Review: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

It’s an anecdote that Tom Cruise must have told a hundred times by now. During the production of Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015), the megastar found himself stuck in traffic, so decided he’d be better off taking the London Tube. At first, nobody on the train seemed to have spotted Cruise… that is until the actor noticed a fourteen-year old girl staring right at him. Without making a fuss, Cruise gave the young fan a light-hearted shush, then posed for a quick picture. In the words of the star himself, ‘I’ll never forget her’.

It’s the kind of charming story, apocryphal or not, that seems ripped straight out of one of the actor’s films. The kind of story that proves how Tom Cruise remains one of those rare movie stars who still feels as exciting as the characters they play. A man whose offscreen persona still seems a mere extension of his onscreen personae. It is unthinkable to imagine anyone other than Cruise leading a Mission film. Unlike its homegrown counterpart, the Bond franchise (which recasts its protagonist every ten-odd years), Mission is totally synonymous with Cruise.

Tom Cruise remains one of those rare movie stars who still feels as exciting as the characters they play

In Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) – the long-running spy series’ seventh and latest instalment – this fact has never been clearer. Once again, Cruise stars as superspy Ethan Hunt, an ultra-heroic agent of the Impossible Mission Force whose ‘habitual rogue behaviour’ has slowly become legendary. Dead Reckoning sees the man himself battle the mysterious Gabriel (Esai Morales), a villain from Hunt’s past with dreams of global annihilation. Aided by his IMF team (Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson) but dogged by the combined might of various spy agencies (the perennially underlooked Shea Whigham as military hardcase Jasper Briggs is a particular highlight), Hunt must race against time to to recover the two halves of an all-powerful cruciform key (i.e. a literal double cross).

Though full of the usual twists and turns, this storyline largely serves as a vehicle to get Cruise from one action scene to the other… and rightfully so. Aided by Lorne Balfe’s propulsive score, elemental action premises like The Runaway Train, The High-Speed Car Chase, or The Bomb That Needs Defusing are rendered with the kind of pinpoint precision that feels both larger than life and perfectly in scale with an idle childhood daydream. It’s exactly the kind of action that audiences have come to expect from Mission. The film is clearly aware of this – and any plots failing to meet the octane quota are accordingly sidelined: while Hayley Atwell co-stars as an enigmatic criminal named Grace, her chemistry with Cruise, refreshingly, never turns romantic.

What’s less refreshing is Dead Reckoning’s Part One status. While the film’s ending is undoubtedly conclusive (miles ahead of fellow 2023 blockbuster Fast X’s), Dead Reckoning nonetheless lacks the down-to-the-wire ticking clock tension that made previous instalment Fallout (2018) such a series highlight. By the end of this film, the clock is still ticking and the Fallout-style tension is presumably being saved for the sequel.

What Dead Reckoning lacks in jeopardy, however, it makes up for in expansiveness. The movie’s shoot was famously epic in scope; filming everywhere from Abu Dhabi International Airport to right here at Birmingham New Street railway station… and that’s just for a single scene. At one point, Ethan Hunt boards an escalator in the West Midlands and disembarks it in the Middle East. Combine this with sequences in Rome, Venice and the Swiss Alps and you’ve got a film that evokes a genuine sense of globe-trotting spectacle, both on and off the screen.

The movie’s shoot was famously epic in scope

The non-action scenes, conversely, are typically set in nondescript safehouses and performed with restless, sweaty energy as Hunt and his team try to second-guess their enemies’ moves. In this manner, longtime Mission director Christopher McQuarrie manages to alternate between the Dutch-angled paranoia of Brian De Palma’s original Mission: Impossible (1996) and the cinematic thrills of a Brosnan Bond film.

This effect, intentional or not, is one of compression and expansion: when Hunt is engaged on a mission, his world is vast, glamorous and spectacular. When he is not, his world is instead claustrophobic and mired down in strategy. The powerful effect created by this contrast cannot be understated: onscreen (and indeed off), moments of action are like oxygen for Cruise.

These similarities between Cruise and onscreen avatar Ethan Hunt are hard to resist. Both are men of action, facing insurmountable odds, whose lowest points come when they are unable to get outside and run after things. Both have a reputation for achieving the impossible: in an early Dead Reckoning scene, Shea Whigham’s character calls Hunt a ‘mind-reading, shape-shifting incarnation of chaos’… and you can’t help but agree with him. Indeed, for a film which faced so many shutdowns and highly publicised pitfalls as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the noble underdog stylings of Dead Reckoning feel oddly appropriate. The end may be coming, but the sexagenarian superstar can always kick it a little further down the line.

It seems strange that a movie in which a man rides his motocross bike off the edge of a cliff could be considered elegiac, but there you go.

Verdict

Tom Cruise gives it his all in an unrelenting action blockbuster that feels both refreshingly old-fashioned and thrillingly boundary-pushing. While it doesn’t quite surpass the franchise’s absolute best, Dead Reckoning Part One nevertheless upholds the Mission series’ impossibly high standards.