Joyce Glasser reviews Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part I (July 10, 2023) Cert 12A, 163 mins.
Although written before the Covid epidemic – shooting was interrupted by Covid restrictions – director and co-writer (with Erik Jendresen) Christopher McQuarrie’s Dead Reckoning Part I captures today’s zeitgeist about the threat of Artificial Intelligence. What do you do if an AI entity stops following commands and starts giving them with human beings being unaware that these communications are fake? You call in the Mission Impossible Team for their biggest challenge yet.
If that is tomorrow’s challenge for world leaders, the long running McQuarrie/Cruise duo give us another, designed to ensure that Cruise’s alter ego, Ethan Hunt, is the centre of attention. The man everyone needs or needs to destroy. It just so happens that Hunt is the only human on earth that the Entity, represented by a hazy blue eyeball graphic, is worried about and therefore, its chief target.
The franchise lucked out that Guy Ritchie’s action/comedy/caper Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre was not seen by more people. In that film a device called The Handle is going to be bought by two bio-tech geniuses to cause worldwide financial collapse. The Entity is aiming for similar control and chaos.
In the tense opening scene a stealth, state-of-the-art Russian submarine that cannot be detected by any country, explodes, reminiscent of the Titan disaster. And the enemy, although he is personified as Gabriel (Esai Morales), a kind of Yevgeny Prigozhin terrorist, is really a blue eyeball-like graphic called Entity, a rogue AI programme wreaking havoc with national security systems everywhere.
We learn about this, as does a heavily disguised Ethan Hunt, in a clandestine hotel summit of intelligence agencies convened to discuss Entity that went rogue and is now infiltrating all defence and military systems. Hunt knocks everyone out with a chemical spray except Former IMF director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) who asks him how he will escape security now rushing to the door. This is a nod to creator Bruce Geller’s MI television series in which Hunt’s equivalent is a master of disguises. Here, Hunt dawns a latex mask of Kittridge to answer Kittridge’s question and demonstrate that he is one step ahead of his former controller.
Like the previously released Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the MacGuffin here comes in two halves, in this case a prosaic key, both halves of which must be found and united. On behalf of the Impossible Missions Force which consists of action and disguise man Hunt, Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) a technical field agent and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) a computer expert, Ethan accepts the assignment to find the two keys and verify they are not a number of fakes doing the rounds.
Then there’s the problem that the only person who knows what the combined key unlocks is Gabriel. Hunt learns that Alanna Mitsopolis AKA The White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), a woman who deals in arms trading and money laundering (who we first meet in Mission Impossible: Fallout), has one key and is meeting with Gabriel at a private party in Venice to give it to him. The dialogue refers to an historic animosity between former IMF colleague Gabriel and Hunt, but we never learn what it is. Nor does it really matter: Gabriel is guilty of more than being a greedy killer: he is a boring villain.
The plot is intricate and so ambitious it is frequently choppy as if you’ve missed something. Hunt is first assigned to retrieve half of the key from his former ally (and romantic interest) Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) who has a bounty placed on her. Faust, a former MI6 agent, went rogue with the IMF in the 2015 episode ‘Rogue Nation.’ Through Kittridge he finds her under attack by bounty hunters in a windblown derelict camp in the Arabian Desert and naturally saves her. How she recognises Hunt in his Ethan of Arabia get up in the middle of battle is not half as curious as why she is surprised to see him the next time they meet.
After infiltrating the agency summit, Ethan, now with his team, is off on a series of country and city hoping escapades, each one an overlong set piece full of impressive, if often rehashed stunts. Famously, most are done in the camera with 61-year-old Cruise as his own stunt man, and not through CGI.
In an interminable car chase through Rome, Ethan encounters Paris (Pom Klementieff), Gabriel’s bleached blonde androgenous, punk side kick. Paris is a deadly killer without a conscience until she is betrayed by Gabriel in the closest thing we get to character development in the film.
Neither Benji nor Luther develop as characters, nor does Ethan, who is perfect from the start. Nor do the female characters. Ilsa Faust gets squeezed out of the film which is first given over to Grace (Hayley Atwell) in a long cat and mouse chase in an airport in which pickpocket Grace manages to obtain Ethan’s key. But Ethan, early on, recognises her potential for the IMF. It is a bit like Indy’s goddaughter Helena in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny who recognises the potential in her teen sidekick, Teddy Kumar, when she sees the street urchin pickpocketing.
After destroying half the listed monuments in Rome, Hunt is suddenly in Venice for a short gondola ride in the moonlight with Faust before it’s time to crash The White Widow’s party. It’s not much of a party and Hunt does not come away with the gift.
Meanwhile, Luther and Benji realise their surveillance and tracking equipment is compromised but have no way to tell Hunt he is hearing unreliable instructions. As a result, Hunt is too late arriving on a Venetian bridge where he must choose to save the woman he loves most, Ilsa or Grace. In fact, Hunt would be unable to do so. MI films have long been sexless, loveless and unromantic. Characters never bother with eating, sleeping, changing clothes (they travel too lightly) or with any human needs.
In the scene in which Hunt recruits Grace for the IMF, he tells her, ‘your life will always matter more than my own.’ It is hardly reassuring. Shortly after, we see Hunt, desperate to land on the moving Orient Express in which Grace is facing Gabriel alone, drive his motorcycle off a cliff and parachute at a dangerously low level through a security glazed train window. Poirot solved his eponymous case without a suicide mission or wrecking the entire Orient Express and it’s route through Europe. In Hunt’s desperate world murder is a doddle. His task is to slow down the inevitable destruction of everything, including, to his credit, cinema.
