It’s no secret that Tom Cruise cares more about the survival of the movie business — or at least the movie business as he’s known it, and helped to shape in his own image — than anyone else has ever cared about anything else. Sure, we’re talking about a guy who seems to care about everythingmore than anyone else cares about anything, but the fight against the future has grown increasingly personal for “modern” Hollywood’s signature mega-star, whose first “Mission: Impossible” movie helped transmute him into a living emblem of the movies themselves.
What others might see as a content-driven culture war, Cruise naturally regards as an existential threat, and the last few years have seen the actor-producer channel his singularly clenched intensity into a holy crusade against the standard-lowering forces of digital technology (the Eighth Dynamic saves its toughest battles for its strongest warriors).
Motion-smoothing might just be a setting that you need to change on your parents’ TV, but Cruise sees it as a vast conspiracy to make people more apathetic towards the viewing experience. Venture capital might have sold the masses on the idea that movie theaters are a relic of the analog era, but Cruise sees them as irreplaceable churches where alienated strangers can be united in the light of the collective imagination (and codify his ever-inflating savior complex). A.I. might promise to make your life easier, but Cruise sees it as a willful surrender of human agency, an affront to objective reality, and — perhaps most of all — a massive “fuck you” to a multiplex icon who frequently risks his life to restore the relationship between seeing and believing.
Anyone who saw “Top Gun: Maverick” knows that Cruise isn’t shy about confronting these concerns on-screen, and since everyone saw (and believed) that Best Picture-nominated mega-hit despite the supposed death of cinema, it stands to reason that Cruise’s next blockbuster — the goofy, romantic, and often transcendently committed “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” — should escalate his beef with the machines to hilariously literal new heights.
Indeed, the last four “Missions” have brought consistency to this once-chameleonic franchise by focusing on Ethan Hunt’s all too human vulnerabilities; namely, the super-spy’s attachment to his estranged wife (Michelle Monaghan, whose storyline was resolved in 2018’s majestic “Fallout”), and how such intimate relationships tend to get in the way of saving the world. It’s hard for anyone to prioritize the greater good when their own happiness is hanging in the balance, but Hunt’s ultimate strength has always been his ability to make the impossible choice. That Hunt is a real person under his various masks is what makes him so dangerous, and that he’s played by the most alien and unrelatable of movie stars is what makes him so compelling.
Over time, the “Mission: Impossible” series has forged a cohesive identity through its obsession with balancing the human element against bottom-line calculations, and that’s why it’s become such a natural place for Cruise to motorcycle into traffic around the Arc de Triomphe, fly a motorcycle off the top of a mountain in Norway, or otherwise showcase that he’s the only A-lister mad enough to save the movies from themselves. These death-defying spectacles risk becoming snuff films in the service of self-preservation; absent the unbridled nostalgia of “Maverick,” the forward-thinking new installment feels like nothing less than a $300 million backdrop for Cruise to argue that blockbusters can’t afford to lose their last shred of believability.
“Mission: Impossible” has always taken place in a shadow world where you can’t believe your own two eyes, and so it feels natural for “Dead Reckoning Part One” to take such direct aim at the clear and present dangers posed by our digital future. By re-re-re-affirming how satisfying practical action setpieces can be, Cruise and returning director Christopher McQuarrie set the stage for a story about why technology shouldn’t be fully entrusted with the things that require a human touch.
Ridiculous from the start but also strangely fresh for yet another 21st century tentpole about a rogue A.I., “Dead Reckoning Part One” may not be the best movie in the “Mission: Impossible” franchise — there’s no topping the raw adrenaline rush of “Fallout,” and McQuarrie is smart enough not to try — but this extravagantly entertaining Dolby soap opera nails what the “Mission: Impossible” franchise does best: Weaponizing artifice and illusion in order to fight for a world that’s still worth believing in.
