The Mission Impossible franchise has, almost since it began, been delivering consistently more exciting action movies every few years that push the boundaries of what is possible without the use of digital effects, and leading man Tom Cruise promising to deliver some of the craziest stunts you’ll ever see on the big screen. These films have become real event movies that are worth going to the cinema for, with the previous film, Mission impossible: Fallout, being the first film that I saw in IMAX, and it’s now my preferred premium format for watching films at the cinema.
When Mission Impossible 7 was first announced, it was confirmed that this would not only be the finale to the whole franchise, but also a two-part film featuring the biggest stunts ever seen in the franchise. With the arrival of COVID-19 the release was rightly pushed back to ensure that the film could have a cinematic release, something that director Christopher McQuarrie and Cruise both heavily advocated for. Following the success of Top Gun: Maverick, another Cruise action spectacle, anticipation was certainly higher than ever for the now titled Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One; and now the wait is over. Do Cruise & McQuarrie deliver on their promise, or is Dead Reckoning Part One just a measly starter dish?
When IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is assigned to the bounty of one of his allies, Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Fergusson), he discovers that her life is on the line because she holds half of a key that multiple dangerous parties want. Nobody knows what the key unlocks, but they all know that is has something to do with a self-aware artificial intelligence known as ‘The Entity’, an A.I that has infiltrated every computer system in the world, causing global intelligence agencies to question whether the information they hold is actually the truth or fabricated by the A.I. Only one man claims to know what the key does, Gabriel (Esai Morales), a man who speaks on behalf of the Entity, and a ghost from Ethan’s past.
Hoping to find both halves of the key and destroy the Entity, Hunt loses half of the key to a pickpocket, Grace (Hayley Atwell). With Grace now in the crosshairs of every intelligence and criminal agency in the world, Hunt takes it upon himself to keep her safe and find out what the key is actually for.
When Mission Impossible 7 was first announced, it was confirmed that this would not only be the finale to the whole franchise, but also a two-part film featuring the biggest stunts ever seen in the franchise. With the arrival of COVID-19 the release was rightly pushed back to ensure that the film could have a cinematic release, something that director Christopher McQuarrie and Cruise both heavily advocated for. Following the success of Top Gun: Maverick, another Cruise action spectacle, anticipation was certainly higher than ever for the now titled Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One; and now the wait is over. Do Cruise & McQuarrie deliver on their promise, or is Dead Reckoning Part One just a measly starter dish?
When IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is assigned to the bounty of one of his allies, Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Fergusson), he discovers that her life is on the line because she holds half of a key that multiple dangerous parties want. Nobody knows what the key unlocks, but they all know that is has something to do with a self-aware artificial intelligence known as ‘The Entity’, an A.I that has infiltrated every computer system in the world, causing global intelligence agencies to question whether the information they hold is actually the truth or fabricated by the A.I. Only one man claims to know what the key does, Gabriel (Esai Morales), a man who speaks on behalf of the Entity, and a ghost from Ethan’s past.
Hoping to find both halves of the key and destroy the Entity, Hunt loses half of the key to a pickpocket, Grace (Hayley Atwell). With Grace now in the crosshairs of every intelligence and criminal agency in the world, Hunt takes it upon himself to keep her safe and find out what the key is actually for.
I had high hopes for Dead Reckoning, and along with John Wick Chapter 4 this is the second major action movie of the year that I feel a bit let down by. With John Wick Chapter 4 it largely came down to the film being far too long and the story overcomplicating itself far too much for a John Wick film, and Dead Reckoning has similar issues. Clocking in at around two hours and forty minutes, it’s the longest Mission Impossible by around twenty minutes, and I would say the first forty of the film could have been halved, at least. The setup for this film is so convoluted and dryly delivered, and I honestly feel that this comes with the territory of the film being a ‘Part One’. McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendressen have really allowed this film to take up as much time as humanly possible because they know they’re squeezing another film out of this. Why bother getting to the point in ten or fifteen minutes when we can spend the best part of an hour just re-introducing old characters, having the same conversation over and over again, and making the whole thing sound far more complicated than it actually is. It’s not until the film gets to Italy, right at the end of the first act, that it even starts to become interesting. From here on out the film does a pretty good job of keeping things moving, but start of the film is just such a slog that honestly, I was struggling to keep my eyes open…in an IMAX theatre, do you know how hard that is to do? A room designed with a gigantic screen and booming sound, and yet I felt comfortable enough and so disengaged with what I was watching that I very nearly just went to sleep.
