A Familiar Magic Trick Executed to Perfection

Hayley Atwell and Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One.

Tom Cruise does what he does in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One. He is very good at what he does.

One of the most enchanting aspects of 2018’s Mission: Impossible — Fallout, the last Mission: Impossible film, was the cavalier attitude with which it treated plot exposition. Its opening scenes breezed through a cavalcade of names and organizations and motivations that practically dared you to understand what was going on. This was, honestly, liberating. Don’t worry about why anything is happening, writer-director Christopher McQuarrie seemed to be telling us. Just enjoy the spectacle. This is the movie in which Tom Cruise hangs off a helicopter.

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, as suggested by that ominous “part one,” seems to care a bit more about its plot, and it’s not hard to see why. This time, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt isn’t fighting nihilistic terrorists or vaporous international-espionage networks but an all-powerful artificial intelligence known as “the Entity” that has instant access to any and all online networks and can effectively dupe the world’s tech-reliant militaries into fighting one another. It’s a variation on the man-versus-machine theme that Cruise and McQuarrie pursued in last year’s Top Gun: Maverick and a rather compelling metaphor for their well-publicized dedication to old-school action film–making and real-life stunt work. It also happens to resonate with our current moment: You can easily imagine the Entity standing in for any number of modern society’s (and modern cinema’s) high-tech bogeymen, from dead-eyed disrupters to algorithm-obsessed visionaries.

But if Dead Reckoning spends a bit too much time slowly (and repeatedly) spelling out what the Entity is and what it can do and why that’s capital-B Bad, it can be forgiven, because all that exposition serves as a kind of spiritual justification for the bravado on display. It could even be a justification for the entire Mission: Impossible series, as this new entry is largely built out of sequences that evoke previous movies, only cranked up to 11 — from a fight atop a speeding train to a sandstorm to a car chase through narrow European streets. It has even brought back Henry Czerny’s charmingly officious Eugene Kittridge, who was the head of the IMF (Impossible Mission Force) in the first movie but has now, five pictures later, become the head of the CIA.

There’s an Easter-eggy quality to much of Dead Reckoning, but McQuarrie & Co. escalate matters effectively. Alec Baldwin’s Alan Hunley once memorably called Ethan Hunt “the living manifestation of destiny”; this time, Shea Whigham’s Jasper Briggs, (yet) an(other) intelligence agent tasked with bringing Hunt in, describes him as “a mind-reading, shape-shifting incarnation of chaos.” Everybody is set in their usual roles. Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust is once again a cross between love interest and mysterious outsider, a rogue spy who has to save Ethan and be saved by him at key moments. Vanessa Kirby returns as the White Widow, an arms dealer who plays all sides. Among the latest additions to the main cast, Esai Morales brings an impressively chilly hauteur to Gabriel, a death-obsessed terrorist working for the Entity. Hayley Atwell’s Grace, a professional thief who winds up entangled in the attempt to retrieve two halves of a mysterious key that everybody’s after, makes for an energetic audience surrogate, and she and Cruise have excellent chemistry. It’s also hard at times to tell if Grace was just in the wrong place at the wrong time or if there’s more to her. A number of these characters seem like they’ll get their true moment in the sun in part two.

It’s fascinating to consider the fact that the Mission: Impossible films have come to be seen as an artful rebuke to the cookie-cutter sameness of Hollywood action pictures since the M:I formula might be the oldest and most ironclad of them all. The formula extends even beyond the movies to the marketing — right down to the ritual of advance press about Cruise’s centerpiece stunt for each new movie. Which is why, for the past year and a half, we’ve been treated to endless clips of the star’s death-defying motorcycle-parachute jump over — or rather into — an immense Norwegian canyon. It’s certainly sensational onscreen, though one could argue that the nine-minute promotional featurette Paramount created explaining how that particular (insane) stunt was accomplished is even more impressive.

Within the context of the film, the stunt (and our awareness of its approach) also works as a clever bit of distraction. So much time is spent setting up the motorcycle jump that we might start to think that’s going to be the climax of the movie. But what comes afterward — an extended train sequence that culminates in what might be the most hair-raising derailment ever put to film, full of seesawing train cars and dangling movie stars — is even more unforgettable. That is, in many ways, the enduring charm of all these films: They feel like magic tricks, built as they are on anticipation, familiarity, misdirection, and spectacle. Whenever it gets down to the business of making Tom Cruise run and jump and drive and fly in and out of things, Dead Reckoning manages to astonish.