Tom Cruise is the kid at the high school party willing to jump off the roof of a party to make a great party legendary. Anyone who is willing to be outside a plane on takeoff, engage in a helicopter fight, or boost air force applications singlehandedly is certainly a breath of fresh air compared to those pansies who only CGI their action. Cruise brings that controlled insanity to Dead Reckoning Part One, finding new ways to fly through the air and land onto various moving objects. IMF must stand for Insane Mother F*****.
After an unsettling prologue, this Mission: Impossible takes us on a hunt for a strange key that’s been split in half. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his IMF friends (Ving Rhames’s Luther and Simon Pegg’s Benji) have found a lead from IMF leader Eugene Kittredge (Tom Czerny) on the first key, putting Ethan in contact with an old frenemy, Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson). As for the other half, Ethan thinks he has the jump on that one too, but is beat to the punch by a mysterious woman (Hayley Atwell), whom Ethan and most of the world’s crime syndicates have no idea was involved in any way.
Covid must have made Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise wary that the end might be approaching. As such, Dead Reckoning really takes that title literally. In the wake of Ethan Hunt saving the day are several women who didn’t get the chance to, or got in his way. This Mission Impossible goes the Skyfall route, attacking those close to Ethan instead of the man himself, opting to hurt our indestructible main character through his more fallible friends and female allies. As such, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Pom Klementieff, and especially the perennially underappreciated Hayley Atwell get the juicier roles to play here as their lives are in more story based peril, being the point of the movie. It’s telling that the big emotional moments are not Tom Cruise’s (who’s doing the mechanical stoic hero thing) but Hayley Atwell’s, whose innocent fear at what she’s gotten herself into provides the driving tension inside a train Cruise is trying to jump onto.
Because that’s where Jackass MasterClass graduate Mr. Cruise wants to plant his entertainment flag. The big “holy sh*t” setpiece is in the trailer, but there’s more to the movie then just that cliff jump. There’s a Roman car chase that puts Fast X to shame, since Cruise and Atwell are really doing the practical driving and using their strange pairing with an interesting car choice to max comedic effect. In general, there’s a lot of time spent on how people inside moving vehicles shift when the vehicle’s momentum changes unexpectedly. It’s not flashy, but it is effect and something unique Mission Impossible brings to the table. Plus I enjoy the winking move of making Cruise’s running form look as epic and important as possible. He can only do this so many more times people.
More will be told in the next Mission Impossible, as we dig deeper into Esai Morales and his AI companion villain. How will the Insane Mother F****** deal with this situation? Will Hayley Atwell decide to go back to Captain America? Will Simon Pegg eat a Cornetto? Will Ving Rhames turn himself into an AI virtual simulation and punch the AI villain? And most importantly, which cliff will Tom Cruise run off of next? Find out next Dead Reckoning, Part Two in 2024!