At particular moments during Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One, it’s possible to ignore the color and sound and imagine you’re watching a clip from one of the masters of silent cinema. Here’s Buster Keaton jumping off a train, here’s Harold Lloyd flinging himself across an abyss to grab a railing that barely looks like it can hold him. This isn’t to say that Tom Cruise’s new action movie is lacking in innovation or somehow lesser than those old-fashioned predecessors. Rather, it’s a worthy addition to the pantheon of gutsy, visceral cinema where part of the fun is wrangling with the question, “How did they do that?” even though you don’t really need to know the answer. You just want to see the hero make the jump and keep running.
And run he does. The headlong sprint is one of Cruise’s calling cards, and he hasn’t aged out of it yet. In one scene in this, the seventh installment in the Mission: Impossible series, his character, Ethan Hunt, escapes from a tight scrape by running full tilt along the roof of an airport, and the moment is as comical as it is thrilling. What is he going to do when he gets to the edge of the roof considering that the bad guys are still everywhere? No matter, it looks cool, and the swooping aerial shot thrills the senses. In fact, the plot hinges on several moments of outlandish coincidence, executed with brash confidence as if Ethan knew precisely what the outcome was going to be. Swift pacing, however, keeps your attention focused on what’s coming next rather than dwelling on how unlikely what just happened might be. Whether you find it thrilling or silly, you feel like you’re getting your money’s worth.
That’s the line that this film flirts with crossing, again and again. Directed by Christopher McQuarrie from a script he wrote with Erik Jendresen (and based on the original television series developed by Bruce Geller), the film toggles from maximally absurd to breathtakingly exciting. Both of these dimensions of tone are artfully crafted and executed with top-shelf filmmaking prowess. An early scene features a collection of super-serious government operatives who each intone one line of earth-shattering exposition, like a Greek chorus of doom. The cast seems to be one twitch away from bursting out laughing at the silliness of it all, but they manage to play it straight. An over-explaining scene like this can stop an action movie in its tracks, but McQuarrie frames each talking head at a canted angle in close-up to heighten tension. It’s a trick from old Hollywood, and it’s expertly deployed, with the added wildcard element of a menacing character lurking out of focus in the background. And is that guy peeling a latex mask from his face to reveal a hidden identity? Of course he is – it’s Mission: Impossible, and no trick is left unplayed, no matter how cheesy or improbable.
At this point, Tom Cruise’s real-life mission has become the salvation of blockbuster cinema, with last year’s spectacular Top Gun: Maverick, and now this globe-spanning extravaganza with one epic set piece after another. Cruise seems to have lost none of his vigor, and he famously executes many of his own most outrageous stunts, including the hair-raising motorcycle cliff jump featured in the film’s trailers. The situation that puts him there is entirely preposterous, but it isn’t even the most thrilling episode in this adventure which also features a fist fight atop a speeding train, a high-speed car chase through the streets of Rome and a hair-raising train wreck and escape sequence that would have had Buster Keaton calling for a safety harness. Speeding trains and pianos dangling from a fraying rope have been effective tropes for as long as cinema has existed, and still retain the power to make audiences squirm and cheer.
While this film’s plot stands mostly alone from previous installments in the franchise, several familiar characters return, including Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg), Kittridge (Henry Czerny) and the enigmatic Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), each of whom earns some deepened characterization. A new addition, Grace (Hayley Atwell), generates some plot-driving complications and a romantic dilemma for Ethan which never quite gels; for someone with so much experience outsmarting intelligence services and bad guys all around the globe, Ethan seems inexplicably gullible when it comes to the new girl. Presumably returning in the forthcoming Part Two installment, Grace’s character arc may not yet be complete. That’s the main issue with Part One, in fact – it all serves as set-up for what comes next. The opening sequence, a nail-biting prologue on a Russian submarine, teases further underwater adventures and an implacable antagonist in an A.I. algorithm known as The Entity. These are storylines that are left incomplete, and so a sense of resolution is forestalled until at least next summer.
Hopefully, Tom Cruise survives the filming. His commitment to derring-do seems to go to greater lengths with each film he makes, and it is a major component in the largely positive critical reception and audience appeal of his productions. In Part One, his face occasionally resembles a loose silicon mask, which in any other movie might be distracting, but in a Mission: Impossible movie it sends up plot hole alerts. (Is he about to pull off his mask and reveal that Ethan Hunt has been someone else all along?) Not to worry, he’s just aging. And while Cruise appears to be as vigorous as any actor working in the action genre today, it might be nice to see him settle into some less strenuous roles where he can channel as much intensity into his emotive chops as he puts into jumping out of planes and off of cliffs. And yet, the actor/producer has set up expectations for at least one more mind-blowing escapade. Will he personally pilot a space capsule to crash it into the moon’s eyeball? Of course, that sounds ridiculous, but that’s exactly what the Mission: Impossible movies do: take absurd stunts from cinema’s swashbuckling past and turn it into the most thrilling thing you’ll see today.
Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures
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