A part of this may be to do with the fact that I haven’t seen any Mission Impossible films since Fallout, and I’ve only seen each film once. So, the front heavy nature of introducing new characters, or reintroducing old ones (which it doesn’t really do, Henry Czerny’s Kitteridge for example just turns up with no intro and the film expects you to remember who he is despite not appearing in the series since the original 1996 film) right at the start of the film for almost the entire first act was not the best way of structuring the story in my eyes.
The whole story is just needlessly complex and takes itself far too seriously as well. It’s a typical techno-fearmongering story we’ve seen plenty of times before where an A.I. gets too smart and now everyone either thinks they can control it or wants to destroy it because no program that powerful should exist. Dead Reckoning just keeps having its characters spew convoluted and cyclical riddles rather than actual dialogue that human beings would use in order to confuse the other characters and the audience so that they can spend three times as long talking about the thing than they actually need to. I think this is made even worse by the fact that the audience are shown what the key is used for in the opening scene, and how each half became separated, but none of the characters other than Gabriel know this and he's intentionally not telling people because he’s the villain. So, whilst everyone’s faffing about trying to work out what this key does, there I am in the audience pulling my hair out because we already know what it does! Had this been kept a mystery to the audience, one that we need to work out with the characters, then I think the film would have been a lot more suspenseful. By the end of the film our characters still don’t know what the key does, not properly, and yet we the audience were shown exactly what it does in the opening two minutes. So, you can guarantee that Dead Reckoning Part Two will spend a decent chunk of the runtime with Ethan and his merry band of agents trying to work out what the key does.
A part of this may be to do with the fact that I haven’t seen any Mission Impossible films since Fallout, and I’ve only seen each film once. So, the front heavy nature of introducing new characters, or reintroducing old ones (which it doesn’t really do, Henry Czerny’s Kitteridge for example just turns up with no intro and the film expects you to remember who he is despite not appearing in the series since the original 1996 film) right at the start of the film for almost the entire first act was not the best way of structuring the story in my eyes.
The whole story is just needlessly complex and takes itself far too seriously as well. It’s a typical techno-fearmongering story we’ve seen plenty of times before where an A.I. gets too smart and now everyone either thinks they can control it or wants to destroy it because no program that powerful should exist. Dead Reckoning just keeps having its characters spew convoluted and cyclical riddles rather than actual dialogue that human beings would use in order to confuse the other characters and the audience so that they can spend three times as long talking about the thing than they actually need to. I think this is made even worse by the fact that the audience are shown what the key is used for in the opening scene, and how each half became separated, but none of the characters other than Gabriel know this and he's intentionally not telling people because he’s the villain. So, whilst everyone’s faffing about trying to work out what this key does, there I am in the audience pulling my hair out because we already know what it does! Had this been kept a mystery to the audience, one that we need to work out with the characters, then I think the film would have been a lot more suspenseful. By the end of the film our characters still don’t know what the key does, not properly, and yet we the audience were shown exactly what it does in the opening two minutes. So, you can guarantee that Dead Reckoning Part Two will spend a decent chunk of the runtime with Ethan and his merry band of agents trying to work out what the key does.
The action is ultimately the draw of Dead Reckoning Part One, because that promise of delivering some of the craziest stunts the franchise has ever seen is absolutely delivered here. First up is the car chase through Italy, as seen in the trailer with Cruise and Atwell in a little yellow Fiat 500. What makes the scene different from a lot of car chases is the fact that Atwell & Cruise are handcuffed together, often swapping who’s driving, and are having a rather significant amount of car troubles. It’s not only edge of your seat gripping but seeing both of them panicked and seemingly out of their depth is rather funny.
