The ostensible villain in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is Gabriel (Esai Morales), a shadowy black ops agent servicing a community of global power brokers with a theft here, an assassination there. From his biblical name to his lethal, avenging-angel skill set—when you were partying, he studied the blade—Gabriel cuts an imposing figure. But the film’s real big bad—revealed early on enough in the plot that it’s not a spoiler to say so—is a sentient artificial intelligence program known as The Entity, which gets whispered about in secret briefings and is represented visually as a mass of blue tentacles undulating menacingly like a demonic screensaver across laptops, cellphones, and the jumbotrons at a late-night Venetian rave.
As an avatar of the impending techno-apocalypse, The Entity is as implacable as HAL 9000 and as power-hungry as Skynet; its capabilities include (but are not limited to) collapsing the world’s economic systems, evading national-security protocols, and rerouting nuclear weapons on a whim. It can also turn Gabriel invisible, cloaking him from surveillance satellites like a futuristic vampire. Whether by coincidence or allegorical design, it’s hard to imagine a more topical antagonist for Tom Cruise, and not just because the first display of its power involves a brutally mangled deep-sea submersible.
What keeps this AI up at night instead of calmly dreaming of electric sheep is the possibility that there exists one flesh-and-blood person brave, talented, and resourceful enough to be a worthy foe—to outwit The Entity’s flawless probability-generating matrix and deliver humanity from the end of the world as we know it.
Ethan Hunt has always been evil’s worst nightmare. He’s been at this long enough that his first cinematic assignment involved an actual floppy disk, as much a relic of the mid-’90s as U2 and Brian De Palma, whose combined presence and artistic gravitas went a long way toward legitimizing Cruise’s first true bid for action-icon status post Top Gun. An uncommonly adult blockbuster filled with sex and beyond-PG-13 violence and suffused with a nasty sense of humor—never more so than when De Palma killed off most of Cruise’s IMF teammates in the first half hour—Mission: Impossible predated Cruise’s megalomaniacal reinvention as the hardest-working man in show business. Released after the minor debacle of Interview With the Vampire, it was a movie designed to give Hollywood’s most anodyne headliner a little bit of edge (as opposed to Jerry Maguire, also released in 1996, which sought to domesticate him once and for all). The metamorphosis took: In the film’s most satisfying dramatic sequence, Ethan went head-to-head against his duplicitous boss, Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), warning the older man during a fraught debriefing that he’d never seen his star agent “very upset”—a line that goofed on Cruise’s benign persona before it was literally exploded with a carefully placed stick of pyrotechnic chewing gum.
In Dead Reckoning, Kittridge is back, and considerably more conscious of what Ethan is capable of; he’s also aware of The Entity, and knows that his former underling is his best bet at securing this potential weapon of mass destruction, even if he’s understandably hesitant to come in from the cold. A wonderfully menacing Canadian character actor who’s spent the last few decades in network TV purgatory, Czerny picks up nicely where his performance left off nearly 30 years ago: He’s gone gray, all the better to ignite his gelignite eyes, and his scenes with Cruise crackle with a terse, quasi-mythical nostalgia (right down to the canted, De Palma–ish camera angles) and set the tone for a movie taking a leisurely, purposeful victory lap around its own legacy. If some of the scenes here seem a bit familiar, that’s the price of endurance. It’s hard for a series to break new ground when it’s already done it all.
Typically, when a franchise achieves self-awareness it becomes a bit like The Entity: cool, detached, and mean-spirited. Dead Reckoning avoids these pitfalls as nimbly as its hero stick-shifts through narrow cobblestone streets. The movie is the third consecutive Mission: Impossible film directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who’s neither a grand stylist like De Palma or Mission: Impossible 2’s John Woo nor a storytelling “visionary” like J.J. Abrams, whose M:I III was, Philip Seymour Hoffman notwithstanding, a bit of a drag. McQuarrie’s signature is more like a serial number: Each unit engineered on his watch holds together on its own terms while locking into a larger design. His skillful self-effacement—and careful obeisance to Cruise’s whims—makes him the perfect caretaker for a franchise that continues to exist and excel as a weird sort of paradox, a box office juggernaut defined by all the things that it is not.
For instance, the M:I movies are not superhero fables, but their steady kineticism (and patient world-building) outstrips Marvel’s sitcom blandness and the DCEU’s faux-mythic bombast in one fell swoop. They’re not calamitous, incoherent brand extensions like the Transformers sequels or dusty, desperate intellectual property renovations à la Indiana Jones. They’re not angling for cult status or backdoor subversion. They’re not typically bloated (Dead Reckoning is the longest entry so far and feels considerably shorter than its 163 minutes) or cluttered (Cruise sucks up too much oxygen to permit a huge ensemble of characters); they’re mostly unpretentious in ways that escape a habitual significance-fetishist like Christopher Nolan, whose silliest and most enjoyable recent movie, Tenet, felt a bit like a Mission: Impossible riff. Above all, in an era when the steady proliferation of CGI in both the foreground and background of mainstream moviemaking has made literally anything seem possible, they’re largely, proudly analog, showcasing a commitment to stunt work that feels like an existential thesis statement.
