Action Distraction — Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One review

A version of this review appeared in The Scotsman.

Rogue agents take on rogue A.I. in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, a topically potent summer blockbuster that pits Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt against a sentient digital parasite with the power to wipe out humanity as we know it. Coming at a time when striking Hollywood screenwriters and the rest of the film industry are trying to figure out what rapidly advancing tech will mean for their own futures, the film’s plot could be taken as a symbolic call for action against further algorithmic abuses of the movie-making process, with Cruise’s willingness to ride a motorbike off a vertiginous cliff edge for your viewing pleasure not simply a zealous act of cinematic thrill-seeking, but a fight for the very soul of cinema itself.

The stunts have, of course, long been this series’ raison d’être and Dead Reckoning’s are as spectacular as ever — and not just that aforementioned motorcycle-assisted parachute jump. Car chases are filmed with crunchy verisimilitude, with the sound design tuning us into the concussive effect they have on some of the characters and the cameras strapped to the car doors ensuring we know it’s Cruise, not a stunt double, doing some of the tyre-screeching wheel spins down Rome’s Spanish Steps and its too-narrow streets. The much-hyped climactic set-piece on a runaway steam train is also a seamless wonder of practical and digital effects work, a simultaneous throwback to the first Mission: Impossible movie’s explosive Euro Tunnel finale and the dawn-of-cinema antics of Hollywood’s original daredevil, Buster Keaton, in his 1926 masterpiece The General. Cruise knows this kind of spectacle has always been an essential component when it comes to the magic of movies and his unwillingness to let it die on the vine for the sake of convenient content creation is certainly laudable, radical even.

There’s just one problem: the other two hours of this 165-minute behemoth aren’t quite up to snuff. They’re passable in a let-it-wash-over-you sort of way, but where 2018’s Mission: Impossible - Fallout saw the series reach a peak of perfection in its its ability to blend fluid action with the typically convoluted plotting required to stitch together all the running, jumping, fighting and driving bits, the new film’s set pieces feel incidental to the story, so much so that returning director Christopher McQuarrie sometimes just abandons them, cutting to another location on the other side of the world in preparation for the next bit of action in the hope that we won’t spend too much time wondering why, say, he’s left Ethan Hunt running across an airport rooftop, heading nowhere, pursued by no one. 

It doesn’t help that the film gets off to dull start. Introducing us to the film’s virtual villain, known as the Entity, the cold open puts us on a Russian submarine somewhere in the Bering Strait where a control-room full of sweaty men with comically thick accents realise too late they’ve been tricked into torpedoing their own vessel. What should be a theme-explicating nod to humanity’s ongoing ability to sow the seeds of its own destruction becomes instead an oddly appropriate metaphor for McQuarrie’s decision to continue setting up the film with reams of gibberish exposition that threatens to sink it before the traditional M:I fuse has even been lit. Delivered by various grave-sounding government bods taking turns to parse out the information one line at a time, the basic gist of this monotonous verbal relay race is that the Entity can be controlled by a MacGuffiny key that has been split in two. 

The rest of the film takes shape around Ethan’s pursuit of it, aided by his usual Impossible Missions Force cohorts Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg) and sort-of love interest Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), whose relationship with Ethan is finally consummated with a gentle hug on a balcony in Venice just as his head is being turned by the arrival of Hayley Atwell’s Grace, an international thief caught up in the action and gradually recruited into Ethan’s team. There’s also Gabriel (Esai Morales), a shadowy figure from Ethan’s pre-IMF days, snippets of which we see in flashback. In the present day Gabriel has become the Entity’s human emissary, gliding through the action with a pre-cog understanding that anything he says will come to pass. Really, though, he’s there to provide Ethan with a more tangible nemesis, even though introducing an origins story for Cruise in the seventh instalment of a series going back 27 years could be seen as a cheeky deus ex machina for the franchise as a whole. 

More dispiriting is the fact that so many of the basic plot and character beats are virtually identical to those underlying the recent Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. It’s certainly one of bigger ironies of the film’s decision to take a stance against the homogenising power of A.I., something further compounded by the rote quality of a lot of the early action (did we really need another sandstorm after Ghost Protocol?). But the film does kick into gear with that car chase through Rome and, even though the gag of having our hero forced to drive a tiny yellow Fiat was already groan-worthy when Roger Moore did it with a Citroen 2CV in For Your Eyes Only, Cruise makes it work enough to propel the film towards its cliff-hanger conclusion. His commitment saves the film from narrative oblivion. But only just.