﻿{"id":28843,"date":"2023-08-04T06:49:22","date_gmt":"2023-08-04T05:49:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=28843"},"modified":"2023-08-04T06:49:22","modified_gmt":"2023-08-04T05:49:22","slug":"a-review-of-mission-impossible-dead-reckoning-part-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=28843","title":{"rendered":"A review of &#8220;Mission: Impossible -Dead Reckoning Part One&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\nIt&#8217;s been a long time coming &#8211; and we still don&#8217;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 &#8211; the third successive one co-written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie &#8211; so that the money-making franchise has now been running for an incredible 27 years and its star Tom Cruise is now 61.\n<p>\nThis 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&#8217;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 &#8220;Mission: Impossible&#8221; movies, this is a triumph of style over substance and you just have to go with it and, if you can do that, you&#8217;re in for an exciting and entertaining ride.\n<p>Tom gives us a full spectacle of running, jumping, driving, riding and fighting. Sadly his keynote stunt &#8211; which is amazing &#8211; 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 &#8220;Fallout&#8221;, plus ace pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) and French assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff).\n<p>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 &#8220;The key is only the beginning&#8221;.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been a long time coming &#8211; and we still don&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28843"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28843\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28844,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28843\/revisions\/28844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}