Can you believe anyone ever thought about phasing Tom Cruise out of the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movies? It’s true: during the production of GHOST PROTOCOL, someone at Paramount got the bright idea that Cruise was growing too old for spy games so it was time for Ethan Hunt to move into a managerial role for a new IMF team led by Jeremy Renner’s William Brandt. Instead, Cruise insisted he wasn’t going anywhere, dangled from the world’s tallest building, and the rest will go on to be the stuff of Hollywood legend that we’ve been fortunate to witness. For the past decade, Cruise has been the biggest movie star in the world, and MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE has been the vehicle best suited to his infectious star persona. We haven’t continued seeing these movies — which have improbably only become more spectacular with the arrival of writer/director Christopher McQuarrie — for the run-of-the-mill spectacle peddled by other Hollywood productions: we’ve done so specifically to see the death-defying feats Cruise and company dream up, an approach that evokes the very essence of cinema as a window into the impossible.
It’s astounding that a star of Cruise’s magnitude would resort to such livewire acts, but that’s the appeal here. He’s not just doing it for him — he’s doing it for all of us, uniting us in one of cinema’s most noble pursuits: the shared awe and wonder that can only come from someone doing the unimaginable. He could coast on being Tom Cruise: Movie Star, but he’s going to be immortalized as Tom Cruise: The Man Who Risked Death to Entertain You. At this point, the title MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE applies to the films’ very productions because they feel like such herculean undertakings that nobody in their right mind should be doing in an era where movie magic can be rendered in a computer. Simply put, these movies rule because Tom Cruise and his friends do a bunch of cool shit, and it’s real — obviously, they sport some digital embellishments, but these films thrive on a tactile, analog quality that can’t be replicated by even the most elaborate strings of code.
It’s fitting, then, that the latest entry, DEAD RECKONING: PART ONE pits Ethan and another ragtag IMF outfit against an algorithm. Following the mysterious sabotage of a Russian submarine, a haywire artificial intelligence known as “The Entity” goes rouge and begins infiltrating surveillance networks across the globe, spooking every major world power now scrambling to not only put the genie back into the bottle but to also control it for its own ends. Whoever controls The Entity controls information, the very truth itself — so long as they can retrieve the two halves of a key that can unlock… something. It turns out, nobody really knows what the cruciform MacGuffin driving the plot does. They only know that they must retrieve this key, which is the only thing the audience needs to know as well — the intricate details will come into hazy focus as they always do in these movies.
Ethan’s IMF team — once again consisting of Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), and Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) — essentially becomes a rogue unit when they set out to destroy The Entity instead of controlling it. The current Director of National Intelligence (Cary Elwes) is one of several parties looking to gain access to the Entity, including master thief Grace (Hayley Atwell), returning arms dealer the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), and Gabriel (Esai Morales), a shadowy terrorist with ties to Ethan’s pre-IMF days who employs a silent assassin (Pom Klementieff) to do his dirty work. Oh, and Ethan’s old boss Kittridge (Henry Czerny) also returns, dispatching a pair of field agents (Shea Whigham and Greg Tarzan Davis) to bring Ethan in. Previous entries have featured similar globe-spanning rat races, but DEAD RECKONING is a super-sized riff on the theme that could have easily been titled IT’S A MAD MAD MAD MAD MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE.
Remarkably, DEAD RECKONING never sags under its own weight. Even at 163 minutes, it effortlessly glides from one stunning sequence to another, strung along by just enough techno-babble to keep the plot afloat. This one best exemplifies the strange paradox of these movies, which are not about much at all — Ethan’s always tracking down some MacGuffin or another — yet somehow feel so monumental. It feels downright Hitchcockian in that sense, perhaps more than any other previous entry, including the one directed by Brian De Palma. Hitchcock’s masterpieces are still exemplary of their form: tightly wound yet absolutely dazzling in their unwinding thanks to their director’s preternatural instincts when it came to spinning yarns. Like those films, DEAD RECKONING boasts a ludicrous plot that crumbles under scrutiny, but who cares when it’s this thrilling, funny, and sexy? It moves with the same sleek efficiency as its star’s signature running gait: calm, determined, and barreling ahead with purpose as it effortlessly weaves between its cast solving riddles to diffuse a bomb in an airport, cars careening through the streets of Rome, and moonlit fistfights in Venice.
McQuarrie matches the audacity of the action sequences with the restrained, measured approach this franchise has enjoyed since its course correction from the chaotic, BOURNE-inflected lensing of the third film. Calling it “unfussy” feels like a disservice and implies McQuarrie and company are content to simply point and shoot, but there’s something refreshing about the way DEAD RECKONING doesn’t strain to impress with unnecessary, garish panache. Instead, it leans on clean, coherent shots and sharp editing to create a snappy rhythm: when these movies are at their best, they feel like balletic orchestrations of controlled chaos, and DEAD RECKONING might be the most exquisite of the bunch so far.
