For better or worse, Mission: Impossible has become the literal definition of set-piece cinema, with each new installment promising an even more bombastic, edge-of-your-seat stunt sequence performed by the ‘one and only saviour of cinema’, Tom Cruise. Whilst previous films in the series have seen Cruise’s IMF agent Ethan Hunt scale the largest tower in the world (the Burj Khalifa, Dubai) in Ghost Protocol, strap himself to the side of an airbus in Rogue Nation, and perform a HALO jump in Fallout, this seventh outing sees the now 61-year-old actor ride a motorcycle off of an Austrian cliff, only to parachute to safety on board the Orient Express.
What about the plot, you ask? The plot is unimportant, an incidental factor that plods along behind Cruise‘s own impossible mission to one-up himself with a new death-defying stunt for every film. Ostensibly, Dead Reckoning sees Cruise and his IMF team – Simon Pegg’s Benji, Ving Rhames’ Luther, and Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa – attempt to recover a key that grants the user the ability to exploit an apparently self-aware and very much hostile artificial intelligence known as ‘The Entity’. Of course, other governments, rogue agents and weapons dealers are all vying for the same narrative MacGuffin as well, including Vanessa Kirby’s Alanna (last seen in Fallout) and a newcomer to the franchise, the terrorist Gabriel (Esai Morales) who is working on behalf of The Entity itself.
Clearly a response to the real world’s own growing concern over A.I. and its potential impact on warfare and politics (let alone day-to-day life!), Dead Reckoning releases as a timely riff on the question: ‘What if Chat-GPT was like, really, really smart – like, out to kill us smart?!?!’ In a sense, this is a cautionary tale, albeit one that appears to have little interest in the realities or even possibilities of such technology (why the A.I. can be overcome by an actual physical key is never really explained). Take a second to consider any of the film’s narrative machinations and the plot holes come at you thick and fast; Cruise’s ludicrously repeated sprint between locations and plot points working to keep the momentum up, a sense that he is literally trying to outrun the film’s frequent contrivances and question marks.
In a first for the series, Dead Reckoning is billed as Part One of Two, with the sequel reportedly due for a 2024 release. As such, the film’s threadbare story is left mostly unresolved, although not on the kind of cliffhanger moment one might expect (Cruise has already jumped off said cliff!) You can enjoy Dead Reckoning Part One on its own terms, for the most part, with little info needing to be recapped once Part Two makes its way onto screens.
There are bad guys; there are explosions; Hunt/Cruise will save the day.
But enough with the nitpicking, Chris! Such criticisms aren’t why you sit down to watch a Mission: Impossible film, are they? You watch it for the action and the spectacle – something that the film has in droves. Rather than the aforementioned cliff jump, a white-knuckle car chase through Rome was, for me, the action highlight of the film. It’s a sequence that sees Cruise handcuffed to another new addition to the franchise, Hayley Atwell’s master thief – Grace – as they attempt to make a getaway. In these moments, Dead Reckoning is pure cinematic joy, an ode to the spectacular (and specifically in-camera, practically-realised) visual possibilities of big-screen entertainment. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter who is chasing them or why: it’s the thrill of watching these adrenaline-driven moments that draws in the audience and packs a punch. Like other films in the franchise, as well as last year’s brilliant Top Gun: Maverick, so much of what we see on screen is based on practical stuntwork and live-action performances. Yes, safety harnesses and rigs have been airbrushed away, but Cruise’s old-school approach to action cinema effortlessly stands out amongst other recent action films that depend upon the now commonplace and often overly-used crutch of VFX.
Say what you want about Cruise – and there is a hell of a lot to say about the notoriously eccentric, often controversial, and generally unhinged scientologist – but he can make one hell of a blockbuster!
Notes from the Multiplex 