Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (dir. Christopher McQuarrie, 2023) — Review

In Top Gun: Maverick, the big Tom Cruise blockbuster of 2022, the enemy was purposefully obscure—a villainous but unspecified nation ready to be outdone by our hero’s guts and derring-do without alienating any overseas theatergoers. That film, designed as a cinematic high five, gave a much-needed dose of big-screen optimism for viewers returning to theaters as the pandemic receded. Now, a little more than a year later, comes Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, the latest edition of Cruise’s other big franchise. Once again, he’s squaring off with a faceless villain, but rather than staging a new cold war, the film shifts its focus towards a more modern apocalypse, lending a shocking jolt of relevance to a series that should be gasping for ideas nearly 30 years into its run.

In the Mission: Impossible films, Cruise plays Ethan Hunt, a secret agent of uncommon athleticism and galaxy-size overconfidence who never saw a brewing nuclear crisis he couldn’t fight off with a combination of funny masks and Cirque du Soleil–level stunt work. Though the series, based on the 1960s TV show, has gambolled along since 1996, it somehow reached new heights with 2018’s Fallout, defying the age-related gravity that eventually brings even the biggest names back down to Earth. (See: Indiana Jones.) As the 61-year-old Cruise’s career races on with no sign of slowing, each new movie feels like a manifesto on the importance of his continued existence. Dead Reckoning Part One, yet another testament, pits Ethan against an all-powerful artificial intelligence that has no personality, no soul, and, most importantly, absolutely no star power. It envisages the future that old Hollywood fears, one in which computers make every decision. The running, jumping, deeply analog Ethan is the perfect man to stop it—surely?

With Dead Reckoning Part One, another swaggering delight in the series, director Christopher McQuarrie yet again finds actual narrative grist in the continued adventures of the world’s silliest superspy. In having Ethan do battle with a ruthless AI dubbed “The Entity,” which wants to control the world’s governments, the film holds him up as an exemplar of humanity—a bold gambit, perhaps, given that Cruise is one of our strangest celebrities, but one the Mission: Impossible movies have been nudging forward for quite a while now. Someone like James Bond might be the best at what he does, but he’s still an extension of the state, and ultimately a ruthless person as a result. Hunt, though technically part of America’s intelligence apparatus, rejects any notion of “the greater good,” instead stretching reality however he can to save everyone around him and the world at the same time.

The usual gaggle of pals surround Ethan: the tech guys Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), and the multitalented British spy Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson). The big additions to the mix are two more femmes fatales, an expert pickpocket named Grace (Hayley Atwell) and an assassin named Paris (Pom Klementieff). And though our villain embodies nothing more than a glowing sphere that lives in the cloud, it does command a human emissary of sorts, the seething terrorist Gabriel (Esai Morales, sporting a perfectly cropped salt-and-pepper beard). Russia and the US are hunting for a set of special keys that will do … something to the Entity; as usual for Mission: Impossible, the details remain pretty unimportant.

Still, fans of McQuarrie’s high-energy approach in the prior two films might be surprised at the extent to which this entry remembers the other side of spycraft. The double-crossing and murky alliance-making fun evoke the twisty espionage of Brian De Palma’s first Mission: Impossible, way back in 1996; to underline it, the nervy character actor Henry Czerny returns as Eugene Kittridge, now the CIA chief, who hasn’t appeared since the Pleistocene instalment. He largely highlights the ongoing absurdity of Hunt’s IMF, the “Impossible Mission Force,” a quasi-governmental agency that somehow exists alongside America’s regular intelligence apparatus and recruits agents who excel at close-up magic as well as hand-to-hand combat.

Though the computerised AI Entity poses as the main villain, Kittridge represents an equally important element in these movies: the stuffed shirt who sputters impotently as Ethan and his friends defy all logic on their way to saving the day. Dead Reckoning Part One still features plenty of wild, stylish stunts—like an unbelievably fabulous car chase in Rome, Ethan riding a motorcycle off a mountain to parachute onto a moving train, doing martial arts atop the Orient Express—but there’s more than a hint of melancholy in between all the action, and a hint of worry that maybe the good times can’t last forever in the face of all this bureaucratic, algorithmic thought. The conclusion of Part One, ends in the same place it started, resulting in an inevitably less satisfying ending rather than a proper third act. Yet, it still stands out as a worthy entry in America’s best ongoing franchise, where sincerity and absurdity walk hand in hand with vital, triumphant conviction.