Like the beat, beat, beat of the tomtom, a pounding of the drums tells us that another installment of “Mission: Impossible” is under way. Most of us know the trills and thrills of Lalo Schifrin’s original score, which remains the most exciting theme tune ever composed for TV. (Paddling furiously in its wake is that of “Hawaii Five-O.”) For the ensuing movie franchise, the tune has been repeatedly stretched and tweaked—or, in the case of the second film, lacerated by Limp Bizkit. Now, as the seventh chapter of the saga begins, we hear no melody at all: nothing but the rhythm, thudding forth. But it’s enough. We brace ourselves, and adopt the Mission position. Here we go.
The new movie, which is directed by Christopher McQuarrie, runs for two hours and forty-three minutes, and its full title is “Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One,” which takes about half an hour to say. If Part Two, which is due to be released next June, is of similar dimensions, we’ll be landed with a tale that is more than five hours in the telling. Concision junkies will have to look elsewhere. The first sign of swelling, in this latest adventure, comes with a gathering of U.S. intelligence personnel, which goes on and on. It’s eventually halted by a guy who throws smoke bombs around, unleashing clouds of pretty green gas—a mild surprise to those present, who were presumably expecting coffee and a selection of pastries, but by this stage any interruption is welcome.
The topic of the meeting is the Entity, which is discussed at such length, and in tones of such grandiloquent awe, that I understood it even less at the end than I did at the start. In the world of “Mission: Impossible,” villainy gets bigger and more abstract by the movie. In “Rogue Nation” (2015), we had the Syndicate. In “Fallout” (2018), we had the Apostles. Now we get the Entity. (What next? The Intimation? The Word in Your Ear?) It seems to be a species of A.I.—“an enemy that is everywhere and nowhere,” we hear, with “a mind of its own.” Access to it is granted by a cruciform key, in two sections; collect the pair, slot ’em together, and the Entity lies within your grasp. Any government or terrorist outfit possessing it will wield unquenchable power, and the one person who can stop it from slipping into evil hands is, of course, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), Frodo Baggins having taken early retirement.
Ethan assembles his usual gang, consisting of Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), who has been on call since the first “Mission: Impossible” (1996), and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg). Also in the mix is Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), who made her début in “Rogue Nation.” To my eyes, it was with the arrival of Ferguson that the franchise truly took flight; her manner was tranquil even at the height of tension, her character’s fealty was elusive, and she was splendidly unimpressed by the hero. That impressed him. Make no mistake, Cruise is in control of these movies—“A Tom Cruise Production,” the opening credits of “Dead Reckoning” announce—but he has the wit to realize how dreary that dominance would become if Ethan were not, at regular intervals, unmanned by women.
Hence the amazing Grace (Hayley Atwell). She is a thief, whom Ethan bumps into at the Abu Dhabi airport. The thing about bumping into Grace is that, post-bump, you will find yourself bereft of valuables, for her fingers are feather-light. Although she has a sheaf of passports, like Jason Bourne, she is new to mayhem, never mind to brutality, and Atwell does a lovely job of suggesting that Grace’s natural state is one of criminal innocence—wide-eyed yet without a flake of ditziness, and far too schooled in common sense to be a femme fatale. Observe how she pauses, with a frown of uncertainty, before putting on one of those rubber masks which more seasoned habitués of “Mission: Impossible,” when switching identities, don and doff like gloves. Ever practical, she ties her hair back before clambering onto the outside of a speeding train, and, as she and Ethan are harried through Roman streets by multiple vehicles, exclaims, “Is there anyone not chasing us?” An excellent question. The chase concludes with a merry plea. “Don’t hate me,” she says, leaving Ethan bewitched, bothered, and be-handcuffed to a steering wheel. Nice.
The cuffs are a Hitchcockian clue, and the whole movie is clamorous with echoes of earlier works. (“Dead Reckoning” was a Humphrey Bogart thriller from 1947—tangled, surly, and steeped in postwar bitterness.) On the trusty comic principle that huge blockbusters deserve dinky modes of transport, Ethan and Grace scoot through Rome in a Fiat 500, the color of ripe lemons, recalling Roger Moore’s Citroën 2CV in “For Your Eyes Only” (1981), or, indeed, the tuk-tuk driven to exhaustion by Harrison Ford in the latest “Indiana Jones.” The climax of McQuarrie’s film, set on and atop a train, alludes with pride to the first “Mission: Impossible” and winds up saluting “The General” (1926), Buster Keaton’s runaway masterpiece, as a locomotive takes a deep dive through a broken bridge.