At this point in his career, Cruise can set his own mandate as a leading man, and his mission—which he chooses to accept with a vengeance—is to emphasize the degree of difficulty inherent in making action movies the old-fashioned way, almost as an ontological intervention against some larger, encroaching phenomenon of artificiality. If you were to make a list of the things that make Tom Cruise (as opposed to Ethan Hunt) very upset, the no. 1 entry (above Matt Lauer, psychiatry, streaming platforms, and The Master) would surely be the kind of digital manipulation practiced by The Entity and Hollywood alike. In last year’s Top Gun: Maverick, we were consistently reminded that a fighter plane is less important than the pilot flying it, which would be a cliché if not for the fact that Cruise—as opposed to his alter ego Pete Mitchell—was actually the guy with his hand on the throttle. Similarly, in Dead Reckoning the question of why Ethan Hunt rides a motorcycle off a vertiginous cliffside and parachutes to safety—all in one seamless shot—is less important than knowing Cruise did it, over and over again, and that the stunt was captured on the first day of shooting as a safeguard on behalf of his collaborators and financiers. “Let’s know on day one what is going to happen,” Cruise told Entertainment Tonight recently. “Do we all continue or is it a major rewrite?”
If we’re ranking heart-in-throat moments, the motorcycle jump—unveiled on YouTube last December—leapfrogs Ghost Protocol’s skyscraper climb and Rogue Nation’s HALO drop; for about 90 seconds, it transforms the film into a morbidly fascinating documentary in which Cruise—whose instincts as a physical comedian rival Buster Keaton and Jackie Chan—channels what must have been very real terror into a reckless leap of faith. (The sequence evokes no less than the classic ski jump in The Spy Who Loved Me, minus a visual detail as witty as Roger Moore’s Union Jack parachute.) Moments like these are difficult to review because they don’t demand analysis so much as awe. Suffice it to say that it achieves the intended effect and then some.
As for the movie itself, it’s about on par with its immediate predecessors: a swift, absorbing string of implausibilities, luxuriously packaged in stunning detail. If it’s not quite as strapping as 2018’s Fallout, that could have something to do with the fact that the production was interrupted by COVID, or maybe McQuarrie’s script (cowritten by playwright Erik Jendresen) just isn’t as tight. Like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Dead Reckoning is basically a two-and-a-half-hour game of hot potato involving a pocket-sized MacGuffin. On one side, we have Gabriel and his silent, harlequin-doll henchwoman Paris (Pom Klementieff, channeling Daryl Hannah in Blade Runner); on the other, Ethan rounds up his usual coterie of disavowed pals Benji (Simon Pegg), Luther (Ving Rhames), and Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson), who’s first seen holding her own against some bounty hunters somewhere in the Middle East. (Between this film and the Dune series, Ferguson must have something in her contracts about acting in the middle of sandstorms.) Beyond providing the requisite continuity, these characters are here to tease the possibility of collateral damage; as the tech-savvy Luther surmises, the best way for The Entity to hurt Ethan is to kill off the people closest to him.
One hint at the relative expendability of each gang member lies in the introduction of a new potential love interest, a chaotic British pickpocket named Grace, played by Hayley Atwell with the deadpan aplomb of an actress who’ll be sticking around for a while. The most enjoyable performance, though, is given by Fallout alumnus Vanessa Kirby as the sweetly cuckoo arms dealer Alanna Mitsopolis, known colloquially as The White Widow. Alanna, who’s worth billions on top of her illegal activities, has the eccentric patrician act down pat, but she’s also holding in something wilder and more unnerving: She’s got a faraway smile and huge, helter-skelter eyes that pop covetously every time she sees Ethan. Like she did in Fallout, Kirby gives Dead Reckoning a little bit of goofy, glamorous lift; in the funniest scene, she’s even obliged to spoof her own mannerisms in a way that shows off tremendous technical skill and a trouper’s good humor. Where Cruise seems impervious to self-parody, Kirby luxuriates in it.
As its nightmare-for-a-copy-editor title suggests, Dead Reckoning is an incomplete narrative, although it at least officially owns its cliffhanger status; it’s not as visually beautiful or expressive as the thoroughly bifurcated Across the Spider-Verse, but it does a better job at leaving us wanting more instead of just feeling abandoned. The closing camera movement that brings its half-told story full circle combines showmanship with structural integrity, as good a summation as any of the kind of quality-controlled products that Cruise and McQuarrie are selling. At the end of the day, they’re as mercenary as Gabriel, but in a cinematic landscape overrun by movies content with being artificially intelligent or strategically dumbed down—or both—their filmmaking smarts almost make them seem like heroes.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.
Adam Nayman
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