The precision of these sequences is astonishing, meaning the action isn’t just some half-hearted white noise meant to keep the story moving. McQuarrie recognizes this is the bread and butter, and gives each sequence a distinct personality: a shootout in a sandstorm is engulfed by thunderous, unnerving sound design, the Rome car chase pinballs with a sense of humor straight out of the Buster Keaton/Jackie Chan playbook, a tense meeting in a neon-soaked nightclub becomes a moody tech-noir showdown whose canted angles recall the subtle thrills of De Palma’s original film. What’s really astounding is that this only constitutes the first half of the film. Rest assured that the second half doesn’t relent — it holds the film’s jaw-dropping motorcycle stunt that’s nestled within a climactic train sequence that pushes you to the edge of your seat until its gravity-defying conclusion. It’s properly harrowing, of course — I haven’t been this stressed out in a theater since the helicopter sequence in FALLOUT.
But it’s also quite amusing, and you can sense the glee that must have gone into constructing a scene that paints Ethan Hunt into an impossible corner. You can guess how it ends, but, then again, that’s always been the case. The fun is in watching him wriggle off the hook, and it occurs to me that McQuarrie and Cruise share the same artistic dynamic as Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, only there’s not as much fake blood involved. DEAD RECKONING is frequently funny in the same way the EVIL DEAD movies are because the script almost treats the mission as a comedy of errors for everyone involved, laced with well-timed sight gags and amusing reaction shots. It’s so nice to have a blockbuster where the humor isn’t the same old quippy, self-aware schtick that’s undercut so many action films in recent years.
Even though the past few films have become more escapist and outrageous than ever, they’ve also committed to digging into what makes Ethan Hunt tick. Where the first trio of movies treats Hunt as pure avatar, an American James Bond who exists to be effortlessly cool, the McQuarrie films probe into his psychology, particularly his manic compulsion to protect his friends and family even at the cost of his own life. Once he and Grace move past their flirtatious dalliances (with Atwell totally nailing that stretch to cement her mega-star status), she’s brought firmly into the fold, where Ethan pledges to care about her life more than his own, a selflessness that puts him in the realm of genuine superheroes. Ethan Hunt doesn’t do this to be cool or to stroke his ego: he does it because he senses salvation in the love and camaraderie he shares with his kindred spirits, a bond that has historically been both forged and shattered by tragedy.
Cryptic flashbacks reveal that a woman (Mariela Garriga) close to Ethan died during his first encounter with Gabriel, the pivotal event that has haunted the agent’s entire career, here reimagined as a never-ending tragedy of slain colleagues and lost loves. For all the film’s spectacular sequences, there’s one quiet shot that’s lingered in my mind that captures this essence: Ethan, hunched over, mourning the loss of one woman just as another emerges in the frame behind him, with Lorne Balfe’s swelling score heightening the tragic grandeur of this vertiginous feedback loop of love and loss. Cruise is marvelous here in a way only he can be: despite his efforts to immortalize his on-screen invincibility, these movies work because these moments of vulnerability provide human stakes. The fate of the world often hangs in the balance in these films, but it’s not as important as the lives and worlds their characters inhabit, which is why you don’t care what the stupid key does or how it works: you just really want Ethan and his crew to escape unscathed. Everything else will work out.
Never has that been more obvious than it is with this film, whose title telegraphs the inevitable PART TWO due to follow next year. But even that inevitability underscores the appeal of these escapist fantasies, where the world teeters on the verge of collapse, only to be brought back from the brink by a man who will outwit and outlast everyone. Ethan Hunt remains “the living manifestation of destiny,” and so too does MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, a franchise whose analog thrills soar in a digital landscape that’s resigned to churning out content slop. That’s even the obvious subtext of DEAD RECKONING, where the heroes have to shut down the nameless, faceless algorithmic machine, mirroring Cruise’s own dogged quest to save cinema one death-defying stunt at a time. Unlike its long-running contemporaries, however, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE doesn’t bother to have a crisis of faith. There’s no wondering if Ethan Hunt is no longer necessary in a world dominated by machines because that would suggest that Cruise has any intentions of slowing down — and we all know how that goes.
Tags: Action Film, Bruce Geller, Cary Elwes, Charles Parnell, Christopher McQuarrie, Eddie Hamilton, Erik Jendresen, Esai Morales, Fraser Taggart, Frederick Schmidt, Greg Tarzan Davis, Hayley Atwell, Henry Czerny, Indira Varma, Lorne Balfe, Mariela Garriga, Mark Gatiss, Pom Klementieff, Rebecca Ferguson, Rob Delaney, Sequels, Shea Whigham, Simon Pegg, tom cruise, Vanessa Kirby, Ving Rhames
No Comments