‘Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One’ alternately thrilling, snoozy | Movie review
In December, Paramount Pictures released an enthralling behind-the-scenes video for its upcoming big-budget release “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” detailing a high-stakes stunt.
In it, Tom Cruise — not a stuntman, but Cruise, the enduring and ageless Hollywood heavyweight — jumps a motorcycle off a mountain in Norway.
It’s crazy.
Crazier? The perfectionist Cruise executed the jump seven more times.
The first couple of pages of production notes for the movie — in theaters this week — are devoted to the stunt, as well. Shot on the first day of principal photography in September 2020, the effort was the culmination of a year of prep work by Cruise, a skydiver who’d dreamt about executing the daredevil move for decades.
The good news is the work pays off, as it and other large-scale action sequences in “Part One” — the seventh installment in the popular “Mission: Impossible” big-screen franchise — are constantly thrilling and impressive.
The bad news: Almost anytime the movie isn’t in the midst of one “Dead Reckoning” comes pretty close to becoming deadly boring.
It’s surprising just how stagnant the film feels in several stretches given Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie’s penchant for collaborating on winning projects, including the most recent installments in this series. (McQuarrie co-wrote 2011’s “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” and since has directed and co-written 2015’s “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation” and 2018’s “Mission: Impossible — Fallout.”)
McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen have crafted an exposition-heavy tale of an artificial intelligence gone rogue that never feels as if it needs two parts to tell. (“Dead Reckoning Part Two: is set for a theatrical release on June 28.) At more than two and a half hours, “Part One” is plenty long enough for a self-contained story.
We meet the persistently pesky AI aboard a Russian sub, a state-of-the-art war machine that runs into problems thanks to what becomes known as “The Entity.”
We then catch up with the franchise’s central figure, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, operative extraordinaire with the top-secret Impossible Mission Force. He’s lying low in Amsterdam, but he accepts a mission from Henry Czerny’s Eugene Kittridge — not seen since 1996’s franchise-launching “Mission Impossible,” the character is now the director of the CIA — that takes him to the Arabian Desert.
And so begins Ethan’s reconnecting with friends, enemies and frenemies, including Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Alanna Mitsopolis (Vanessa Kirby), aka The White Widow.
The Entity sees Ethan as such a threat that it has recruited an old nemesis to work on its behalf, Esai Morales’ Gabriel. The movie leans so hard into flashbacks involving the pair that you have to convince yourself that you’ve never seen these scenes, their dalliance set prior to Ethan becoming an IMF agent. McQuarrie simply needs to FEEL just how much Gabriel-related baggage Ethan apparently has been carrying around this whole time, but this works only so well.
Also new to the mix — and adding more to it than Gabriel — is Hayley Atwell’s Grace, a high-priced thief hired to steal a key that could be, well, the key to controlling The Entity. Grace is both ambitious and in over her head, a combination that helps keep you guessing as to what she will do at any given time when paired with Ethan, and Atwell (“Agent Carter”) proves to be a solid addition.
They are chased through the streets of Rome — another of the movie’s international shooting locales along with, among others, Venice and the aforementioned Norway, standing in for the Austrian Alps — by Gabriel’s French henchwoman, Paris (Pom Klementieff of “Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3”). The latter is in a giant armored vehicle and Ethan and Grace in a very small car, which allows for a nice amount of humor to be infused into what otherwise is a well-executed but familiar-feeling sequence. (The recently released “Fast X” boasts an even crazier, if less satisfying, sequence set in the streets of the Italian capital.)
Give credit to McQuarrie and others for a well-timed AI-centric story, but it’s simply hard to become invested in it. In part, that’s because it provides no real food for thought beyond what if an AI did this or that horrifying thing? It doesn’t help that this greatest of enemies is represented by visuals that often feel like Windows screensavers.
And there’s the movie’s MacGuffin, the all-important key. It consists of two separated halves that must be united to have any worth. That “Dead Reckoning” uses a central plot device so similar to that of the recently released and entirely mind-numbing “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” is an unfortunate coincidence.
Part of the secret sauce of movies such as those in the “Mission: Impossible” and James Bond series are plots so convoluted that you feel like you’re barely keeping up. If nothing else, it makes them seem a little smarter than they actually are.
“Dead Reckoning Part One” is ultimately so simple — unite key, stop AI — that you wish characters would at least spend less time explaining everything.
There’s so much explaining.
“I’m going to need just a few more details,” Grace tells Ethan, Luther and Benji when they try to recruit her into helping her with a nearly impossible mission.
“They tend to just get in the way,” counters Benji.
How right you are, sir.
We do get a pretty nifty action sequence before the closing credits in “Part One,” leaving us at least a little hungry for “Part Two.”
And we know we’ll accept that “Mission, too, as it’s impossible to believe we won’t see Cruise do something even crazier in that one.
‘Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One’
Where: Theaters.
When: July 14.
Rated: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some language and suggestive material.
Runtime: 2 hours, 43 minutes.
Stars (of four): 2.5.