Though I found it a tad overlong and didn’t really care for its AI-centric plot, Dead Reckoning Part One is entertaining as hell and pretty much everything you’d want from a spy action blockbuster.
I’ve followed the Mission: Impossible franchise sporadically through the years, and without really intending to, I ended up missing out on the previous two installments, which I understand are the most acclaimed ones in the series. I do plan on catching up eventually, but they’re not a required homework for this seventh entry, even though some emotional moments probably land harder if you’re more familiar with the characters.
In this new spy action adventure, Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his team face villain du jour, a malevolent artificial intelligence originally designed for digital sabotage. Referred to simply as the Entity more times than anyone would care to hear, the AI went rogue after achieving sentience, and now various world powers are scrambling to protect their security, while at the same time racing each other in a bid to harness and weaponise the Entity. In a move that surprises absolutely no one, Hunt also goes rogue almost instantly, believing the AI to be too dangerous to fall into anyone’s hands, including his own government.
The key to this very modern threat is a quaintly old-fashioned real key that resembles a religious artifact, and is split into two halves. One half is held by Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson, elegant and lethal), a former intelligence operative and a friend to Hunt. The chase for the second half takes Hunt and old favourites Luther and Benji (Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg) to Abu Dhabi airport, where he comes across Grace (Hayley Atwell), a professional thief out to steal the key on behalf of a mysterious buyer.
The AI plot may be very “now” and zeitgeisty and all, but as a villain the Entity is no HAL 9000 and I found my interest waning during the talky exposition scenes that are supposed to build up its threat. The Entity manifests only briefly in the film as a sort of digital Eye of Sauron, while the more active foe is a cold and ruthless assassin named Gabriel (Esai Morales), who serves as its human liaison. It is also revealed that Gabriel has a personal history with Ethan Hunt, who is shocked to discover that his old nemesis still lives. There’s a hint on near-religious zealotry, with a nod to the biblical angel Gabriel who served as the messenger of God, and potentially more information to follow in Part Two, but for now Gabriel’s history and motivations are too murky for him to be a truly satisfying antagonist.
Of course the far-fetched plot only really exists as a flimsy connective tissue between the exhilarating chases, fights and stunts, and like most of its predecessors, Dead Reckoning delivers on action and thrills and how. The highlights include a tense handcuffed car chase through the streets of Rome, featuring the cutest yellow miniature Fiat and the famous Spanish Steps. And there’s the frankly jaw-dropping finale set in and around the Orient Express steaming through the scenic Alps. I was already familiar with the footage of Tom Cruise really driving that motorbike off a real mountain, but the last dizzying action sequence set on the train had me positively squirming in my seat.
Though the franchise made a few attempts at turning Ethan Hunt into a more fully realised character, I never quite bought it. To me he has always remained a cipher and an empty vessel for Tom Cruise’s star power, but hey these days I’ll happily take the star power from a fully committed performer still devoted to making movies the old school way. The big revelation of Dead Reckoning is Hayley Atwell, who nearly steals the entire movie as light-fingered Grace. I’ve never seen the Marvel movies and TV series she was in, so my reaction was, wow where did Hollywood hide her all these years? Grace doesn’t trust Hunt as easily as his own team, and so there’s an unpredictability to their partnership, which at the same time crackles with a zesty screwball energy that you hope will never cross into a romance – for Grace’s own sake.
Other great performances include Vanessa Kirby (who was wonderful as Princess Margaret in the early seasons of The Crown) as the White Widow, a powerful and dangerous international arms dealer, and Pom Klementieff as a relentless assassin who feels like an old-school Bond villain and has an intense, claustrophobic fight with Hunt in the impossibly narrow street in Venice. I hope that all that AI nonsense can grow on me in the next movie, but for now Part One delivers enough thrills and intrigue to make me go, roll on Part Two please.
P.S. In the prologue, the actor playing the Russian nuclear submarine commander also appeared in Netflix’ The Queen’s Gambit as the Russian chess Grandmaster; I’d like to think that the blink-and-miss-it shot of the unfinished chess game onboard the sub is a nod to Vasily Borgov.
P.P.S. Groups of unaccompanied pre-teen boys should absolutely be banned from the cinemas. The pack behind me wouldn’t even bother to keep their voices down during the movie, thankfully they got up and left midway.
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