Courtesy Paramount Pictures
Movies
Celebrated geriatric stuntman Tom Cruise returns to avoid acting at all costs in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, a probable prequel to Dead Reckoning Part Two and the umpteenth entry in the long-running MI series of movies based on the 1960s television show of the same name.
Once again, Cruise plays Ethan Hunt, a kickass secret agent with, and this is true, the Impossible Missions Force, a clandestine branch of the CIA that employs people who got in so much trouble once that their government was like, “You can either drive your motorcycle off a cliff and parachute onto a train or we’re gonna let the super-criminals of whom you ran afoul kill you so hard.”
This time, Ethan is on the trail of a key that unlocks The Entity, a rogue sentient AI that mutated into the kind of “Kill all humans!” thing we’ve seen in films since 2001. Of course, every freaking government on the planet wants it, because this living bit of code can hack into so many mainframes it’d make a ‘90s rollerblading computer nerd shit.
Back for the mission are series regulars Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames, who are computer genius/engineer types with a shared penchant for cracking wise. Newcomer Hayley Atwell (Captain America) joins the mission this time, too, as a globe-trotting jewel thief who picked the wrong pocket.
Dead Reckoning fails the Bechdel Test at every turn. (To pass the test, women must appear in a scene without a man and talk about something other than men. Not nearly as many movies pass as you might think.) Returning cast member Rebecca Ferguson, for example, shows up just to give Ethan the juice he needs to fight Gabriel (a pretty OK Esai Morales, whom they make shout “ETHAAAAAAAN!” in much the same way he shouted “RICHIIIIIIEEEE!” in 1987′s La Bamba), a bad dude who was somehow hired by the AI to do bombs and stuff.
Ethan, meanwhile, has pissed off the US government yet again by going rogue, which could have been an interesting wrinkle had writer/director Christopher McQuarrie (he’s behind a number of MI movies) and his fellow writers Bruce Geller and Erik Jendresen bothered to express the parallels between his actions and The Entity’s. Instead, Cruise jumps on and off shit and drives fast and does that flat-handed running thing before jumping some more. Shea Whigham (Boardwalk Empire) plays the gov’t guy out to stop him despite his begrudging respect, while Pom Klementieff (Guardians of the Galaxy) plays a mostly voiceless assassin who…ugh, who cares? Morales sinks his teeth into evil gleefully, though, which is kind of fun, and Atwell’s not-quite-innocent superthief breaks up Pegg and Rhames’ tired ball-busting routine.
Gracefully, Dead Reckoning doesn’t end on a cliffhanger so much as a “to be continued,” though after so so many films in the series, it’s hard to keep up or care anymore. Maybe just save this one for a rainy day when we’re deeper into the WGA/SAG strike and we’ve run out of scripted content.
5
+Atwell is fun
-Diminishing fight scene returns; 3 hours is way longer than it needs to be
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One
Directed by McQuarrie
With Cruise, Atwell, Pegg, Rhames, Klementieff and Morales
Violet Crown, Regal, PG-13, 163 min.
