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It is an unusual compliment to say of what will undoubtedly be the year’s best action film that the experience of watching it is rather like being punched in the face for the better part of three hours. But Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One is a bruising, visceral and wholly exciting ride that’s about as close as you can imagine to being put in a boxing ring with its star Tom Cruise.
If the viewer is pummeled and bludgeoned into an ecstatic state of submission, then that’s the price you pay for this exceptional slice of filmmaking: a thriller that doesn’t just thrill, but exhilarates and wholly dominates its audience in the process. I’ve written before about how Cruise remains the last old-school star in Hollywood, but what makes him so fascinating to watch as an actor is the barely-concealed mania beneath the charm and charisma. (Not for nothing is this rightly described as a “Tom Cruise Production” in the opening credits.) This exhibits itself both on-screen and off; when watching Cruise throw himself into the most demanding of stunt sequences, whether it’s jumping off cliffs, driving cars around Rome at breakneck speed or engaging in train-bound derring-do of a kind barely seen since Buster Keaton and The General, it’s impossible not to be both enraptured and slightly frightened by his utter dedication to showing the audience something new. To quote Russell Crowe in Gladiator, “Are you not entertained?” Well, yes, you will be.
And yet the other side to Cruise is that of insane competitiveness. The Mission: Impossible films have always had a semi-friendly rivalry with the Bond franchise, and it is surely no coincidence that they have improved vastly in quality since Sam Mendes raised the 007 bar with Skyfall, which made more money worldwide than any of the Cruise pictures. The difference is that, while the Craig Bond pictures subsequently became lost in a mire of dull world-building and unbelievable plotting, the Mission: Impossible movies — especially the last three — are simply but brilliantly precision-tooled to constructing simple but thrilling storylines. (This one revolving around a sinister and omniscient AI program known as “the Entity” with designs on world domination, and a key that has to be retrieved to gain control of the source code, or some such nonsense.) This allows Cruise and his hugely talented co-stars to do their very best.
Under the careful eye of Christopher McQuarrie, returning for his third consecutive Mission: Impossible film, there is an outrageous amount of entertainment to be had by the new additions to the cast, whether it’s Hayley Atwell’s opportunistic thief Grace, Esai Morales’s suave villain Gabriel or Pom Klementieff’s psychotic henchwoman, as well as a returning ensemble that features the superbly talented likes of Vanessa Kirby, Rebecca Ferguson and the very welcome reappearance of Henry Czerny from the first film as the not-to-be-trusted CIA director Kittridge. In fact, there are homages aplenty to the original, even down to the thumpingly exciting and perilous train-set finale; perhaps the obvious inference is that if you see Cruise on board your local Amtrak, you should run away, whooping in terror.
At a time when Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny shows how pedestrian, cynical and boring — to say nothing of unprofitable — this kind of action picture can be, Dead Reckoning is an intense oxygen hit. It makes all its competitors — the Fast and Furious franchise, the Bonds and DC and Marvel superhero pictures — look anemic and second-rate in comparison. Rumor has it that the next Mission: Impossible film (which is teased at the end, rather than left on an almighty cliffhanger) will be the last one, although Cruise is now gaily talking about going into his eighties, à la Harrison Ford. If the films were to decline in quality, then this would be a tragedy, but for now, this turbo-charged slice of outrageousness represents the pinnacle of what audiences should expect from this kind of escapism. Long may it continue.