That being said, the decision to make the bad guy a string of code or whatever — with heavy emphasis on the whatever — can’t help but feel a bit like throwing in the towel, least of all in a series that’s suffered from a serious villain problem from the very beginning (Philip Seymour Hoffman being the sole and undeniable exception). Which isn’t to say that Ethan Hunt and his pals at the Impossible Mission Force are tasked with defeating a bad piece of malware or another run of the mill Skynet ripoff. Far from it.
“The Entity,” as it’s referred to approximately every five seconds over the course of this luxurious 163-minute film, is a piece of A.I. so elegant that it decides to throw an “Eyes Wide Shut”-like costume ball for itself in a Venetian palace (classic Entity behavior), and so elaborate that its master plan will take an entire second film to fully unpack. At one point someone tells Hunt that he’s “playing four-dimensional chess with an algorithm,” but it’s a match that McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen’s script largely streamlines into the series’ usual game of high-wire MacGuffin chasing, with the Entity convinced that it has enough data to predict Hunt’s every move.
Essentially, the streaming algorithm identifies Tom Cruise as the only person who can stop it, and therefore does everything in its power to kill him; art imitating life imitating art. Little does the Entity know that it’s dealing with the living manifestation of destiny himself, now rebranded as “a mind-reading, shape-shifting incarnation of chaos.”
If the deeply satisfying “Dead Reckoning Part One” only feels unfinished or half-told because of the human stooge the Entity hires to do its bidding: A zero-impression terrorist named Gabriel (Esai Morales) who was supposedly instrumental in Hunt’s decision to join the IMF all those years ago. We learn next to nothing about their overlapping pasts over the course of this movie, which feels like an egregious oversight because Gabriel has so little to offer beyond generic intrigue, sinister handsomeness, and an unstoppable crony of his own (a homicidal Pom Klementieff, electrifying despite the tropiness of the whole “silent Asian henchwoman” archetype).
What the “mysterious figure from Hunt’s past” approach really offers this movie is a different and more classically melodramatic tone than we got from the franchise’s last few installments, as “Dead Reckoning” pivots away from the orgiastic action that shaped “Fallout,” and towards something that more closely resembles a high-octane “Death in Venice” or a John Frankenheimer remake of “Roman Holiday” than it does the likes of “Fury Road.” There are still plenty of bullets fired, but there’s also a moonlit sword fight between Gabriel and Rebecca Ferguson’s ice-cold (and oh so cool) Ilsa Faust atop the Ponte Minich, a luminous bridge in the Sestiere Castello. Cruise still gets to sprint around with stop-motion stiffness (that he thinks he’s 40 is a lot more noticeable than the fact that he’s actually 61), but this Hunt always seems to be running away from something even when he’s hurtling towards something else.
In stark contrast to several of the previous “Mission”s, Hunt and his team, headlined as usual by Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames’ snippy hackers, are presented as more prey than predator. Likewise, this movie’s rather small array of action setpieces — all of them fresh, tactile, and utterly spectacular in a way that continues to put the rest of Hollywood to shame — are less dependent on what the spies are trying to accomplish than what they’re hoping to avoid. Or escape.
Case in point: The frantic and extremely funny mid-film chase through the streets of central Rome, during which Hunt is handcuffed to the sexy pickpocket (franchise newcomer Hayley Atwell) who might be able to lead him to the MacGuffin. A jaw-dropping “how the fuck did they do that?” mega-flex in an age when movies are seldom magical enough to beg that question, the city-wide jailbreak combines artfully destructive slapstick with the loudest car crashes you’ve ever heard to create the kind of cinematic euphoria that still can’t be faked or forged at home (VR headsets might allow rich people to enjoy IMAX-sized screens on their living room couches, but “Dead Reckoning” is a bone-shaking reminder that sound is the real secret weapon of the theatrical experience). Not since “La Dolce Vita” has a film more effectively transformed ancient Rome into a modern playground, a fitting touch for a blockbuster so desperate to squeeze a few new dollops of joy from the ruins that surround it.
