Over the years, how many madmen has IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) saved the world from? There was
Solomon Lane, the cultish leader of a group of ex-agents who called themselves the Syndicate. There was the scene-stealing Sabine Moreau (Léa Seydoux) in
Ghost Protocol. And who can forget
Mission Impossible 3's Owen Davian, played by the late Philp Seymour Hoffman, or the first Mission's Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), head of IMF and merciless double agent that started it all? But what all these enemies had in common was they all had a face. In Dead Reckoning, the antagonist is invisible. It is everywhere and nowhere. A collection of bits gone rogue. The enemy is AI.
This sentient AI, known simply as the "Entity", visualized as pulsating concentric circles of dots, has infiltrated every device and every screen, and forced governments to switch to analog communication. Gabriel (Isia Morales) serves as its face - a messiah who carries out its commands. He is also a man with whom Hunt appears to share a mysterious past. Hunt's mission - should he choose to accept it (when has he ever not accepted it?) - is to find and retrieve a two-piece key - the only physical object capable of controlling this "self-aware, self-learning" entity.
The Entity may be the franchise's most formidable antagonist yet. At the very least, the threat feels very on-trend for our day and age, when AI pundits warn of imminent "Singularity" - a doomsday scenario in which uncontrollable AI takes over the world.
Once again, Hunt is out there, sprinting on rooftops and racing through European piazzas, with Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames) in his ear. Britain's MI-6 agent Ilya Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) joins them in their quest for just long enough to hand off the baton to the franchise's newest "lady accomplice", Grace (Hayley Atwell), a professional thief who finds herself mixed up in Hunt's mission, literally chained to him inside a toy-sized Fiat, as they try to dodge not one, not two, but three chase parties.
What made the Mission Impossible franchise so outrageously successful (its lifetime box-office collection is $3.5 billion), despite being thirty years and seven movies old, is its largely unchanged formula. The arc of each of its stories stays the same. Ethan must choose between saving his team and saving the world. And impossibly, he manages to do both, while doing ridiculously dangerous stunts like scaling the Burj Khalifa or hanging off the side of an airborne Boeing.
Dead Reckoning (Part One) too has that signature Tom Cruise brave act. This time, he rides his motorcycle off a cliff and parachutes into a valley. But longtime fans of the franchise may find Dead Reckoning hits different. For one, it is a two-parter, which means we will have to wait until 2024 to get a satisfying finale. The pacing is also less crisp than in past films as it reintroduces its characters. For the first time in a long time, we hear Hunt recall the IMF oath: "We live and die in the shadows for those we hold close and those we never meet." And lest we forgot, we relearn what IMF stands for - Impossible Mission Force - and its goals (do the dirty work no government wants to do and never get rewarded for it). Why all this expounding? In a press interview, Director Christopher McQuarrie explains that it was a deliberate attempt to bring in a newer, younger audience unfamiliar with the franchise. That leaves old-timers like me feeling like there is too much talk and not enough mischief.
Tom's highly anticipated stunts, perhaps due to sky-high expectations, end up feeling somewhat underwhelming. The bright spot of the movie is instead Hayley Atwell, whose playful, vulnerable performance as Grace makes her a perfect complement to Tom Cruise's debonair Hunt.
Isia Morales hardly instills fear as the antagonist, but I can't say I've been particularly impressed with past villains in Mission Impossible either - not since Philip Seymour's Davian.
Watching Dead Reckoning Part One, you must remind yourself of the magnitude of what's been achieved, because the off-screen bravada doesn't always translate to big-screen awe. Still, Dead Reckoning Part One has two of my favorite MI scenes yet: a Grace+Hunt car chase in Venice, and a Grace+Hunt escape from a falling train. Which is to say, the Grace-Hunt combo really works, and forgettable as Part One was, I can't help but feel that they've saved the best of this duo for Part Two.