Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning unwittingly holds an undesirable spot in Hollywood history. As one of the pandemic’s first mainstream casualties, the two-parter simultaneously became the first production to be impacted by and bounce back from COVID’s industry-shuttering impact, setting a benchmark for other movies to emulate. After a whopping series-expensive $290 million budget and a turbulent 3 years in the making, the first-half finally held out all streaming bids and made it to theaters, its marketing leaning heavily into some wild, dangerous, and widely publicized stunts by its lead man. And it’s big on entertainment for the most part, the one promise it consistently sold to its audiences and delivers on, even though the clunky exposition comes in the way of its heart-stopping action sequences.
Like countless other motion pictures heralding the arrival of malevolent machines, Dead Reckoning is about a rogue AI becoming sentient and threatening to disrupt world order. It uses a human, Gabriel (Esai Morales), to do its bidding, one who is somehow convinced that a new world order needs to surface by tearing the current one down. The AI has infiltrated pretty much every country’s miltary systems and stock markets, triggering a race amongst the world’s superpowers to enslave and exploit it for their own gain. Key to all of this is a key split into two pieces that combine to unlock something unknown but powerful. The pursuit of the key and its purpose serves as the movie’s MacGuffin and engages everyone from the CIA to the IMF in seizing control of it, before it can be misused.
Unlike the previous installments, Dead Reckoning integrates its plot with the story in a rather clunky way. I suspect it has to do with claims made by director Christopher McQuarrie and star-producer Tom Cruise on stitching the plot to fit the action sequences instead of the other way around, adopting a more figure-it-out-as-you-go approach. It leans on heavy exposition delivered by characters in long monologues, literally trying to paraphrase and summarize the occassionally convoluted story. It’s almost as if there’s a meta-awareness of audiences finding the plot hard to follow, resulting in characters frequently breaking down what has happened in the movie thus far. This juxtaposition of storytelling and action often breaks the film’s rhythm, and the longish running time certainly doesn’t help its case.
Where entries like Fallout and Ghost Protocol struck the right balance of plot, character, and action, this one stretches dialogue a bit too far. The delivery is far from succinct and seems intent on over-explaining. Some developments either don’t land that well, or seem quite anticlimactic in the face of what the characters have been through, the fate of Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust in particular. And while past movies have involved a healthy amount of teamwork, that’s largely lacking from the climactic mission. Thus, while both Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) shine earlier in the story when they run dual missions simultaneously by guiding Cruise and diffusing a bomb, they’re otherwise mostly relegated to expressing concern in platitudes. The finale essentially becomes a partnership between Cruise and franchise newcomer Grace (Hayley Atwell), with Luther dispatched to a remote, offline location to figure out the AI’s mechanics, and Benji stuck giving directions to Ethan.
Dead Reckoning certainly won’t win any brownie points for pushing an innovative plot. And neither are its creators gunning for the Oscars. As intriguing and fascinating as the plot developments, their relevance to present-day issues, and the numerous twists can be, they’re not why we watch these movies. We watch them for the spectacularly crafted action set-pieces, which Dead Reckoning has aplenty of. Between a thrilling car chase across the streets of Rome, a fist-fight in the alleys of Venice, and a train-wreck along the Swiss alps, Dead Reckoning offers viewers some well-choreographed, immaculately-designed stunts that are designed to get audiences roaring. Cruise’s much publicized stunt driving a bike off a cliff almost seems self-aware of its audacity and ridiculousness, and left my theatrical screening dead silent, with goosebumps rarely induced by CGI efforts.
In many ways, Dead Reckoning almost harkens back to the first Mission: Impossible. Cruise (Ethan Hunt), is now touching 60, closer in age to Jim Phelps (Jon Voight). Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) returns to the franchise after being absent from all movies since the first, and his meeting with Cruise as glimpsed in the trailer is framed to deliberately recreate their pivotal interaction from the first one. The intricate storyline is akin to a knot of threads that always seems within reach of unraveling, until it isn’t. There’s a definite emphasis on storytelling and providing characters adequate screentime, even though its efficacy is questionable. And much of the climax takes place on a train, with one character impersonating another via masks, a fight atop the train’s roof, a helicopter entering the scene, and our action heroes missing a train tunnel by a hairline. Given that the two back-to-back releases were originally meant to serve as Ethan Hunt’s swan song, the callbacks are far from unintentional, nevermind that the game-plan has changed since then.
Like their storytelling, Mission: Impossible movies aren’t particularly known for impeccable performances, but the cast delivers regardless. Cruise remains sincere and deeply committed to his role, his eyes almost hinting at Ethan Hunt’s tragic past that I would’ve loved to see more of, but I suspect is being saved for Part Two. Pegg and Rhames share great chemistry in their lone mission together, and almost warrant a buddy-cop spin-off. If the series does expand beyond the mainline movies, I’d love to see these two taking down thugs together. Atwell enters the fray competently and puts her action-chops to good use, while Ferguson displays great potential as always, until she’s betrayed by her character arc. Pom Klementieff walks a fine line between insanity and morality, and Esai Morales is ruthless, but largely monotone as Gabriel, and a far cry from Sean Harris’ maniacal Solomon Lane or Henry Cavill’s depraved August Walker.
By the time a franchise needs its seventh installment, it has mostly run out of steam. McQuarrie’s third attempt at the IMF is far from that crowd of movies though. Despite its by now stale storytelling, it has managed to stay ahead of the curve and keep audiences invested by virtue of its breathtaking action. It’s exquisitely shot, with cinematographer Fraser Taggart frequently relying on dutch angles in what is yet another callback to the 1996 original. Lorne Balfe’s score maintains the spirit of its predecessor and employs the central theme by Lalo Schifrin in some modern ways evocative of Hans Zimmer’s work. Despite marginally lacking compared to 2018’s Fallout, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is a crowd-pleaser, a solid action-entertainer, and just an overall well-made and brilliantly executed movie that delivers what it promised to its audiences. Here’s hoping Dead Reckoning Part Two can improve upon its flaws to become the best movie in the franchise.
