Cruise in for a bruisin'
Over the course of its 27-years-and-counting lifespan - a geological epoch, by summertime movie standards - the Mission: Impossible movies have tried on many different guises and been many different things. But one of the things they have been the most consistently, going back at least to the free-climbing and knife-against-the-eyeball scenes in 2000's Mission: Impossible II have been the "holy shit, they actually did that" movies - movies for which a really incredibly big portion of their advertising and overall spectatorial appeal has been the knowledge that the filmmakers decided to strap Tom Cruise to various things and do God knows what to him and generally give off the impression that they're trying to kill him right there on camera, and he hopes they will succeed. For this, Cruise has emerged as more or less objectively the Last Proper Movie Star, someone who has dedicated his late career to transforming his very body into a cinematic object, less a person of flesh and blood than a subject of spectacle in and of itself. This reached its apogee with 2018's Mission: Impossible - Fallout, the sixth film in the series, in which, holy shit, Cruise actually did a HALO jump, and holy shit, Cruise actually flew a helicopter, but most of all, I think we all quietly understand, holy shit, Cruise actually broke his ankle on a take that made it into the final cut, including crawling himself over a ledge and hobbling away without breaking character. And I think this is probably as far as they'll let it go, because despite the media narratives and the jokes, movie productions are actually insured and the insurance people aren't interested in letting famous people who still have dialogue scenes to film die right in the middle of production. A broken ankle is, I suspect, the very best we'll ever get.
And this brings us to the follow-up to Fallout, a film with the mellifluous and graceful title of Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part One. It is a remarkable thing, very probably the biggest and most exciting and energising popcorn movie in the five intervening years since its direct predecessor, though I hope you won't let Avatar: The Way of Water know that I said that. There's a train scene at the climax that includes a particular practical stunt that most train scenes would consider the absolute peak of what they could possibly do, and for Dead Reckoning, this merely counts as the midway point of the sequence, before the really good stuff starts. At the same time, the people responsible for the series, which at this point mostly means producer-star Cruise and director/co-writer (with Erik Jendresen) Christopher McQuarrie, are aware that they won't be out-spectacling the last movie. And so, rather than "holy shit, they did the one big thing", the film has mostly elected to go for "holy shit, look at all the little things they actually did" - as though the series has restfully concluded that it has nothing left to prove by being dazzling on an unprecedented scale, and so it can just dedicate itself to being dazzling in small, interesting ways. For example, it's a film that has required at least two of its cast to become flawlessly good at close-up magic, and in particular, it has multiple scenes whose primary purpose is to showcase that Hayley Atwell studied very hard to get this stuff down and make it look casual and easy. And I mean, sure, "learn a talent" is one of the simplest acting tricks out there, but that's the miracle of Dead Reckoning: noting that it doesn't actually have to do anything wildly gargantuan and amazing to be a phenomenal popcorn movie. It just needs to be extremely good at the things movies are extremely good at: movie stars, and recording things in the camera with limited digital tinkering to make them more than just the stuff of physical reality.
Movie star-wise, there is of course Cruise himself, who has here done something even more incredible than flying helicopter, something I never truly thought we'd see him do onscreen: allow some visual evidence that he is aging. Not much evidence, the film has still be lit to make the sexagenarian (who was actually still 59 when the film was shooting, I think, but whatever) appear virile and agile and young for nearly all of its running time. But in the very first scene where he appears, Cruise emerges from the shadows in a gloomy room with hard, high-contrast lighting, and he looks haggard - more even than in the small but meaningful amount of wrinkles Cruise permitted to be visible in Top Gun: Maverick, where he merely looked like a weathered elder statesman. It's impossible to imagine that it's an accident that these images are our very first glimpse of the film's protagonist: the beat-up, worn-out vision of Cruise's Ethan Hunt who emerges from the shadows makes an immediate impact on us as a man who has run and run and will never stop running, and sets up a film that is, by the standards of the cheerful giddy spectacle of the Mission: Impossible series, gripped in melancholy, aware to the point of morbidity with the passage of time and the things we lost along the way. This isn't persistent: it's still a tremendously fun movie built around various chase scenes - but it's a constant undercurrent, how the film asks its hero to make *ahem* a reckoning. And yes, "dead reckoning" is a navigational term, one that even gets used in that context in the film's opening scene, but "that sounds almost meaningful and it's cool, let's use it as our title" is an ancient tradition in Hollywood.
