Is it really possible that we’re only one final death-defying stunt away from the end of the Mission: Impossible series? If you believe Tom Cruise, then you might want to savor the stunt that’s at the heart of the terribly-titled Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, which is what happens when you blow your punctuation load within the first 20 characters and still have to deal with that this film will have a direct sequel. It’s on the poster and trailer, and everybody knows it’s coming. And yet. When the film stops for Cruise’s death-defying motorcycle-assisted BASE jump off of the side of a cliff – it quite literally grinds things to a full halt, interrupting the pacing of the entire sequence of which it is only a facet and cutting the sound out so that we may witness it with appropriate reverence – it is breathtaking. If one were to lop off the final hour of Dead Reckoning and present it as a standalone feature, there’s a real argument to be made that those baffling critics who claimed that the last film in the franchise, Fallout, was heir apparent to Fury Road might have been on to something.
Christopher McQuarrie, who is becoming the only consistent director that the franchise has ever had – by the time it ends, he’ll have directed as many installments as had existed when he came on in 2015 – weaves together a thrilling and suspenseful conclusion (something the films have lacked since the days of De Palma and Woo), while also eliding the assumed cliffhanger that a subtitle like Part One might suggest. It’s just a bummer that the two hours that exist before it – that’s right, this movie is about as long as your average baseball game now – are underwhelming in the same way that every one of his installments since Rogue Nation (a feat never equaled in terms of style and pace) have been.
After his two-hundredth disavowal, pursuit by governments around the world, and ultimate victory against the forces of darkness and the people whom he said he couldn’t make the impossible mission possible to complete, Ethan Hunt (Cruise) is tasked with another mission: track down his old colleague Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), and recover one half of the “cruciform” key, which when joined together, unlocks a mystery at the heart of a sunken Russian submarine under the Antarctic Ice. This time, however, our overlord villain is a digital one: An AI that, to the astonishment of the NSA director (Cary Elwes), has managed to infiltrate all government services without breaking a virtual sweat. Control of this AI is a top priority for the CIA’s Kittridge (Henry Czerny, reprising his role from years ago), who also happens to run the Impossible Mission Force (I guess. I’m really not sure, given how intentionally convoluted these films are), who believes that it being in US hands will preserve them as the world’s sole superpower for the foreseeable future. Naturally, Hunt comes to disagree, especially when a familiar face from his pre-IMF past pops up: Gabriel (Esai Morales, who rocks this part like a Quiet Storm track), the man whose murderous deeds put Hunt on the path to superspydom, who is now working for the AI to ensure global anarchy. To stop him, Hunt will need all of his friends – Faust, Luther (Ving Rhames), and Benji (Simon Pegg) – on his side and the help of an international thief named Grace (Hayley Atwell), who may be a friend or foe in the making.
There’s something to be said for consistency, but when paralleled with its most high-profile competitor, the M:I movies often come up lacking in most departments, aside from the stunt work. It’s easy to forget that the first Mission: Impossible wouldn’t have existed without the precarity that the Bond franchise found itself in after the collapse of the Soviet Union, arriving a scant six months after Goldeneye hit theaters. One bad choice, and the M:I movies might have overtaken their overseas rival, but Martin Campbell’s film managed to bring Bond into a new era and establish an essential modernity to the Bond series – this is partially why he was a natural choice to come back for Daniel Craig’s first installment, Casino Royale, after all. M:! is, strangely enough, limited in its ability to do the same kind of jukes when faced down by the defensive line of obsolescence: It is a rebootquel, lest ye forget, one of the first to successfully bring a TV franchise to the screen while retaining its quality, and is as such burdened by continuity in a way that Bond isn’t. But aside from its action bona fides, it has grown steadily more stylistically inert as the years have passed. The musical chairs nature of the Bond franchise brought innovations to build upon, but once McQuarrie became the series’ overseer – placed there by its owner, Tom Cruise – the films’ style and look notably declined from installment to installment. The M:I movies never quite recovered from JJ Abrams’ attempt to make a maximalist episode of Alias out of III, and compared to the imagery that Roger Deakins, Hoyte van Hoytama, and Linus Sandgren brought to Bond in the interim, the M:I movies look rough.
