Mission: Impossible – Fallout
2018
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Jul 12, 2023 · In Theaters At Home TV Shows. In Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his IMF team embark on their most dangerous mission yet: To track down a terrifying new ...
Jul 14, 2023 · The image most people associate with “ Mission: Impossible ” is probably Mr. Cruise stretching those legs and swinging those arms. He does that more than once here, but it seems like the momentum of that image was the artistic force behind this entire film. “Dead Reckoning Part One” prioritizes movement—trains, cars, Ethan’s legs.
Jul 11, 2023 · Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One Rated PG-13 for thriller violence. Running time: 2 hours 43 minutes. Running time: 2 hours 43 minutes. In theaters.
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By Siddhant Adlakha
Posted: Jul 5, 2023 4:00 pm
After the resounding success of Top Gun: Maverick, a 60-year-old Tom Cruise is back to save the summer blockbuster yet again, this time with an even more direct confrontation of obsolescence. Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh Mission: Impossible film and the first of what was envisioned as a two-part finale is both a timely rumination on the dangers of AI as well as a banger of an action sequel that never slows down. It’s by no means the best Mission: Impossible, but it’s easily the funniest, and a sure contender for the most purely entertaining of the lot, with the kind of farcical escalations that kneecap the average summer movie (looking at you, Fast X). Anything that seems like a flaw gets folded into the subtext by writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, who crafts a winding head trip that houses some of the most precise, rhythmically assembled, and tension-filled sequences in the series’ history
Until the previous entry in the franchise, Mission: Impossible – Fallout (the one with Henry Cavill reloading his forearms), these movies largely stood alone, but Dead Reckoning Part One reaches into the past on numerous fronts. The return of the first movie’s morally dubious intelligence head, Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), serves less as a wistful cameo and more as a throwback to the series’ neo-noir roots – a welcome antidote to a summer overrun with empty nostalgia à la The Flash and the new Indiana Jones. Ethan Hunt’s (Cruise) need to go rogue in Dead Reckoning is a direct result of characters and events of the original, Brian De Palma-directed Mission: Impossible, leading to a scenario where Hunt’s own government can’t be trusted with the movie’s dangerous McGuffin: an all-powerful, artificially intelligent algorithm dubbed “the Entity.”
Right from the thrilling opening scene set aboard a Russian submarine, the Entity’s abilities seem almost supernatural, but they’re ultimately grounded in the ones and zeroes that dominate all modern life. Every wall humanity has built quickly becomes a weakness, requiring Hunt to leave the shadows, lest control of the Entity fall into the wrong hands – which is to say, the hands of any individual or agency. He re-emerges both burdened and determined; saving the world is something he must do, but this far into his career as a super-spy, it’s also something he wants to do.
Perhaps it’s the only thing he's capable of doing anymore, a story that Cruise expresses quietly amidst the movie’s bombast. (McQuarrie even apes some of De Palma’s askew framing to enhance the intensity of his close-ups.) Cruise is an underrated actor, but his job here is made slightly easier since the movie’s subtext so closely aligns with his own anti-streaming credo as an actor and producer. It isn’t long before one gets the impression that Cruise made Dead Reckoning out of an altruistic duty toward preserving classical, big-screen action cinema – and, of course, because he enjoys the sheer lunacy of practical stunt work – in an age when AI and algorithms have become existentially threatening to artistry itself.
Mission: Impossible
Mission: Impossible II
Mission: Impossible III
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
Mission: Impossible – Fallout
Each new Mission: Impossible brings with it expectations for greater heights of on-screen spectacle, but Grace grounds the film in hilarious ways. She’s a proficient pickpocket, but compared to the highly trained agents all around her, she’s a civilian, and so for Hunt to protect her from bullets and armored Humvees essentially means scaling back his own MacGyver-esque tinkering and problem solving, forcing him to aim for more pragmatic and attainable solutions. A regular human companion humanizes him in turn, yielding an amusing extended car chase with amazing seat-rumbling sound design, a sequence that relies more on wit and improvisation than Cruise’s otherwise superhuman skills.
A regular human companion humanizes Hunt.
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In Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, Alec Baldwin’s IMF Secretary called Hunt “the living manifestation of destiny.” Here, a character refers to him as an “incarnation of chaos,” a thematic concept further articulated through McQuarrie’s aesthetic approach. There’s a claustrophobia and unpredictability to the hand-to-hand combat, but the image’s geography and meaning is never obscured, even during the most rapid action scenes. Still, the way the film retroactively incorporates this chaotic credo into Hunt’s past is one of its major flaws. It lasers in on the idea that the people in his vicinity – especially women – are forever placed in danger, but over-emphasizes it in a way that creates a problem where one didn’t previously exist. Characters like Grace, Isla, and even a woman from Hunt’s past invented from whole cloth for Dead Reckoning are thus rendered interchangeable.
A similar overcorrection emerges in the exposition. Where the heroes’ many realizations about the Entity yield fascinatingly funny exchanges (the actors are always sincerely tuned in to the plot’s ludicrous tonal wavelength), the amount of information revealed beforehand saps at least a fraction of the tension. Where, on one extreme, you have the non-specific Rabbit’s Foot from Mission: Impossible III — a weapon whose actual nature is never specified — the goal of Hunt’s fetch quest here (i.e. what the aforementioned key unlocks) is made so clear and simplistic to the audience that leaving the characters in the dark about it feels like a misstep. In the process of trying to clarify the nature of its McGuffin, Dead Reckoning demystifies it entirely, creating a “cliffhanger” ending that’s more of a gentle lean across a ledge.
In order to gain this information, Hunt and his team must perform a heist so silly and gloriously over-the-top that it papers over those imperfections at least for a little while. The cliffside bike jump teased in the movie’s marketing is a minor letdown (what you see in the trailers is what you get), but what follows is a third act the likes of which Mission: Impossible has never seen – as jaw-dropping as it is knee-slapping. It’s a locomotive climax that, despite its realistic physics, combines Looney Tunes sensibilities with palpable human stakes – which about sums up the movie as a whole.
If every tentpole franchise entry were this fun and finely tuned, the theatrical-versus-streaming debate would be immediately put to rest. Ethan Hunt may fight to save the world, but Dead Reckoning Part One plays like Tom Cruise’s fight to save the summer blockbuster through entertainment on an enormous scale. Whatever lies in store for the future ...
Review scoring
great
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning sees Tom Cruise’s anti-algorithm crusade take hilariously literal form, in a fun, intense and self-reflexive action saga that works despite itself.
Siddhant Adlakha
- Siddhant Adlakha
Jul 5, 2023 · Critics Pick ‘Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One’ Review: A Stunt-Loving Tom Cruise Takes On AI … and Big-Screen CG Rivals Combining breaking-news intrigue with ever-crazier ...
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Jul 5, 2023 · It says a lot about Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, the first chapter in the $3.5 billion franchise’s two-part seventh installment, that detailed footage of one of the film’s ...