And then, beyond Cruise, the film is pretty remarkably well-stocked with new and returning faces, several of them doing fantastic work. As the film's featured villainous henchwoman, sporting a weird patch of white makeup around her eyes and a little jet-black teardrop tattoo, Pom Klementieff probably makes the biggest impression, and this despite being handed the extra challenge of having almost no dialogue, with I think a total of two lines in English. She's a terrific presence, presenting a fully-realised emotional arc in a figure who would function perfectly well without any personality at all, and while her character's dazzling weird look would tend to make her the center of attention in most scenes, anyway (besides the makeup, she has a lengthy stretch of screentime wearing what appears to be a "darker, edgier" high school marching band uniform), she's communicating a ton of wily menace and cunning just through her merciless stare. In the midst of a movie that feels more like classic James Bond than actual James Bond has felt in decades, Klementieff has all of the "realist cartoon" energy of the great Bond villains, and she's an utter treat to watch. Atwell, making her own first appearance in the franchise, has a relatively easier task, but at the same time her own arc as an amoral thief who reluctantly has to team up with the good guys could have been much more trite if she just played things as uncomplicated and adorable, which wouldn't be entirely out-of-bounds for the script as written; instead, she's letting the character be sharp and arrogant, making it very clear that she finds Ethan annoying or off-putting for the stretch of the movie where that applies, and generally never asking the audience to root for her when she can instead be an interesting destablising force.
As far as the "point the camera at exciting things" angle goes, I think a pattern emerges. 2011's Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol gave us one of modern cinema's most iconic stunts, and rather than trying to top it, the very next film in the series, 2015's Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation redirected its energies toward being more of a thriller and less of a gonzo action movie. Fallout gave us like 90 minutes of "are you fucking kidding me?" action spectacle, and now Dead Reckoning gives us like 120 minutes of "are you fucking kidding me?" suspense. There is a stretch of I don't even know how many minutes that involves a three-way chase through an airport that secretly involves a fourth way, where three of the participants have magic sci-fi spy gear that lets them see everything simultaneously, that is simultaneously a race-against-the-clock nuclear bomb sequence in which series stalwart Ving Rhames has to spend the whole sequence communicating cross both plotlines, and it feels basically like McQuarrie is just showing off the number of plates he can get spinning all at once and how long he can stretch that out for. The film then pauses for a somewhat less complicated chase scene through the Rome police department, you know, just so we can catch our breath, before diving into a car chase that is simultaneously terribly exciting and fraught, but also goofy comic slapstick involving the ridiculous sight of a little Fiat 500 in its all its tiny shoebox glory attempting to seem cool and sleek. The Spanish Steps get involved at one point, with editor Eddie Hamilton doing a nice little cut-cut-cut moving back to a wide crane shot of the steps, just to bring into focus how delightful it will be to shove a tiny car down them at top speed. Basically, Dead Reckoning feels like the people making it knew that the incredibly tense and fun and stylish opera sequence from Rogue Nation was that film's highlight, and wanted to see if they could sustain about a 100 minutes of that across the length of a whole movie.
I frankly think they did. At 163 minutes, Dead Reckoning ought to feel like brutal punishment, but it achieved something many films only three-fifths of its running time have failed to achieve: it buzzed by without me wondering even once how much time had passed. This is a splendid, splendid thriller, with enough human gravity to not feel completely weightless (there's even a well-earned sad scene in the middle, the point where it finally stops to say "okay, that 70 minutes of nonstop action and suspense was quite a bit, perhaps you would like to be able to pee now, or at least relax your shoulders" for a good ten minutes of exposition), and enough variation in its big sequences that it never feels like it's running out of imagination. It suffers, minutely, from some odd editing in the dialogue scenes, a fixation on close-ups that can only partially be explained as part of its pandemic-rattled shoot (this is, if I am not mistaken, the last of the big "pandemic-impacted productions" to see the light of day), a perverse disinterest in screen direction that thankfully does not apply to the action sequences, where spatial clarity is crucial. But it's still nice to have it in dialogue scenes, and in the remarkably strange scene where we get all the big intrigue about this film's MacGuffin laid out, the basic rules of editing are being flaunted so aggressively that it's only possible to view it as a purposeful decision. It suffers, even more minutely, from the flatness of its exterior-lit scenes. But otherwise, this is as energetic as one dares to hope a popcorn movie might be, in love with the capacity of movies to provide every sort of visual delight. I mean, what's more purely cinematic, at either extreme, than the textures of the human trains, and full-size trains moving at top speed, and Dead Reckoning has both of those, in places of great privilege. It even manages to make "fist fight and running on top of a moving train" seem like an exciting new concept, and at that point, we're talking about some outright wizardry.
