In an era of declining box office receipts and regurgitated intellectual properties featuring race- and gender-swapped protagonists to appeal to “modern audiences,” it seems the only surefire way to make a smash hit is to attach Tom Cruise to the project. Last summer’s smash blockbuster was Top Gun: Maverick (2022); one year later, it’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023).
Unwieldy title aside, Dead Reckoning Part One is an excellent film. Cruise returns to portray super spy Ethan Hunt, the most resourceful asset of the mysterious Impossible Mission Force (IMF). What makes the flick so compelling, and not just another rehash of past M:I films, is its antagonist: a powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) called “The Entity,” an enemy that is “everywhere… and nowhere.”
Dead Reckoning Part One is one of those films that is too byzantine to summarize neatly, but when you’re in the theater (and you should see this flick on the big screen), the plot makes perfect sense. If anything, the film indulges in something that plagues too many movies: characters explaining what is going on in an expository scene, even though we can clearly see what is happening. Part of the fun of movies is that they tell by showing, not the other way around. A wife should be asking her husband, “What is going on,” not have a character tell her.
That quibble aside, suffice it to say that Dead Reckoning Part One is a globetrotting adventure with all sorts of duplicity and double-crosses, as well as unlikely alliances. The Entity rests beneath the Bering Sea on a wrecked Russian submarine, loudly (intentionally) infiltrating the intelligence databases of agencies all over the world. It can predict the billions of outcomes of events seamlessly, so can effortlessly manipulate events to increase the likelihood of achieving its desired outcome.
Naturally, every intelligence agency in the world wants to access and control The Entity for their own purposes. Unfortunately, accessing The Entity requires a cruciform key in two halves. When the halves come together, they make a complete key, which can access The Entity’s hardware. As such, the first half of Dead Reckoning Part One involves all the major players—the CIA/US government, other nations, Ethan Hunt, shadowy arms dealers, Gabrielle (Hunt’s arch nemesis, a “fanatic” who is working for The Entity)—trying to obtain the two halves of the cruciform key.
While all the governments, terrorist organizations, etc., want The Entity for its power over “truth”—defined in the film as access to all of the world’s intelligence data, as well as access to any digital device in the world—and its insanely vast computing power, Hunt (as a bit of a stand-in for us, the audience) wants the key so he can destroy The Entity, because (as a young CIA agent says to his commander later in the film) “no person should have that power.”
What begins is a game of cat-and-mouse between Ethan and his IMF buddies; the CIA/US government; Gabrielle and The Entity; and an international arms dealer (not to mention every other country in the world). Hunt and his allies must outwit every human player and an artificial intelligence with nearly omniscient predictive powers. The Entity can manipulate any digital device in a number of ways: creating false images; erasing certain people from security footage; mimicking voices in earpieces; etc. The Entity uses our very reliance on digital gadgetry against us, causing the various factions to resort to analog forms of communication, like short-wave radios and old-school television signals. The CIA even sets up an entire safe room of massive cathode-ray tube televisions getting information from an ancient, Cold War-era satellite.
The key—both in halves and as a whole—changes hands several time thanks to an unlikely ally in Grace, a skilled pickpocket who finds herself in way over her head. Grace is a great example of how to write a “strong female character,” in that she is not automatically good at everything. She is a skilled thief, but is clearly out of her depth in high-speed car chases and the like. Grace is smooth and competent, but she clearly needs Ethan Hunt’s expertise in tight situations. Over the course of the film, she grows more confident, as the events of the flicks—including a runaway train!—force her to adapt. Ethan Hunt learns from her, too, but the film does not belittle him to make Grace look better, which seems to be the case with so many modern films.
Hunt, of course, is getting on in years, and while he’s still incredibly skilled, he’s growing weary, and even questioning his own abilities. The stunts in the film are insane, and knowing that Tom Cruise does many of his own stunts makes them even more impressive: the cat is sixty-one-years old. There’s one scene in which Hunt drives a motorcycle off a rocky outcropping, and then must parachute onto a rapidly moving target; apparently, Cruise did this take multiple times. How much of it is Hollywood magic versus reality is unclear, but he did drive a motorcycle off a cliff. Whoa!
That’s also what makes this film so good—you can feel Cruise’s dedication to his craft in every scene. The guy sincerely loves making movies, and he doesn’t cut any corners.
Dead Reckoning Part One is not perfect, of course. It’s a very long film, clocking in at 163 minutes, or two hours, forty-three minutes (2h43m). I felt it in the theater (as did my bladder—gulp!). At roughly the two hour, twenty minute (2h20m) mark, I was thinking, “Okay, we should be finishing about now.” The trend for these massive blockbusters seems to be to make films longer and longer, and I lament the slow death of the ninety-minute feature. Dead Reckoning Part One could have been about twenty or thirty minutes shorter—and we still have a Part Two coming at some point!
That said, the movie rarely dragged. There was one point about halfway through where I found myself wondering how much longer we had, but that passed quickly. When I left the theater, it felt just about right, and I was surprised how quickly the three hours passed.
One reason the movie clips along is because there is nearly nonstop action, punctuated only occasionally with expository scenes. The action doesn’t get exhausting, though, like in a Marvel movie, where there’s so much CGI foolishness going on, it all becomes incomprehensible (Transformers films suffer from this same effect). The action scenes use CGI and special effects very sparingly, and most of the action involves real stunts. For example, there is a long car chase sequence that uses actual vehicles (including a tiny little Fiat 500), and it’s super fun and compelling.
“Compelling” is a great word for this film. So rarely do I experience genuine suspense or fear for the main characters in a film. Of course Ethan Hunt is going to live—right? Even with that knowledge, I genuinely feared for his safety throughout the film, and some of the stunts and close-calls made me tense up in my seat. When was the last time you watched a flick that had that effect on you?
Further, the premise—a super powerful AI that can manipulate the “truth” and wreak havoc across the globe—is all-too-compelling. Twenty years ago, it would have seemed like a hacky sci-fi premise; now, it seems chillingly real. All of those tech advocates loudly trumpeting the glorious future of artificial intelligence had better watch this movie and think about what they’re championing long and hard. It’s serendipitous that Dead Reckoning Part One released the same month as Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023), which poses the question, “just because we can do something, does it mean we should do it?” In a digital world, an out-of-control super-AI could do a great deal of damage, and has more fewer checks on its power than the countries wielding nuclear weapons. Maybe we should turn it off, yeah?
So, I’ll close with a reiteration of my advice early in this review: see Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One in the theater—now. Don’t miss it. It’s the best film of the summer.