Cruise has none of Keaton’s dreamy stoicism, but both actors, trim and compact, define themselves by the outsized magnificence of their stunts. In addition, each of them is most at ease when in haste. They run unstoppably yet with an oddly formal poise—torso held upright, like that of a waiter with a tray, above the pumping pistons of their legs. Watch Keaton sprint along the crest of a hill, a century ago, in the finale of “Seven Chances,” or Cruise in full flow on the roof of an airport, in “Dead Reckoning.” Relentlessness of this order ought to be chilling. Not so. Instead, we are stirred and amused by a preternatural sight: men as little machines.
There is a devout podcast, “Light the Fuse,” which peruses “Mission: Impossible” in all its incarnations. Should you wish to hear an interview—nay, a two-part interview—with a former marketing intern on the third film, here is your opportunity. As the podcast approaches its two-hundred-and-fortieth episode, one has to ask: why do these movies continue to suck us in? Perhaps because they are as fetishistic as their fans. Precision is everything. I have lost count of the objects, friendly and hostile, that click, lock, or shunt into place. The bass flute that turned into an assassin’s rifle, in “Rogue Nation,” somehow stood for the cunningly wrought design of the entire narrative. Likewise, on a larger scale, the main attraction of “Dead Reckoning” is a motorbike-and-parachute leap that was previewed, unpacked, and explained online, many months ago, the purpose being to demonstrate that Cruise, the nerveless and unfading star, had performed the maneuver himself. Here is a motion picture equipped with auto-spoilers, eager to stress that at the heart of its fantasy lies something risky and real.
It was after “Rogue Nation” that I searched my conscience and discovered, as I sorted through the rubble, that I was looking forward with greater gusto to the next helping of “Mission: Impossible” than I was to the upcoming James Bond. For somebody reared on 007, this was tantamount to apostasy. I felt like a mid-Victorian Protestant admitting, in shame and confusion, to the lure of the Catholic faith. The change of allegiance was merely hardened by “No Time to Die,” the most recent Bond flick, in 2021, which foundered in an agony of self-involvement. Who wants a hero who expires under the sheer weight of backstory? Where’s the fun in that?
By contrast, retrospection has played a blessedly small part in the emotional legend of Ethan Hunt. We gaze back, in remembrance of stunts past—“Oh, my God, that bit in the fourth one where he climbed a skyscraper with magnetic suckers on his mitts,” and so on. Ethan’s own impulse, though, is forever onward, and to complain that his character lacks depth is to misinterpret the laws of dramatic physics. He is mass times velocity plus grin. If he has a history, it tends to self-destruct from film to film; which of us honestly remembers, let alone cares, that he got married in “Mission: Impossible III” (2006)? Does he remember? That’s why the plot of “Dead Reckoning” is a cause for concern—not because of the metaphysical fluff (“Whoever controls the Entity controls the truth”) but because of Gabriel (Esai Morales), a smooth devil who craves the cruciform key. Thirty years ago, apparently, he crossed paths with Ethan, who declares, “In a very real sense, he made me who I am today.” I don’t like the sound of that. Let us pray that Part Two will not require Ethan to follow the example of poor 007, forsaking crazy capers to lick his psychological wounds.
For now, how does Part One stack up? Well, as I say, it’s too talky by half. A funky soirée at the Doge’s Palace, in Venice, brings together Ethan, Ilsa, Gabriel, Grace, and the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), the arms dealer with a hypnotizing stare whom we first encountered in “Fallout.” All the interested parties, in other words, yet the result is just not interesting; I vaguely hoped that Miss Marple would show up, reveal the killer’s name, and hit the dance floor. Soon afterward, a fight breaks out in an alleyway, during which Ethan beats a woman’s head against a wall—a spasm of nastiness that has no place in a saga as strangely anesthetized as “Mission: Impossible.” There isn’t the faintest shudder of sex in “Dead Reckoning,” so why does McQuarrie allow such violence to sour the spirited action?
But let’s be fair. Despite its longueurs and shortcomings, this movie is still a bag of extravagant treats. A submarine attacked by an invisible foe beneath the Arctic ice. A grand piano suspended directly over Ethan and Grace, and prevented from dropping only by a slowly weakening clamp. Rebecca Ferguson wearing a sniper’s eye patch. A nuclear bomb that asks the person trying to defuse it whether he is afraid of death. And, best of all, in Rome, the Fiat 500 rocking and rolling down the Spanish Steps—which, as we are charmingly assured in the closing credits, were not harmed in the making of the film. Thank God. Or thank Tom Cruise. The choice is yours. ♦