Reviews in this series
Mission: Impossible (De Palma, 1996)
Mission: Impossible II (Woo, 2000)
Mission: Impossible III (Abrams, 2006)
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (Bird, 2011)
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (McQuarrie, 2015)
Mission: Impossible - Fallout (McQuarrie, 2018)
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part One (McQuarrie, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
And this brings us to the follow-up to Fallout, a film with the mellifluous and graceful title of Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part One. It is a remarkable thing, very probably the biggest and most exciting and energising popcorn movie in the five intervening years since its direct predecessor, though I hope you won't let Avatar: The Way of Water know that I said that. There's a train scene at the climax that includes a particular practical stunt that most train scenes would consider the absolute peak of what they could possibly do, and for Dead Reckoning, this merely counts as the midway point of the sequence, before the really good stuff starts. At the same time, the people responsible for the series, which at this point mostly means producer-star Cruise and director/co-writer (with Erik Jendresen) Christopher McQuarrie, are aware that they won't be out-spectacling the last movie. And so, rather than "holy shit, they did the one big thing", the film has mostly elected to go for "holy shit, look at all the little things they actually did" - as though the series has restfully concluded that it has nothing left to prove by being dazzling on an unprecedented scale, and so it can just dedicate itself to being dazzling in small, interesting ways. For example, it's a film that has required at least two of its cast to become flawlessly good at close-up magic, and in particular, it has multiple scenes whose primary purpose is to showcase that Hayley Atwell studied very hard to get this stuff down and make it look casual and easy. And I mean, sure, "learn a talent" is one of the simplest acting tricks out there, but that's the miracle of Dead Reckoning: noting that it doesn't actually have to do anything wildly gargantuan and amazing to be a phenomenal popcorn movie. It just needs to be extremely good at the things movies are extremely good at: movie stars, and recording things in the camera with limited digital tinkering to make them more than just the stuff of physical reality.
Movie star-wise, there is of course Cruise himself, who has here done something even more incredible than flying helicopter, something I never truly thought we'd see him do onscreen: allow some visual evidence that he is aging. Not much evidence, the film has still be lit to make the sexagenarian (who was actually still 59 when the film was shooting, I think, but whatever) appear virile and agile and young for nearly all of its running time. But in the very first scene where he appears, Cruise emerges from the shadows in a gloomy room with hard, high-contrast lighting, and he looks haggard - more even than in the small but meaningful amount of wrinkles Cruise permitted to be visible in Top Gun: Maverick, where he merely looked like a weathered elder statesman. It's impossible to imagine that it's an accident that these images are our very first glimpse of the film's protagonist: the beat-up, worn-out vision of Cruise's Ethan Hunt who emerges from the shadows makes an immediate impact on us as a man who has run and run and will never stop running, and sets up a film that is, by the standards of the cheerful giddy spectacle of the Mission: Impossible series, gripped in melancholy, aware to the point of morbidity with the passage of time and the things we lost along the way. This isn't persistent: it's still a tremendously fun movie built around various chase scenes - but it's a constant undercurrent, how the film asks its hero to make *ahem* a reckoning. And yes, "dead reckoning" is a navigational term, one that even gets used in that context in the film's opening scene, but "that sounds almost meaningful and it's cool, let's use it as our title" is an ancient tradition in Hollywood.
