The first Mission Impossible films got mixed reviews among top critics. Roger Ebert, the man who made film reviewing an art, was almost alone in praising Mission Impossible 2, and it wasn’t until the fourth one, Ghost Protocol, that the franchise’s reputation really took off. This coincided with the arrival of Simon Pegg as IT expert Benji, and I don’t think it’s actually a coincidence. Simon Pegg brought charm and lightness to a franchise that sorely need them.
It was also Ghost Protocol that made the stunts the selling-point. Tom Cruise must be the biggest Hollywood star who does stunts that no one except stuntmen would do—and he comes up with them himself. In Ghost Protocol he scaled the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Cruise also outdoes himself each film. In Rogue Nation he strapped himself to the outside of a jet no fewer than eight times to get the shot. Now in the seventh film—Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part I—Cruise drives a motorbike off a cliff into a towering ravine. The training alone took him over a year. Again the stunt
was the major draw, and it is amazing to watch—but you have to wait two hours to see it, and there are another forty minutes to go. I had to get a babysitter for four hours just to watch the whole film, which really detracted from the enjoyment. Looking back, the opening scene is the best one. A Russian submarine patrols the Bering Sea carrying the world’s most powerful weapon—a mysterious machine called The Entity—when their radar picks up an enemy vessel. The following events are utterly gripping. Sweat pours off the faces of the Russian crew as they await the impending impact of a torpedo, which then disappears just as quickly as it materialised. The radar picked up a false reading—there was no enemy ship. I won’t say more, except that the conclusion of the scene is the most poignant of the whole film.
Not that we’d expect poignancy from the Mission Impossible franchise. In fact, we get too much of it in Dead Reckoning. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is forever agonising over the safety of glamorous women who keep appearing with little or no explanation—his wife from the last three films, played by Michelle Monaghan, is nowhere to be seen, even though her safety was the main motivation for Ethan Hunt. In Dead Reckoning there are repeated flashbacks to another beautiful woman dying in Hunt’s arms, but I had no idea who she was. The baddie who killed this mystery woman is back, and he threatens three more beautiful women whom Hunt tries (and mostly fails) to protect. Rebecca
Ferguson plays Ilsa, a Swedish-British former MI6 agent who now operates solo. She and Hunt had a strange pseudo-romantic relationship in a few of the previous films—I can’t remember if they ever kiss but they hold hands and hug a lot. The baddie Gabriel will take her life or the life of Hayley Atwell, who Hunt only just met and who keeps throwing him in front of moving vehicles—and it’s not entirely clear why Gabriel is going to kill one of these women. The threat seems a distraction from the main plot, which is to find and disarm the world’s most powerful and potentially lethal machine.
The machine itself is one of the more interesting characters, and presents an enemy which no longer seems far-fetched—a super-computer operated by AI. The Entity learns from humans as they interact, and it is smarter, better and faster than us at just about everything. The Entity can replicate Simon Pegg’s voice, feeding Hunt false information during an operation. Its method is disinformation and chaos, fuelling its ultimate goal of world domination. For once, this Mission Impossible MacGuffin isn’t too far-fetched. World leaders and criminals all vie for possession of the key that operates The Entity—a key made of two parts shaped like an Orthodox cross. For a man who practices Scientology, Tom Cruise uses a lot of Christian symbolism in this film. The symbol of the cross keeps cropping up, and on one occasion is even illuminated behind Hunt’s head, as though he were the coming Messiah.
Ethan Hunt has a Messiah complex, and so does Tom Cruise. These are the closing lines of the film: ‘The world needs you Ethan, even though they don’t know it yet’. Hunt’s (and Cruise’s) obsession with being the ultimate good guy mars the plot and dilutes the thrilling action of the rest of the film. How much more charming is Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, a hero who cares more for ancient artefacts than for real people?
To be fair there are some charming moments in Dead Reckoning—the whole cinema laughed out loud at a motorcycle moment in the background in Rome. This is part of a thrilling twenty-minute car chase in the city, in which Cruise and Hayley Atwell are handcuffed together in a mini Fiat 500, chased by the Italian police, the American feds and a psycho French bounty hunter. Rome is where the film really shines. All of the stunts in the scene were practical, and it shows. Bridges, walls, motorcycles, cars, they’re all smashed in the car chase and Tom Cruise was doing it all one-handed. This was the showstopper though—and it’s another hour and half before we get the next thrilling practical stunt involving a purpose-built Orient Express driven at sixty miles an hour off a cliff. They only had one take with the train, and they got it. It’s just a shame it took so long to get there.
Check out more Entertainment Now movie news, reviews and interviews here.
