The seemingly ageless Tom Cruise returns with another set of death-defying stunts in Christopher McQuarrie's new film Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One. While it is long at 163 minutes, it's a refreshingly old-school piece of summer blockbuster entertainment.
Part of what gives the new Mission: Impossible installment its classic feel is Cruise's willingness to do his own stunts and McQuarrie's willingness to favor practical stunts, a rare thing in this era. I liked Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny more than my Where Y'At colleague David Vicari did, but its over-reliance on CGI is a definite flaw. And even decent superhero movies tend to get tedious in their final acts because of all the CGI. It's not that there are no special effects in Dead Reckoning; it's that McQuarrie and Cruise understand if you mix the effects with a healthy dose of real stunts, it makes even the special effects parts feel more real and less like a video game.
People are understandably discussing a stunt where the 61-year-old Cruise rides a motorbike off a cliff and then base jumps into a canyon. It's amazing and they did an astonishing six takes of this stunt (I was stunned to learn they did more than one). But there's also a wonderfully creative car chase scene in Rome in the first half of the film that's the best car chase I've seen in a long time.
The story, as usual, involves a MacGuffin-- in this case a key that seemingly unlocks access to an AI program that is growing sentient. An old enemy (Esai Morales) of Cruise's Ethan Hunt is also after the key, along with every government on Earth. It's best not to think about the logistics of the plot too much, and the plot's never really the point in the Mission: Impossible series. If you ask people to remember stories from the series, I doubt they'd recall many if any. But it doesn't really matter when the action scenes are so good (I am confident most people can recall action set pieces from previous Mission: Impossible films).
But all this said, the story is enough for the audiences to grab a hold of and enough to serve as the backdrop for all the spectacular action scenes. And even though this is "part one," the script has a clear beginning, middle, and end to it. It works on its own as an individual film. My main problem with the trend of splitting movies into two installments is the first installment doesn't feel like an individual film. It just abruptly ends (e.g. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, Dune, Fast X, the recent Spiderverse installment). But Dead Reckoning avoids that pitfall.
Any fan of old-school Hollywood action should see Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One on the big screen.
