After saving movie theatres in the USA with “Top Gun: Maverick”, Hollywood’s resident stunt fanatic Tom Cruise is back with the franchise that keeps on giving. With only one movie that can be considered bad per se, the Mission: Impossible franchise has been one of the most consistent movie franchises Hollywood has provided. Will Dead Reckoning Part One continue that streak?
The plot? It’s a Mission: Impossible movie. You know the drill.
An experimental warfare AI called “The Entity” becomes sentient and goes rogue. Various countries are now after a key gone missing that can control the AI. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team plan to destroy it. This leads Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), Hunt’s former boss and current director of the CIA, to send a team to capture him. The AI has its own plan and hires a hit squad led by Gabriel (Esai Morales) to kill Hunt. Implicated in all this is a thief named Grace (Hayley Atwell).
The Mission: Impossible movies are like the Dark Souls series of video games. Different setting, same beats. A plot about an AI planning to control the world sounds old-hat, but it’s gained relevance in the age of social media, fake news and the advent of AI technologies like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion. The plot has never been the main draw of the recent Mission: Impossible movies though. It’s just a delivery system for whatever crazy stunt that Tom Cruise is pulling off this time.
The cast is solid. Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames do their thing. Rebecca Ferguson is great as always. As a big fan of the first M:I movie, I was giddy to see Henry Czerny play Kittridge again and he delivers. Even though I would have loved to see a bit more personality on her, Pom Klementieff does a good job as a crazy assassin.
Esai Morales’s Gabriel is…fine. I would have preferred it if he was just another goon hired by the AI. Instead, the movie tries to make him the central reason that Ethan joined the IMF in the first place. While that level of retconning could have worked if the villain was menacing and/or charming, it falls flat here.
The best part of the movie is really Hayley Atwell. With her charisma that goes for days, she’s a terrific addition to the cast. Whether it be bamboozling Hunt with her pickpocketing skills or getting flummoxed that she’s part of a global manhunt, Atwell sells Grace’s confidence and fear perfectly. I would love it if she became part of the regular cast.
And of course, Tom Cruise himself. Even after all these years, he has the verve and vigor to sprint like a madman and pull off his own stunts. Most people don’t consider Cruise to be a serious actor, which I find a bit annoying. It’s his subtle performance that makes a super spy feel human. It’s his intensity that makes you believe Hunt will go to any lengths for the people he cares about. Sure, he might not be outdoing Daniel Day Lewis, but Tom Cruise has always brought his acting chops to Ethan Hunt.
All that said…
Dead Reckoning’s biggest flaw is its runtime at 2 hours and 43 minutes. To its credit, the movie never felt like it lagged. It even mined a good deal of comedy from that runtime. However, I did get the feeling that the movie was stretching its scenes more than necessary to justify its runtime. Barring a few action scenes in the 2nd half, even the action scenes felt a bit stretched. The standouts were the alley fight between Cruise and Klementieff and the final train sequence. Every part of those sequences felt exhilarating.
But again, the rest of the movie feels a bit stretched.
If the dialogues were good, I wouldn’t have complained. But this is the Mission: Impossible series we are talking about.
While dialogue writing has never been the strong suit of the M:I movies, they have been getting progressively cringe-worthy since Rogue Nation and Dead Reckoning continues that streak. There’s no Alec Baldwin calling Hunt as the living manifestation of destiny, but in his place is Shea Whigham calling him an agent of chaos. The dialogue takes itself a bit too seriously. While an intense Tom Cruise can make these dialogues work, the others have a hard time selling it.
Honestly, clean up the dialogue a bit and cut the runtime on a few scenes and you’d have a much better version of Dead Reckoning: Part One. Even with that, Dead Reckoning feels a bit incomplete. It is to be expected, being part one of a two part movie. A part of me does wonder whether this needed to be a two-part movie at all.
Dead Reckoning: Part One isn’t going to crack within the top three M:I movies. It feels a bit long in the tooth and a bit incomplete to make that list. Even with that said, it’s still a good Mission Impossible movie. The action is solid, the characters, new and old, are great and if nothing else, the sight of Tom Cruise barreling through the streets of Rome alone is worth the price of admission.
(You can check my article about where Dead Reckoning Part One ranks in my list of Mission: Impossible movies)