There’s a joke with my Gabbing Geek pals that the Mission: Impossible movies are the cinematic equivalent of Chinese food: they taste good, but you don’t really remember what happened an hour later. Now, I am typing this review up a couple hours after seeing the latest, Dead Reckoning Part One, and I do remember what happened. That said, the joke further went that Paramount can release the exact same movie next year and label it “Part Two,” and no one will be able to tell the difference. I wouldn’t go that far. My general understanding is that the reason this one got divided into two parts was the story was too long to contain in one movie.
I’d like to point out Part One is something like two hours and forty-five minutes long. How long is this story anyway?
After a mysterious incident involving a state-of-the-art Russian submarine’s sinking under the Arctic ice, IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is asked to take on a mission to retrieve a mysterious key from sometime associate Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) before some bounty hunters get her first. What does this key do? Apparently, a rogue AI referred to only as “the Entity” may be controllable or even killable if someone has both halves of the key. Ilsa only has one half. Hunt’s assignment is, presumably, to find the key and turn it in to the United States government. However, the Entity has the means of going into any online system, changing data as it sees fit because it’s that powerful and self-aware, and Ethan doesn’t think that’s the sort of thing anyone should have. So, he’ll destroy the Entity instead.
That, naturally, puts him at odds with his own government, to say nothing of anyone else who wants the key, and that is more or less anyone who knows it exists. While Ethan can always rely on Ilsa, Luther (Ving Rhames), and Benji (Simon Pegg) for back-up, he’s got other problems to deal with. A team of U.S. government agents, led by Briggs (Shea Whigham) and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), want to arrest Ethan for treason. International arms dealer “the White Widow” (Vanessa Kirby) is looking to broker a deal between interested parties. And the Entity has human agents of its own, most notably Gabriel (Esai Morales), a former nemesis of Ethan’s that predates Ethan’s time with the IMF, and Gabriel’s French assassin sidekick Paris (Pom Klementieff), the sort of woman who looks like she really enjoys what she does at all times. And then there’s Grace (Hayley Atwell), a thief hired to find the key for someone, and that gets her wrapped up in a whole lot of trouble where she’s basically trying to earn a living, the sort of thing that has Ethan spending a lot of time trying to keep Grace alive and earn this woman’s trust since, well, even if Ethan had the two halves of the key, he’s not exactly sure how to use it.
Mission: Impossible movies all tend to follow certain patterns. Ethan Hunt will be given a mission that will have him traverse the globe, there will be a number of impressive stunts, a lot of running, and he’ll butt heads with his own government because he wants to do the right thing, and that isn’t always the politically expedient thing in the “national interest”. There will be plans that will be junked and lead to improvisation on the spot, and like the better movies in this series, there better be a particularly despicable villain. Morales’s Gabriel certainly accomplishes that since it’s hard to feel like the Entity is much of an antagonist even when it is messing with Ethan and his friends directly since it’s just an algorithm, and the last time I saw an AI computer program threaten someone, it was Don Cheadle in the Space Jam sequel. There is something of a formula to these movies, but they tend to be unpredictable in their own way, so I don’t much mind.
Besides, while I wouldn’t call this the best of the series, it certainly is the usual fun ride. There’s a better train-based action sequence than the one from the most recent Indiana Jones and a better car chase through the streets of Rome than there was in Fast X, and the latter’s whole bread and butter is car chases. Great action set pieces and thrilling stunts are what the Mission: Impossible series is built on, and even then, this one can find a way to put something new in, like how this one gets a bit into how IMF agents are recruited. It’s not high cinema, but it never pretended to be. Besides, returning director Christopher McQuarrie knows his way around these movies by now. It’s basically just a lot of fun, even if the McGuffin was a bit much for me.
Seriously, the Entity doesn’t feel that dangerous in the grand scheme of things.
Grade: B
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