Cruise would put his thetan-free body through in order to continue saving the movie business from itself.

With each new entry we got to witness a new bonkers stunt, a new level of directorial panache from Christopher McQuarrie (whose mutual muse situation with Cruise had him taking over the series in a writing/directing capacity), and a new adventure for a core group of IMF lifers who have become much more of a family than The Fambly (sorry Toretto). The Mission: Impossible franchise is a machine, just like so many other chunks of IP with which it currently shares box office receipts. It’s one of few entertainment machines, however, whose gears we never think about. Partially because they’re legitimately hard to see, and partially because we don’t want to. We moviegoers like to pretend that we want to see real people on screen engaging in timely thematic material that leaves us in the audience feeling responsibly educated. And while that’s all well and good, the open secret is that what we all really want to see is beautiful people doing extravagant things that get our blood pumping.

Yes, I’m painting with broad strokes here. I am admittedly just as big a fan of stuffy dramas and quirky indies as I am of John Wick and Ethan Hunt, but I maintain that one of the main reasons why people still show up in droves to see a seven-movie-deep action franchise based on a 60 year-old television show and starring a man who is even older than that, is because it delivers the perfect escape from an over-connected, but wildly disconnected world. It’s a chance to sit back and be reliably thrilled, knowing that for every highly advertised set-piece, there are a million other surprise pleasures waiting to be uncovered — that the action will be punctuated by thrilling espionage, strong character work, and most of all, fun. The Mission: Impossible franchise is here for us in the audience, first and foremost, and those involved in its making have dedicated themselves to this cause more so than any other creative team on the planet. To quote Cruise himself from his viral tirade wrought upon a COVID regulation-flouting member of the M:I team: WE ARE THE GOLD STANDARD.

Yes, Mission: Impossible, you are.

Tom Cruise’s mission to save the movies is summed up in a line that Ethan Hunt tells a prospective agent before joining the team partway through Dead Reckoning: “I swear your life will always be more important to me than my own.”

Same goes for the movies. To Tom Cruise, our entertainment is worth whatever physical danger he must endure to make it happen. It’s a bold trade, but it pays off in droves. His willingness to put his life on the line is why the same people who less than a month ago were aghast that anyone could support a movie starring Ezra Miller, are still lining up to see a movie starring the proud demigod of a powerful and dangerous cult. Ezra Miller may be flawed, but it seems their most damning flaw is that they’ve never been tied to a plane for our entertainment.

Also parallel to the real-world mission of Tom Cruise is the central mission of Dead Reckoning itself: an A.I. of sorts has grown sentient and is using its endlessly growing digital access to fuck with the stability of the entire world. This digital entity has thought of everything — but it hasn’t accounted for Ethan Hunt, whose defining characteristic is his ability to improvise his way through the stickiest of situations. Here in the real world, Tom Cruise, faced with a movie landscape that coasts on the “good enough” model of crowd-tested content made passable by post-production wizardry, sells us a product that occurs predominantly in-camera, and which relies on classic techniques enhanced by post-production wizardry, and he does so after skillfully rehabbing a public persona that would’ve ended anyone else’s career ten times over. Tom Cruise IS Ethan Hunt, and he is here to put the star back into the movies.

It’s Tom Cruise vs A.I. both onscreen and in the real world, and it’s goddamn magnificent.

To get too heavily into the plot beyond what I’ve already said would be a waste of space and time, and frankly, you’ve already correctly decided that you’re going to see this on the biggest screen imaginable as soon as humanly possible. All you need to understand is that Ethan and his team, alongside newcomer freelance thief Grace (Hayley Atwell) are tasked with stopping the rogue A.I. while a lot of shady players from varying levels of government/military/CIA wish to rein in the villainous program and use it to their own potentially nefarious ends. This includes Kittridge (Henry Czerny), who delivers dialogue with a cadence unlike anyone else in the business. Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) are there to believably hack stuff, while the great Shea Whigham does what he does best as Briggs, the agent sent to bring Hunt and the gang to justice a la The Fugitive‘s Samuel Gerard (he doesn’t care whether his quarry is guilty or not, it’s his job to bring them in).

The big showstopping stunt is as impressive as one would expect it to be, but ultimately, it’s the most forgettable part of the movie. What shines most in this entry is not the bombast or daring action, but the smaller moments. For the first time since the original film, the bulk of what we’re seeing is tense conversations, literal and figurative sleight of hand, and the layering of multiple “plans” that are morphing independent of one another in real time. All staples of the franchise, yes, but they feel significantly less like a means to an action-packed end this time around (my own recency bias may be in play here, mind you). McQuarrie shoots similarly to De Palma in the smaller moments as well. Plenty of disorienting (although never distracting) Dutch angles give extra life to conversations that throw every visual framing rule in the trash. The way the gigantic talking heads interact follows a strange visual logic, but one that works uncommonly well. If you aren’t a degenerate film dork like me you may not even notice, but if you do, you’ll see how wonderfully off-kilter it all looks.

This is just one of many instances of throwback stylishness that McQuarrie has brought into the series since he took it over, and although this is potentially my least favorite entry of his tenure, it exhibits such a vast leap forward of technique and style that it’s hard not to be left slack-jawed by his growth behind the camera. I am as excited to see Dead Reckoning Part Two as I am to see whatever McQuarrie does after that, big or small.

The script is, by the very nature of the plot, a bit sillier than its forbears overall. On the positive end of things, the character-based humor that has been standard since Ghost Protocol is the best it’s been since Ghost Protocol. There are some legitimately laugh-out-loud gags. On the negative end of things is the technological plot armor. Yes, these movies often employ impossible tech to help our heroes get the job done, but this is the first time where it really starts to strain credulity even by the series’ well-established loose standards.

Small complaint overall, and one that may fizzle when Part Two drops next year. That said, of the 2023 blockbusters that chose to utilize a cliffhanger ending (Fast X, Spider-Verse), this is the first one that still manages to feel like a complete movie even as it dangles the carrot of continued adventure. If this weren’t explicitly labeled a part one, it would still feel whole. No small feat, and it inspires confidence in the strength of the pending finale.

And even though Bill, our Paramount Executive from the beginning of this review, may have jumped the gun on moving Ethan Hunt to a managerial position, it seems that such a transition is indeed on the horizon. I blame Top Gun: Maverick, a movie alllll about an unstoppable badass becoming a teacher. Dead Reckoning digs deeper into Hunt’s background than we’ve ever been before and uses it to bring the franchise at large closer to an actual conclusion (or at least, a passing of the torch) than ever before. As much as I’d love for these movies to go on forever, it’s exciting to see a potentially satisfying close off in the distance.

But before that happens, ol’ Tommy Boy should do one more humdinger of a stunt for us. My suggestion is that he does a hot dog eating contest in space and then motorcycles back to earth without a parachute or a space suit and he has to solve riddles the whole time.

Btw, Pom Klementieff.

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie

Written by Bruce Geller, Erik Jendresen, Christopher McQuarrie

Starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Esai Morales

Rated PG-13, 163 glorious minutes