The grand finale is nothing short of jaw dropping too, and if you’re not blown away by the final thirty or so minutes then I really don’t know what it’ll take to please you. It all starts off with the well-publicised and overly shown clip of Cruise riding a motorcycle off a mountain. As we should all know by now from the trailers and interviews that are inescapable, Cruise actually did that, no CGI (apart from digitally removing the ramp which he launches off), and seeing it particularly in IMAX was genuinely breath-taking. The first concept for the film was Cruise and McQuarrie sitting down and telling each other what big action set-piece they wanted to do, Cruise wanted the motorcycle jump, McQuarrie wanted to crash a train, and these two stunts are merged together excellently as this motorcycle jump bleeds into a thrilling chase sequence so complex and heart pounding that I’ve never seen anything like it on film, and the only thing I can possible compare it to is the train sequence in the videogame Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. It’s mental, and it builds to such a thrilling finale that there were people genuinely shouting and standing up in the screening, we were all just so completely engrossed with what was happening that we all totally forgot we were watching a film. That is what Mission Impossible is all about, not the silly plots, convoluted dialogue, or poorly introduced characters; the bonkers action that is like nothing ever put to screen before.
Should you see Dead Reckoning Part One at the cinema? Yes, absolutely, because those action sequences are never going to hit the same on a small screen and they genuinely deserve all the praise they can get. However, the story and characters do suffer in ways I don’t remember them suffering in other Mission Impossible films. This does break the winning streak the franchise has been building for some time, with Dead Reckoning Part One suddenly be perhaps of middling quality for its own series is a knock after coming off the back of Fallout and there’s no hiding that. But it delivers action the likes of which I wasn’t sure was possible without being done entirely on a green screen, and that is enough for me to recommend checking it out.
So long as Dead Reckoning Part Two patches up the story problems, I think we could be in for one hell of a finale and I really can’t wait to see what stunts Cruise and McQuarrie have planned for us in Ethan Hunt’s last mission.
The grand finale is nothing short of jaw dropping too, and if you’re not blown away by the final thirty or so minutes then I really don’t know what it’ll take to please you. It all starts off with the well-publicised and overly shown clip of Cruise riding a motorcycle off a mountain. As we should all know by now from the trailers and interviews that are inescapable, Cruise actually did that, no CGI (apart from digitally removing the ramp which he launches off), and seeing it particularly in IMAX was genuinely breath-taking. The first concept for the film was Cruise and McQuarrie sitting down and telling each other what big action set-piece they wanted to do, Cruise wanted the motorcycle jump, McQuarrie wanted to crash a train, and these two stunts are merged together excellently as this motorcycle jump bleeds into a thrilling chase sequence so complex and heart pounding that I’ve never seen anything like it on film, and the only thing I can possible compare it to is the train sequence in the videogame Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. It’s mental, and it builds to such a thrilling finale that there were people genuinely shouting and standing up in the screening, we were all just so completely engrossed with what was happening that we all totally forgot we were watching a film. That is what Mission Impossible is all about, not the silly plots, convoluted dialogue, or poorly introduced characters; the bonkers action that is like nothing ever put to screen before.
Should you see Dead Reckoning Part One at the cinema? Yes, absolutely, because those action sequences are never going to hit the same on a small screen and they genuinely deserve all the praise they can get. However, the story and characters do suffer in ways I don’t remember them suffering in other Mission Impossible films. This does break the winning streak the franchise has been building for some time, with Dead Reckoning Part One suddenly be perhaps of middling quality for its own series is a knock after coming off the back of Fallout and there’s no hiding that. But it delivers action the likes of which I wasn’t sure was possible without being done entirely on a green screen, and that is enough for me to recommend checking it out.
So long as Dead Reckoning Part Two patches up the story problems, I think we could be in for one hell of a finale and I really can’t wait to see what stunts Cruise and McQuarrie have planned for us in Ethan Hunt’s last mission.