The fact that Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One was held up for years by a global pandemic to finally reach theaters at a time when the public is increasingly attuned to the proliferation of AI tools helps a lot The film seems eerily prescient – not about the state of the art itself, but the extent to which it is ingrained in people’s minds. In his latest outing as Ethan Hunt, Tom Cruise delivers the kind of skilled, charismatic, and more-than-anticipated performance needed to sell the seventh installment in an action franchise about an aging super-spy whose longtime team of allies are all getting on in years.
But despite Cruise’s absolute perfection as a stunt-oriented action hero and director Christopher McQuarrie, who has a keen flair for creating spectacular action set pieces that genuinely feel like they’re impossible to survive, Dead Reckoning Part One just can’t stop in his own way with an over-reliance on self-referential jokes and ready-made clichés.
Set some time after the events of Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Dead Reckoning Part One tells the intricate and often rather circumstantial story of how Ethan Hunt (Cruise), agent of the Impossible Mission Force, and his team of agents are tasked with destroying the world to be rescued from a sentient, Machiavellian artificial intelligence that has the power to unleash the next series of global wars. Throughout the film, no one seems to fully understand what “The Entity” – Dead Reckoning’s deeply unimaginative name for its amorphous, faceless, mostly digital antagonist – is or was originally intended to be used for. But after a mysterious accident releases the program into the wild along with the two halves of a physical key needed to control or destroy it, a covert international arms race ensues, with several world powers – including the United States – competing for it vying to get their hands on it in hopes of shaping the future in their favor.
Image: Paramount Pictures and Skydance
In Mission: Impossible films, suspense, intrigue and action have always taken precedence over meaningful storytelling. But Dead Reckoning spends so much time trying to explain things clearly (and often fails) – like what the entity is and how it’s different from everything else. Ethan, Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg). ) have never experienced it before — that the film often feels firmly anchored in parody territory.
Aside from Cruise, who delivers a surprisingly low-key, thoughtful performance as Hunt — who never says anything about feeling like a 59-year-old man being played by a 62-year-old, yet still feeling appropriately aged — practically everyone Others in the film strangely feel trapped in a higher, more excited gear of action film acting that tends to feel hollow. This is particularly evident in the film’s many dramatically shot exposure-dump sequences, where the over-the-shoulder looks are so sharply choreographed and executed that it’s easy to imagine the actors practicing them while listening to the most melodramatic music possible .
But while there are plenty of moments where the mood deviates a bit, there are also a few moments centered around new characters like Hayley Atwell’s Grace and Pom Klementieff that stand out for the actors’ ability to Complimenting instead of approaching, Cruise’s energy. Throughout the film, it’s clear that while Paramount has longer-term plans for the larger Mission: Impossible franchise, Ethan Hunt won’t always be the center of attention, and one of the more impressive things about Dead Reckoning is how well it can communicate that a changing of the guard imminent without feeling like an overwrought farewell to Cruise.
Most impressive, of course, are the film’s action sequences — or at least they would be if Dead Reckoning’s ad campaign didn’t highlight (and kind of spoil) many of the more inspired set pieces featuring Ethan and co. around the world. Just as Dead Reckoning’s delay made the AI focus feel in tune with the current news cycle, the film, released just a few weeks after “Almost created a sense of deja vu caused by the many, many nostalgic pieces is reinforced.
For all the foundations it’s laying for the future of the franchise, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (probably right) reckons it can appeal to its core audience by rehashing beats from previous films and injecting them with a hefty dose of meta -Humor spiced up so you get the gist of it all. But while this approach might work for people who have faithfully followed the adventures of Ethan Hunt over the past 27 years, it might be hard to sell to newcomers – especially considering that this is only half the story of Mission: Impossible – Dead” next year is The second part of Reckoning should be over.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One also stars Esai Morales, Vanessa Kirby, Henry Czerny, Frederick Schmidt, Greg Tarzan Davis and Shea Whigham. The film hits theaters on July 12.