Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) Director: Christopher McQuarrie
“We live and die in the shadows, for those we hold close, for those we never meet…”
The seventh Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible film, is the first of a two-parter, with the sequel currently set to be released in 2025. Dead Reckoning Part One is the follow-up to the fan favorite in the series, 2018’s Fallout. It begins with a tense nautical scene a la The Hunt for Red October as a Russian stealth submarine, the Sevastopol, is testing its new highly advanced artificial intelligence deep under the ice of the Bering Sea when they are suddenly spotted by a rival submarine, however computers begin running haywire and the Sevastopol accidentally fires upon itself. A pair of twin keys which can be used to access the artificial intelligence hub are then separated. What happened here? Who is the culprit?
The pair of cruciform keys serve as the central Macguffin of the film as every government around the world desperately searches for the keys in order to harness this powerful new technology, including IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is given his new mission: to track down Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) since she has been captured by bounty hunters and taken somewhere in the Arabian Desert. In the course of a shootout, Ilsa has apparently been killed, but we learn she has secretly survived while protecting the key.
From director of the CIA, Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), we learn more about this particular brand of artificial intelligence. Known as “The Entity,” it is a sentient form of artificial intelligence that has been harvesting deep international state secrets for years, and building complex algorithms to outmaneuver humanity –it is the ultimate enemy. Since every nation is looking to harness this entity, Ethan decides to go rogue from the IMF once again and track down the second key in order to destroy the entity, rather than acquire it for any one particular government. In short, technology cannot be trusted!
This leads Ethan to an extended airport heist sequence where he meets a thief named Grace (Hayley Atwell), immediately followed by a wild handcuffed car chase through Rome, and pure chaos as they infiltrate a secret meeting in Venice hosted by none other than Alanna the “White Widow” (Vanessa Kirby) alongside an old nemesis of Ethan’s named Gabriel (esai Morales), an elusive figure apparently in cahoots with The Entity as its chosen messenger. With numerous other secret agents closing in, the rogue IMF agents –including Ethan, Grace, Benji (Simon Pegg), and Luther (Ving Rhames)—hatch a plot to impersonate Alana the “White Widow” using their trademark masks aboard the Orient Express to Innsbruck. It features a memorable action sequence involving Cruise launching off a cliff from his motorcycle before parachuting onto a moving train which is run off a destructed bridge moments later. It is a truly wild chain of events. And the film ends on a cliffhanger as Ethan, Grace, Benji, and Luther agree to track down the Sevastopol at the bottom of the ocean and use the two conjoined keys to hopefully destroy The Entity.
While I thought the last few Mission: Impossible movies were really terrific action-adventure films all-around (Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation, and Fallout), ultimately I was fairly disappointed with Dead Reckoning. It struck me as a confusing, convoluted, befuddling, overly complicated, mostly frustrating popcorn movie with plenty of bewildering dialogue and a panoply of feeble performances. It is salvaged only by a handful of fun adrenaline-pumping stunts and sequences (i.e. those iconic “cruise control” moments). In particular, the character of Grace was entirely frivolous –she is ceaselessly rescued by Ethan only to prove herself continually untrustworthy throughout the film—however, the broader theme of uncontrolled artificial intelligence run amok across the globe is timely and well-taken.
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- Director: Christopher McQuarrie
- Written by: Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen
- Produced by: Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie
- Starring:
- Tom Cruise…..Ethan Hunt
- Hayley Atwell…..Grace, a questionably loyal thief
- Ving Rhames…..Luther Stickell
- Simon Pegg…..Benji Dunn (Pegg also voices The Entity)
- Rebecca Ferguson…..Ilsa Faust, who previously appeared in Rogue Nation and Fallout
- Vanessa Kirby…..Alanna Mitsopolis “The White Widow”
- Esai Morales…..Gabriel, a nemesis of Ethan and mysterious ally of The Entity
- Pom Klementieff…..Paris, a French assassin who works for Gabriel
- Henry Czerny…..Eugene Kittridge, director of the CIA last scene in the original film Mission: Impossible (1996)
- Cinematography: Fraser Taggart
- Edited by: Eddie Hamilton
- Music by: Lorne Balfe
- Production Companies: Skydance, TC Productions, C2 Motion Picture Group (this was the first Mission: Impossible film since MI3 not to use J.J. Abrams’s company Bad Robot for production)
- Distribution Company: Paramount Pictures