Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One Review - IGN (2024)

After the resounding success of Top Gun: Maverick, a 60-year-old Tom Cruise is back to save the summer blockbuster yet again, this time with an even more direct confrontation of obsolescence. Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh Mission: Impossible film and the first of what was envisioned as a two-part finale is both a timely rumination on the dangers of AI as well as a banger of an action sequel that never slows down. It’s by no means the best Mission: Impossible, but it’s easily the funniest, and a sure contender for the most purely entertaining of the lot, with the kind of farcical escalations that kneecap the average summer movie (looking at you, Fast X). Anything that seems like a flaw gets folded into the subtext by writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, who crafts a winding head trip that houses some of the most precise, rhythmically assembled, and tension-filled sequences in the series’ history

Until the previous entry in the franchise, Mission: Impossible – Fallout (the one with Henry Cavill reloading his forearms), these movies largely stood alone, but Dead Reckoning Part One reaches into the past on numerous fronts. The return of the first movie’s morally dubious intelligence head, Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), serves less as a wistful cameo and more as a throwback to the series’ neo-noir roots – a welcome antidote to a summer overrun with empty nostalgia à la The Flash and the new Indiana Jones. Ethan Hunt’s (Cruise) need to go rogue in Dead Reckoning is a direct result of characters and events of the original, Brian De Palma-directed Mission: Impossible, leading to a scenario where Hunt’s own government can’t be trusted with the movie’s dangerous McGuffin: an all-powerful, artificially intelligent algorithm dubbed “the Entity.”

Right from the thrilling opening scene set aboard a Russian submarine, the Entity’s abilities seem almost supernatural, but they’re ultimately grounded in the ones and zeroes that dominate all modern life. Every wall humanity has built quickly becomes a weakness, requiring Hunt to leave the shadows, lest control of the Entity fall into the wrong hands – which is to say, the hands of any individual or agency. He re-emerges both burdened and determined; saving the world is something he must do, but this far into his career as a super-spy, it’s also something he wants to do.

Perhaps it’s the only thing he's capable of doing anymore, a story that Cruise expresses quietly amidst the movie’s bombast. (McQuarrie even apes some of De Palma’s askew framing to enhance the intensity of his close-ups.) Cruise is an underrated actor, but his job here is made slightly easier since the movie’s subtext so closely aligns with his own anti-streaming credo as an actor and producer. It isn’t long before one gets the impression that Cruise made Dead Reckoning out of an altruistic duty toward preserving classical, big-screen action cinema – and, of course, because he enjoys the sheer lunacy of practical stunt work – in an age when AI and algorithms have become existentially threatening to artistry itself.

The gang's all back together, from the irreverent Luther Stickle (Ving Rhames), to wisecracking Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), to the mysterious Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), now comfortably the only romantic interest whose lifestyle matches Hunt’s. But this well-oiled unit is also our hero’s weakness. As a man who saw his entire team gunned down in the first film, he’s always been torn between completing the mission at hand and ensuring his friends get out alive. This time, he may have met his match: The Entity is the polar opposite of Hunt – an unthinking, unfeeling machine whose logic-first approach is at odds with Hunt’s empathy – and it’s found itself a human avatar to do its bidding, in the form of a terrorist named Gabriel (Esai Morales), a specter from Hunt’s past.

Gabriel is a new addition to the Mission: Impossible roster, but thanks to some well-placed flashbacks – and a stone-cold, terrifying performance from Morales – he feels like he’s always been lurking in the shadows, lying in wait. Playing messenger to an AI capable of accessing any information and bending even the nature of truth, Gabriel becomes the Entity’s aptly-named archangel. (We knew it would happen sooner or later, but this is the closest Cruise has come to making a movie where he fights the biblical God). The plot bears a striking resemblance to season 3 of Westworld, whose all-knowing AI Rehoboam similarly exerted control through precise predictive models – but in the case of Dead Reckoning, the plot charges forward at lightspeed instead of slowing down to reflect on the larger implications. Those consequences are, instead, made apparent through innovative action and chase scenes, where the Entity’s intrusion complicates what might otherwise be straightforward missions.

