By Marc S. Sanders
The object of the Mission: Impossible films is not to wow its audience with thought provoking questions of politics or Cold War intrigue or even daring and uncompromisingly evil villains (apart from Phillip Seymour Hoffman). The elements of espionage coursing through the TV series are non-existent in the film adaptations. I’m not watching a film based on a John LeCarre spy novel. By the time the seventh installment has arrived, titled Dead Reckoning Part 1, the goal of the film series is to sketch out the set ups for one action piece after another. Only they must be bigger, bolder, and seemingly that much more impossible to overcome for their hero, Tom Cruise (playing a guy named Ethan Hunt). The action is once again top notch. The glues that bind these displays of bravado together, you know where the characters have to talk and give us a semblance of a plot, is as nil as the scotch tape that assembles a stretch of film reel into a running time length of nearly two hours and forty-five minutes.
The locales are as grand as any travel getaway. We go through a labyrinthine airport. A techno night club works as a meeting place for a bunch of characters. There are journeys to the Arabian Desert, Rome, Venice, and a beautiful ride along the famed Orient Express. Shot on digital, this movie is a gorgeous travelogue.
Let’s get the problems out of the way, though. The MacGuffin that Ethan Hunt and his trusty pals Benjy and Luther (Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames) have been assigned to recover is two parts of a specially designed key. One part is supposedly with the disavowed MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson). The other half is questionable as to who possesses it, but a thief known only as Grace (Hayley Atwell) may be significant in finding it. Put the two halves of the key together and it will unlock something that no one seems to know of, or where it is located. Here’s my first issue. The audience does know what the key unlocks because it is shown in the first three minutes of the film. So, while the cast of characters act dumbfounded, we know all along. So, there goes any curious interest I may have for wanting to follow through with this.
The other problem is that the same conversation happens over and over and over again. Lines like (and I’m paraphrasing here, or maybe I’m not) “If this key gets into the wrong hands…” and “Whatever this does unlock, Ethan, could spell the end of the world…” or “It’s important that both halves of the key are not put together…” or “Whatever this does unlock…” (See? Even I just repeated myself in this write up.) Except, we know what it unlocks!!!!! The same exchange of dialogue occurs over and over. The redundancy exhausts itself. It occurs so much in fact that it’s writer/director, Christopher McQuarrie, relied upon the repetitive dialogue to stretch this next M:I chapter into two films instead of one (Part 2 is scheduled to be released in 2024). I don’t recall the context of any of Ving Rhames’ lines going further than what I have presented here, for example.
The film is also a little too character heavy. I never understood why two agents (Shea Wigham, Greg Tarzan Davis) are constantly pursuing Ethan. Just was not clear for me. Heightened suspense? That’s the best excuse I can think of. The White Widow from the prior film (Vanessa Kirby) also appears. Not much purpose to her. Cary Elwes is the deputy director, there at the beginning and later towards the end, but again I was not entirely certain of his contribution to the story. Even Ilsa Faust does not seem to have much value, except to work as a step in Ethan’s ongoing trajectory for the key. I think Rebecca Ferguson had no more than five lines in the whole picture.
Finally, Ethan Hunt seems to be up against an omnipotent enemy, an AI program known as The Entity. The humans doing the bidding of this phantom program consist of a goatee wearing Esai Morales and his henchwoman, played by Pom Klementieff. She looks straight out of a James Bond picture and makes for a good car chase through the stone cobbled streets of Rome in a tank like Hummer. Morales is as boring as most of the other the M:I villains.
What works for the film is what Tom Cruise really wants to impress you with though. Riding a speeding motorcycle off a mountain and parachuting his way down. That’s actually a near sixty-year-old Tom Cruise performing that feat. Very impressive. The car chase with a handcuffed Cruise and Atwell in a puny yellow Fiat versus an unbeatable Hummer and an army of Italian police vehicles is fun on the level of Roger Moore’s Bond films. Most impressive for me is the final act where the famed Orient Express train tumbles off a bridge with a gap in the middle, car by car with all the furnishings, piano included, pouring out while Ethan and Grace hold on for dear life.
It’s the high stakes stunts that work. Whatever smidge of a story there is fails though. The script by McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen lacks so much that the cliffhanger the film ends on doesn’t leave me yearning for more because it only hearkens back to the beginning. The characters catch up to what the audience has known for the last three hours. So, I’m not losing sleep wondering with what happens next.
Of course, I’ll go see the Part 2 installment. Tom Cruise won’t let me down in whatever daredevil achievements he’s dreaming of doing next. However, am I going to these movies to watch Mission: Impossible, or to watch an aggressively updated version of Circus Of The Stars?
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 