The central problem with the McQuarrie-era Mission: Impossible films is Cruise himself, as the status quo established by Ghost Protocol doesn’t suit Hunt’s character or his talents as much as one might think for a franchise that quite literally owes its perpetuation to his involvement as producer. Hunt is, to put it mildly, a fucking bummer: For all of his outrageous stunts and actions, he’s a masochist with a messiah complex whose few meager pleasures in life come from his assertions that he’s saving lives and they’ll never know it, like a skyscraper-scaling De Bergerac, and his friendships, which ultimately resemble the relationship an office manager has with their employees, operating on the same sliding scale of jocularity.
He is absurdly, painfully bland as written, and the few times that Cruise betrays something more than angst, anger, or simmering anxiety (barring the occasionally winsome reaction to a Pegg or Rhames joke) is when the final emotion crosses the fourth wall at the onset of one of his stunts. He sounds genuinely terrified to hop off that mountain – who on Earth would blame him for that? It’s the closest I’ve related to Ethan Hunt since at least 2005. But, perhaps, this stoicism is by design: Bond has slowly morphed away from a fantasy of Fleming’s, distilling aspects of his wartime compatriots (which he himself did not possess) into an archetypical hero, an avatar of the audience’s desire – a man of action who savors the good things in life but who, also, retains that sensitive element that On Her Majesty’s Secret Service gave the character — while Hunt is Cruise’s dream version of himself.
Cruise’s intensity is often cited as the key to his appeal – he’s perpetually focused on whatever task is at hand, be it learning pool or bringing a proper end to the Vietnam War – but intensity only goes so far. His best characters share a rakish element to their personalities that Hunt painfully lacks. If you want to know why Top Gun: Maverick succeeded on an emotional level, it’s that Cruise was able to tap into that vein at its full wattage – it’s hard to imagine Hunt gleefully messing with his superiors or leaping out of a date’s second-story window to avoid her daughter in the kitchen – and there is genuine poetry in watching that character mature while retaining that core irascibility. This has been a defining feature of his work for decades, only for it to be totally stripped out of the M:I franchise in recent years, regardless of how many accolades he received for Edge of Tomorrow (in which he dipped fully into scumbag protagonist territory) or how much money the Jack Reacher movies made (his hyper-competence and quirks are played for true laughs, but are also characteristics that are sorely missed in Hunt, no matter one’s opinions of the franchise’s overall quality). Bird recognized this, and so did McQuarrie, to an extent: it’s the reason Jeremy Renner took on some of those duties once it was decided that Hunt needed a film or two to brood over something.
McQuarrie also tries to solve this problem by bringing in Atwell, but her pluck isn’t enough to fill the gaping maw left by Cruise’s lack of charisma. Their scenes together are decently amusing – a chase that sees them speeding through the streets of Rome in a sporty secret-agent Fiat 500 while handcuffed to one another feels taken from a Roger Moore Bond, slide-whistles absent – but her slotted status as proto-recruit prevents any sort of flame from forming between the two of them, especially since Hunt is still pining after his SAS colleague and has a stack of decades in between their respective ages. Rhames (whose appearances in these movies are delights) and Pegg are usually limited to earpiece banter, given that they’re tech nerds on laptop duty with the maps and security cameras and such needing minding, and Ferguson is essentially a mirror of Hunt in competence and attitude.
In short, there’s a charismatic hole at the heart of Dead Reckoning’s core ensemble that only gets greater when McQuarrie attempts some level of revisionism: our villain spotlights Hunt’s failures in a classic fashion – sure, you’ve saved the world a hundred times, but you can’t protect the people that you love – that feels lacking when you hold It up to the romantic angst of Craig’s Bond, where the whole “tortured soul” deal is part of what makes him so goddamn hot. Dead Reckoning, ultimately,is closer to the perspective that the sportswriter (reductive, I know) Jon Bois took when trying to craft a body count for 24’s Jack Bauer, albeit in a milder and more amiable fashion than Bauer’s own “death curse:” You must keep doing the stunts. I can’t keep doing the stunts. I’ll do the stunts.