Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning, Part 1

"Couldn't You Have Told Me This a Little Bit Sooner?"

or

"Is There Anyone Not Chasing Us?"

 

One can't start out a review of Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning (Part 1) without giving props. It is one busy movie, filled with some amazing stunt work and a dedication to craft that one shakes their head in amazement that these things were thought up and brought to some spectacular life. The immediate reaction to one of these things evokes horror and then giggles as they are pain-stakingly realized to convince you that 1) they actually happened and 2) that they actually COULD happen. And a rueful head-nod must go to "Mr. Gung-Ho" Tom Cruise for putting himself "out there" just because he could. One has to say all this, because for the most part this review will trash this entry in the franchise, surely its weakest entry since Mission: Impossible 2.

 

But, wow, those stunts sure are amazing. The trouble is that's what the movie is all about, the stunts and those alone have never made a good movie. What they show is that the characters have an abnormal survival instinct and the tenacity of pit-bulls to pull though whatever obstacle can be thrown, dropped, propelled and fired at them. And that's it for character development. Oh, there's some ret-conning about "how Ethan Hunt became Ethan Hunt" as well as other agents into the IMF, but it's as unsubstantial as...well, as the entire make-up of the IMF apparently is in the spy hierarchy if we're to believe this movie.

The mission this time (should we decide to accept it, and I, frankly, didn't) is to recover the latest "McGuffin" in the series, the two-part "Cruciform Key", which is used to power up "an active learning defense system" which is touted by its Soviet creators as "the state of the art of war." Timely, since we're all worried about AI (and this is where I insert my "written by human hands" disclosure). The Vicious Thingy was last seen on board the Soviet submarine K699, the Sebastopol, which sits at the bottom of the Bering Sea a victim of its own system's ability to present false data to the sub crew causing them to launch a torpedo attack against a ghost target and blowing themselves up. This is one nasty little AI that can wreak havoc on countries and their defenses, but the world's governments don't want to destroy it, so much as control it. World leaders tend to have a lot of hubris; who wants to bet that they learn a lesson in humility in Part 2?

IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise), despite his"habitual rogue tendencies," is enlisted to find the key. Who has it? Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), late colleague, who is not so late and has one-half of the key. Hunt and the team (Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg) decide to go after the other half of the key, where they run into an atomic bomb trap (okay) and a pick-pocket named Grace (Hayley Atwell), who manages to lift the other half of the key from the prospective seller, complicating matters. Hunt also runs into a "face from the past" (Esai Morales), who seems to have the ability to not appear on surveillance systems. But, not the ability to make one of those full-head disguises that Ethan depends on in these movies.

What happens next? Chases. Lots of chases. Ethan and Grace are chased by land, foot, wheels, by the CIA, by Morales' "Gabriel"—along with Pom Klementieff's killing machine, Paris—by the forces of arms dealer The White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), by his own IMF Chief Kittridge (welcome back to the series, Henry Czerny!) by the local constabulary, and evidently anyone with a cell-phone or police scanner, until everyone meets on the Orient Express, and everything just goes literally right off the rails. Most of this is played with deadly earnestness, but one can't help but chuckle at the "Perils of Pauline" aspect of it, some of it is right out of silent movies.

But, the plot is a clunker. And the dialog at times is so vaguely inconsequential (and delivered so seriously) that you wonder if people are speaking in spy code. So, this entry in the series—the 7th—is overwhelming in stunts and underwhelming in story—and inventiveness—even though everyone bravely battles on.

I had much the same reaction to the very stunty recent Indiana Jones movie, which was only saved by a particularly risky (and fanciful) last act. This doesn't have something like that, but it does have another fight on a train with subsequent derailment, and another smashing car chase in a vehicle not built for those things.

 

The trailer for M:I7 exposed the weakness of the film by just showing stunts and fights, as that seemed to be all it has because, for the first time, they seemed to be borrowing from the James Bond series: the train fight from Octopussy, the Citroen chase from For Your Eyes Only becomes a Fiat 500e chase here, with Cruise and Atwell handcuffed as a similar situation in Tomorrow Never Dies, the whole "world-spy-network-hijack" idea comes from SPECTRE (notice that when the "Mission: Impossible" series borrows from Bond, it doesn't borrow from very good ones?), then that very hyped motorcycle jump has echoes of The Spy Who Loved Me. Usually, it's the Bond films that borrow from other films—maybe M:I is running out of ideas.

There are other odd little issues, like that director McQuarrie (who has done some inspired work in previous film in the series) seems to have shot some dialog scenes using three cameras, that are edited in such a way that, when edited together, seems to have the actors not addressing each other in conversation. It's odd...and a little off-putting. Given the attention to detail in the action sequences, why would something like that occur?

 

Still, despite the reservations I have about the film, I hope it has a great box-office return. The film industry needs a little help right now, and this Summer's expected blockbusters have been under-achieving. A solid box-office return could reverse that trend, and help movie-makers battle the real-world challenges of AI.