And then, beyond Cruise, the film is pretty remarkably well-stocked with new and returning faces, several of them doing fantastic work. As the film's featured villainous henchwoman, sporting a weird patch of white makeup around her eyes and a little jet-black teardrop tattoo, Pom Klementieff probably makes the biggest impression, and this despite being handed the extra challenge of having almost no dialogue, with I think a total of two lines in English. She's a terrific presence, presenting a fully-realised emotional arc in a figure who would function perfectly well without any personality at all, and while her character's dazzling weird look would tend to make her the center of attention in most scenes, anyway (besides the makeup, she has a lengthy stretch of screentime wearing what appears to be a "darker, edgier" high school marching band uniform), she's communicating a ton of wily menace and cunning just through her merciless stare. In the midst of a movie that feels more like classic James Bond than actual James Bond has felt in decades, Klementieff has all of the "realist cartoon" energy of the great Bond villains, and she's an utter treat to watch. Atwell, making her own first appearance in the franchise, has a relatively easier task, but at the same time her own arc as an amoral thief who reluctantly has to team up with the good guys could have been much more trite if she just played things as uncomplicated and adorable, which wouldn't be entirely out-of-bounds for the script as written; instead, she's letting the character be sharp and arrogant, making it very clear that she finds Ethan annoying or off-putting for the stretch of the movie where that applies, and generally never asking the audience to root for her when she can instead be an interesting destablising force.
As far as the "point the camera at exciting things" angle goes, I think a pattern emerges. 2011's Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol gave us one of modern cinema's most iconic stunts, and rather than trying to top it, the very next film in the series, 2015's Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation redirected its energies toward being more of a thriller and less of a gonzo action movie. Fallout gave us like 90 minutes of "are you fucking kidding me?" action spectacle, and now Dead Reckoning gives us like 120 minutes of "are you fucking kidding me?" suspense. There is a stretch of I don't even know how many minutes that involves a three-way chase through an airport that secretly involves a fourth way, where three of the participants have magic sci-fi spy gear that lets them see everything simultaneously, that is simultaneously a race-against-the-clock nuclear bomb sequence in which series stalwart Ving Rhames has to spend the whole sequence communicating cross both plotlines, and it feels basically like McQuarrie is just showing off the number of plates he can get spinning all at once and how long he can stretch that out for. The film then pauses for a somewhat less complicated chase scene through the Rome police department, you know, just so we can catch our breath, before diving into a car chase that is simultaneously terribly exciting and fraught, but also goofy comic slapstick involving the ridiculous sight of a little Fiat 500 in its all its tiny shoebox glory attempting to seem cool and sleek. The Spanish Steps get involved at one point, with editor Eddie Hamilton doing a nice little cut-cut-cut moving back to a wide crane shot of the steps, just to bring into focus how delightful it will be to shove a tiny car down them at top speed. Basically, Dead Reckoning feels like the people making it knew that the incredibly tense and fun and stylish opera sequence from Rogue Nation was that film's highlight, and wanted to see if they could sustain about a 100 minutes of that across the length of a whole movie.
I frankly think they did. At 163 minutes, Dead Reckoning ought to feel like brutal punishment, but it achieved something many films only three-fifths of its running time have failed to achieve: it buzzed by without me wondering even once how much time had passed. This is a splendid, splendid thriller, with enough human gravity to not feel completely weightless (there's even a well-earned sad scene in the middle, the point where it finally stops to say "okay, that 70 minutes of nonstop action and suspense was quite a bit, perhaps you would like to be able to pee now, or at least relax your shoulders" for a good ten minutes of exposition), and enough variation in its big sequences that it never feels like it's running out of imagination. It suffers, minutely, from some odd editing in the dialogue scenes, a fixation on close-ups that can only partially be explained as part of its pandemic-rattled shoot (this is, if I am not mistaken, the last of the big "pandemic-impacted productions" to see the light of day), a perverse disinterest in screen direction that thankfully does not apply to the action sequences, where spatial clarity is crucial. But it's still nice to have it in dialogue scenes, and in the remarkably strange scene where we get all the big intrigue about this film's MacGuffin laid out, the basic rules of editing are being flaunted so aggressively that it's only possible to view it as a purposeful decision. It suffers, even more minutely, from the flatness of its exterior-lit scenes. But otherwise, this is as energetic as one dares to hope a popcorn movie might be, in love with the capacity of movies to provide every sort of visual delight. I mean, what's more purely cinematic, at either extreme, than the textures of the human trains, and full-size trains moving at top speed, and Dead Reckoning has both of those, in places of great privilege. It even manages to make "fist fight and running on top of a moving train" seem like an exciting new concept, and at that point, we're talking about some outright wizardry.
Reviews in this series
Mission: Impossible (De Palma, 1996)
Mission: Impossible II (Woo, 2000)
Mission: Impossible III (Abrams, 2006)
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (Bird, 2011)
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (McQuarrie, 2015)
Mission: Impossible - Fallout (McQuarrie, 2018)
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part One (McQuarrie, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