Oh, one more insane flex while we’re on the subject: Shooting an elaborate first-act heist sequence, complete with hundreds of extras and a nuclear bomb, in the world’s biggest airport terminal just before it opened to the public. The wow factor might not rate alongside the Rome chase to come, but hyper-convincing production design and a frightening degree of directorial confidence make for a powerful combination, and McQuarrie has so much fun with the space that you’re basically all-in for whatever the movie does next by the time “Dead Reckoning” takes off from Abu Dhabi.
This being a “Mission: Impossible” movie, it goes without saying that Hunt is also trying to avoid the government that supposedly cuts his checks, and “Dead Reckoning” finds the super-spy going more rogue than he’s ever gone rogue before. The IMF has long acted like Dennis the Menace to the CIA’s Mr. Wilson, but — in another overt nod to the past, this one a lot more rewarding than what Gabriel brings to the picture — the tension between the two is ramped up even further by the reappearance of Hunt’s second-least favorite colleague from the first “Mission: Impossible” almost 30 years ago: The fantastically punchable Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny, reprising the role as only he could). And Kittridge of course has a goon squad of his own, with Shea Whigham and Greg Tarzan Davis playing a pair of enforcers who add a pinch of “are we the baddies?” flavor to the periphery of every major action sequence.
You see, Hunt doesn’t trust any country on Earth with control of the Entity, including his own. Power is never safe in the hands of anyone who cares about algorithmic data more than people. Nevertheless, “Dead Reckoning” is only able to cast our digital future as an enemy unto itself because its heroes wield some pretty spiffy technology of their own, and it would be wrong to suggest the “Mission: Impossible” movies outright reject the tools of modern Hollywood. Tom Cruise might be the world’s least insurable film star, but he’s not Amish.
The marketing campaign for this sequel kicked off with a behind-the-scenes look at “the biggest stunt in cinema history,” in which Cruise drives a Honda CRF 250 off the peak of a Norwegian mountain and then plunges 4,000 feet into a ravine before opening his parachute, and even that head-shaking tribute to practical magic made it clear that the full effect — still a heart-in-your-throat experience after eons of hype — was only possible with the help of some computer enhancement.
The trick remains using such tools responsibly; striking the right balance between humanity and artificiality. It’s a line that Cruise has needed to walk since the early days of his stardom, only for that walk to become a high-wire act after the couch-jumping Scientology of it all made it that much harder for audiences to see themselves in his screen persona. What allows “Dead Reckoning Part One” to become more than the sum of its semi-modular parts is McQuarrie’s gift for expressing character through action, especially during a climactic setpiece that challenges Hunt to forfeit what little is left of his soul.
A glorified trolley problem set aboard the Orient Express, the situation itself is pretty standard for the “Mission” series, but the terms here are a bit starker and more nuanced than ever before. Likewise, the action might seem small-scale when compared to the CGI bonanzas that today’s audiences have been conditioned to expect from the third act of a studio blockbuster, but it’s conducted with such convincing force that it feels bigger and more involving than anything the Avengers have ever had to face (it also feels like a nod back to action cinema’s silent roots, when all you needed to make a great movie was a guy, some guns, and a really big train).
Besides, expectations can be misleading. The Entity might be able to throw itself a banging shindig, but even the most advanced predictive learning algorithms on the planet can’t fully account for the human element. The future isn’t written yet — nothing is certain. The movies and/or the world might be trending in one direction, but it’s never too late to adjust course. “Our lives are the sum of our choices,” someone gravely intones at one point, and Tom Cruise is willing to risk his life to remind us that we can still choose what we want tomorrow to look like. Then again, saving the world isn’t much of a choice when you’re the only one who can do it, and “Dead Reckoning Part One” makes pretty damn clear that Ethan Hunt has no equal. That bodes well for “Dead Reckoning Part Two.” Much less so for everything that follows.
Grade: B+
Paramount Pictures will release “Mission: Impossible — Dead ReckoningPart One” in theaterson Wednesday, July 12.
