Review: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One hinges on three exceptional action sequences that see Tom Cruise pull off impressive stunts in exotic destinations around the world. It provides the sort of four-quadrant, big budget fun that audiences expect during the summer movie season.

The first standout sequence is a car chase through Rome in a tiny yellow Fiat with series newcomer Haley Atwell’s Grace handcuffed to Cruise’s wrist. Cruise’s Ethan Hunt has to navigate the narrow streets and the awkwardness of his left hand being handcuffed to her right one, forcing him to reach across her to drive or force her to take the wheel when she’s not comfortable doing so. Oh, and bad guys with guns are chasing them, of course. This fast, fun sequence captures why people love the Mission: Impossible series. It has real stunts and coherent, tense action that plays with the real geography of the city. Comparing it to the digital slurry of a similar sequence in Rome in Fast X is clarifying.

Later in Dead Reckoning Part One, we get the now-famous cliff jump, where Tom Cruise rides an actual motorcycle off an actual mountain and parachutes to safety below. The stunt was front-and-centre in the film’s promotional marketing. No wonder. It’s lunatic and exhilarating. Despite how prominent it was in the promotions, director Christopher McQuarrie has some tricks up his sleeve, including some hilarious and terrifying camera angles to solidify the reality of Cruise freefalling through the air.

The final sequence is near the film’s finale. Ethan and company are aboard a train that is racing too fast and can’t be stopped. Ahead, a bridge is blown out, and while Ethan manages to slow the train down, it still slides over the edge of the bridge, one car falling and pulling another after it, like a domino set tumbling over in slow-motion. Ethan and Grace have to climb through one dangling car after another before it’s too late. It’s like the cliffhanger scene in The Lost World: Jurassic Park and the opening sequence in the Himalayas in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves rolled into one. It has a clear setting and stakes, a ticking clock scenario, and demonstrates how nothing but human ingenuity and bravery stand in the way of certain death.

Together, these sequences justify the cost of admission and then some. But the rest of the film is a bit more bloated than you might want in a massive summer blockbuster. While some movies, like the recent Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, could use more exposition, Dead Reckoning Part One could use less. There are half a dozen scenes of characters in tight quarters talking over what’s at stake and who needs to get what and what might happen if they’re not successful. It’s all a bit redundant when all you really need to know is the bad guys want a key and Ethan’s team has to get it first if they want to save the world.

To be fair, you don’t go to Mission: Impossible movies for the story, so much, and some people even prefer when the films jettison most of the plot, allowing the story to simply act as a skeleton to hang the stunts on. I tend to agree, but when a film is two hours and 43 minutes long, as Dead Reckoning Part One is, and only the first-half of a longer story at that, I’d rather there be more action and less repetitive scenes of exposition.

Not that you’re ever bored during Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. This is a fun, frothy summer entertainment. The portentous moments teased in the trailers are nicely balanced with levity and jokes and some impressive slapstick humour. Tom Cruise seems to be leaning into the comparison to Buster Keaton; he’s as much vaudevillian here as “the living manifestation of destiny.”

The story has to do with a rogue AI program known as “the Entity.” Cruise and company, including writer and director McQuarrie, seem to have stumbled onto the hot button issue of the moment. The implications are fruitful and add a compelling subtext to the whole film. Cruise, the last movie star, is a hero fighting to stop a depersonalized program from taking over. Like in last year’s Top Gun: Maverick, Cruise is toying with allegory here: stars like him are the last bulwark against an AI-dominated Hollywood, as the current SAG-AFTRA strike is proving. Go in a different direction and the story about a small band of heroes privy to the occult history of the world and fighting to stop an unseen, unknown evil entity starts to sound a little like the revelations of Scientology. There’s no right reading here, but Cruise seems to bake such subtext into all his films today. It makes him that much more of a fascinating star.

Some elements of Dead Reckoning Part One are a downgrade from the previous highs of Rogue Nation and Fallout. For one, there’s not enough Rebecca Ferguson, the most impressive ally in the seven-film series. She gets a moment or two to shine here, but for the most part, she’s sidelined in favor of Atwell and others. We also don’t get the sort of juicy antagonists that we got in the previous two installments with Sean Harris and Henry Cavill. Vanessa Kirby is a welcome return as a mobster scion, but she’s not the main focus here. Esai Morales is fine as the main human antagonist, an operative for the Entity, but he’s little more than a shadowy foil for Ethan Hunt. On a more positive note, Pom Klementieff provides a fun spin on the acrobatic henchman archetype—she’s even got the blond hair. Her eccentric outfits, slight physique, and mysterious demeanor bring an oddball energy to the action scenes; like she’s a villain from a silent film who’s wandered into a modern blockbuster.

There’s plenty of personality and fun in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. But it’s not immune to the bloat that has affected Hollywood as a whole. While the story of the film is about Tom Cruise saving the world, and the subtext is about Tom Cruise saving Hollywood, it’s still a product of the mass market, tentpole spectacle thinking that has defined Hollywood for the last decade and a half. It’s about as good as we can expect in an age when Hollywood studios think that bigger is always better.

7 out of 10

Mission: Impossible – Deck Reckoning Part One (2023, USA)

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie; written by Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen, based on Mission: Impossible by Bruce Geller; starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Mariela Garriga, Henry Czerny.

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