A review of “Mission: Impossible -Dead Reckoning Part One”
It’s been a long time coming – and we still don’t have the complete story. Shooting of the latest IMF escapade has been interrupted so many times by Covid that the final budget is a reported $290M, making it one of the most expensive films ever, and delaying its release until five years after the previous movie. This is the seventh impossible mission – the third successive one co-written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie – so that the money-making franchise has now been running for an incredible 27 years and its star Tom Cruise is now 61.This time the villain is a guy called Gabriel (Puerto Rican-American Esai Morales) but he is merely the front-man for The Entity, some kind of super version of artificial intelligence that can take over all the world’s electronic systems, which in turn can only be accessed by possession of a two-part, bejewelled, cruciform key. Sound silly? You bet. But, like all the “Mission: Impossible” movies, this is a triumph of style over substance and you just have to go with it and, if you can do that, you’re in for an exciting and entertaining ride.
Tom gives us a full spectacle of running, jumping, driving, riding and fighting. Sadly his keynote stunt – which is amazing – was signalled too clearly in the trailer, but there is a terrific end-of-movie sequence involving a runaway train racing onto an exploding bridge. This time he interacts with no less than four (much younger) action females: former MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and criminal broker the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), both of whom were in “Fallout”, plus ace pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) and French assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff).
This first part of the adventure is an excessive two and three quarter hours but Part Two is still to come. As one of the characters (unnecessarily) tells us “The key is only the beginning”.