Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1 (2023)

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Written by Eric Jendresen and Christopher McQuarrie.

I love the way Tom Cruise runs, and in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1, he runs a lot. As Ethan Hunt, he’s tasked with saving the world from a super-A.I. life form, and Cruise puts his entire body into it, performing with such physicality that it almost reads as defiance of this incorporeal menace that threatens us all. 

Whether it’s through the streets of Venice or on the roof of an airport as he jets around the world trying to stop the world from ending, Tom Cruise runs full tilt. Straight back, tight neck, arms violently chopping the air as legs wheel wildly like the rods on the side of a locomotive. I’m sure there are books written about proper sprinting style and how highly-trained military operatives should run, and these manuals might speak against Cruise’s style of doing it, calling it too wasteful, too slow, too performative, but the important thing is it looks fast, the same way a child would think it looks fast.

Isn’t that all there is to good action? Believing in what you’re seeing, buying into what’s up there, and getting swept along by near-death stunts, calamitous stakes, and the feeling one wrong step could spell disaster? The Mission Impossible series understands this better than any other pretender to the action movie throne and it reigns supreme on the efforts of Cruise.  

A genuine movie star, he does his own stunts, and it’s essential in accomplishing the above.  That’s him up there, riding motorcycles off cliffs, pommeling bad guys, rolling around on speeding trains, and hauling ass as he tries to run down leads and do the impossible. The spectacular action of the Mission Impossible franchise is still the draw, and Dead Reckoning Part 1 is not a letdown. The stunts are still awe-inspiring and the undeniably presence of the many practical effects is still inherently the cause of much of the thrill. 

Ving Rhames, Rebecca Ferguson, and Simon Pegg return as Ethan’s trusty accomplices and Haley Atwell is a new addition as uncanny foe Grace, a pickpocket unwittingly dropped in an international crisis as the world’s intelligence agencies try to stop (but also claim control of) this rogue artificial intelligence unlike anything ever seen before. It hacks into hard-to-hack-into places, doesn’t do anything, only leaves enough evidence to show it came and went. Intelligence community members pull their hair out wondering what it wants, only sure of their emasculation in how defenseless they are against it. Naturally, they don’t collaborate, but would rather scrap over who gets to hold this shiny new tool of mass-destruction in the hopes it won’t turn on them. 

Another house that Cruise built, Top Gun, grounded its long-awaited 2022 sequel Top Gun: Maverick in the notion that time was running out for daredevil pilots. Machines were the future as cold, calculating, indefatigable, and unerring birds of prey. Dead Reckoning has cribbed some notes and taken them further, with the faceless villain AI both omnipotent and strangely elusive. Dramatically, it’s a poison pill, as a faceless villain is as disengaging as it sounds. Shadowboxing can be impressive, but it’s still just going through the motions. People only buy tickets to see those fists hitting flesh. 

Writers McQuarrie and Jendresen roll out some proxy villains who aren’t much better, with Esai Morales starring as Gabriel, a fanatic who has some (crudely inserted) personal history with Ethan Hunt, and Vanessa Kirby reprising her role as arms dealer White Widow from Fallout (2018). As charming as Kirby is, the White Widow pales next to Vanessa Redgrave’s Max, her in-universe mother, who in Mission Impossible posed as an arms dealer who you’d believe to have blood on her hands without it bothering her in the least. Another Mission Impossible familiar face is Henry Czerny as ultimate oily G-Man Kittridge. Czerny’s performance in the 1996 film was an absolute campy joy, and he hasn’t lost a step in his return. If anything, it makes the shortcomings of this current-gen gallery of rogues all the more glaring.

Man vs. machine steps into the AI age in Dead Reckoning, and it reads like a coda for someone like Tom Cruise, who has become the last bastion of people-first action as the tide of CGI and AI-generated images swells and threatens to submerge movies for good. McQuarrie and Cruise’s bullrush against this computer-generated future mistakenly makes its point with a missing antagonist that leaves Dead Reckoning – Part 1 a little hollow, but the impressive filmmaking can almost provide enough of a distraction. Are there resolutions to be found in the concluding part 2? Or is time finally running out for Hunt, Tom Cruise, and the rest of us?