The Impossible Mission Force (IMF for short) has always relied on its imaginative spy tech – get ready for mask reveals galore! – but this time their tools are turned against them by a digital force that can manipulate everything they see and hear, imbuing Dead Reckoning with a sense of constant paranoia across its 163 minutes. (The filmmaking makes the longest Mission: Impossible yet feel remarkably brisk.) After a while, the characters can barely trust their own senses. What they can trust – and what the audience trusts as well, nearly 30 years into the franchise – is tactile action and propulsive movement. Dunn can no longer simply sit behind a computer to make Hunt’s job easier. Now, with one more film to go (though plans look like they may change), every supporting character must join the chase.

This is where newcomer Grace (Hayley Atwell) comes in: a thief recruited to steal a secret key from some rich and powerful so-and-so who, she has no idea how in over her head she is until she crosses paths with Hunt. Virtually every scene features the collision of multiple parties with their own interests, including Gabriel and his gleeful henchwoman Paris (Pom Klementieff); the returning White Widow (Vanessa Kirby) and her arms-dealer crew; and a pair of bewildered, well-meaning U.S. agents (Greg Tarzan Davis and the ever-reliable Shea Whigham). And yet, this plot never becomes overwhelming, thanks in part to the idea that everything we’re seeing may have been orchestrated (or pre-ordained) by the Entity. That’s a built-in excuse for the story’s conveniences and contrivances, but it’s really a function of McQuarrie’s clear-eyed directing, which works in tandem with Maverick editor Eddie Hamilton’s penchant for building tension and excitement through reaction shots alone. No matter the scenario, logistical information is never lost, and emotional clarity is always ensured (not to mention enhanced, by Lorne Balfe’s pulsating score).

Each new Mission: Impossible brings with it expectations for greater heights of on-screen spectacle, but Grace grounds the film in hilarious ways. She’s a proficient pickpocket, but compared to the highly trained agents all around her, she’s a civilian, and so for Hunt to protect her from bullets and armored Humvees essentially means scaling back his own MacGyver-esque tinkering and problem solving, forcing him to aim for more pragmatic and attainable solutions. A regular human companion humanizes him in turn, yielding an amusing extended car chase with amazing seat-rumbling sound design, a sequence that relies more on wit and improvisation than Cruise’s otherwise superhuman skills.

In Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Alec Baldwin’s IMF Secretary called Hunt “the living manifestation of destiny.” Here, a character refers to him as an “incarnation of chaos,” a thematic concept further articulated through McQuarrie’s aesthetic approach. There’s a claustrophobia and unpredictability to the hand-to-hand combat, but the image’s geography and meaning is never obscured, even during the most rapid action scenes. Still, the way the film retroactively incorporates this chaotic credo into Hunt’s past is one of its major flaws. It lasers in on the idea that the people in his vicinity – especially women – are forever placed in danger, but over-emphasizes it in a way that creates a problem where one didn’t previously exist. Characters like Grace, Isla, and even a woman from Hunt’s past invented from whole cloth for Dead Reckoning are thus rendered interchangeable.

A similar overcorrection emerges in the exposition. Where the heroes’ many realizations about the Entity yield fascinatingly funny exchanges (the actors are always sincerely tuned in to the plot’s ludicrous tonal wavelength), the amount of information revealed beforehand saps at least a fraction of the tension. Where, on one extreme, you have the non-specific Rabbit’s Foot from Mission: Impossible III — a weapon whose actual nature is never specified — the goal of Hunt’s fetch quest here (i.e. what the aforementioned key unlocks) is made so clear and simplistic to the audience that leaving the characters in the dark about it feels like a misstep. In the process of trying to clarify the nature of its McGuffin, Dead Reckoning demystifies it entirely, creating a “cliffhanger” ending that’s more of a gentle lean across a ledge.

In order to gain this information, Hunt and his team must perform a heist so silly and gloriously over-the-top that it papers over those imperfections at least for a little while. The cliffside bike jump teased in the movie’s marketing is a minor letdown (what you see in the trailers is what you get), but what follows is a third act the likes of which Mission: Impossible has never seen – as jaw-dropping as it is knee-slapping. It’s a locomotive climax that, despite its realistic physics, combines Looney Tunes sensibilities with palpable human stakes – which about sums up the movie as a whole.