Ethan, We Are Counting On You! - 'Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One' Review

MILD SPOILERS

The first minutes of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One will take you to the interior of a Russian submarine, the Sevastopol, navigating through the unforgiving depths of the Bering Sea. If you are old enough, nostalgia will soon kick in and you’ll be transported to the long-forgotten worlds of The Hunt For Red October, Tomorrow Never Dies, Crimson Tide or The Spy Who Loved Me. “They don’t do them like that anymore,” you probably said when rewatching those on Blu-ray or DVD. But now, right as you hear two over-confident officers with a marked accent taking pride in their state-of-the-art stealth navigation system before something goes terribly wrong, you will conclude that –after all– someone is doing them like that.

That someone is Christopher McQuarrie, sitting for the third time on the director’s chair in this franchise after Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and Mission: Impossible – Fallout, who makes the 163 minutes of running time fly by with spectacular stunts, incredible set pieces and a relevant plot for this time and age. We often wonder if Artificial Intelligence will take our jobs and actors are themselves going on strike fearing that AI could replace extras. Reworking an idea first intended for 2000’s Mission: Impossible 2, Dead Reckoning Part One makes AI the enemy Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his allies have to confront. And you know they improvise quite frequently when things don’t go as they planned, now just imagine what could happen with a “sentient” AI device known as The Entity interferes with their communications and forces them to outsmart a machine gone rogue that can predict all of their movements, sometimes to fatal consequences.

Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg) and Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson) all come aboard to help Ethan recover two keys that could help control this Entity in an adventure taking them from the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Desert to Abu Dhabi, Rome, Venice and the Orient Express going through Austria. Everyone’s favourite IMF agent also comes across with Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), the manipulative CIA director first seen in the film that opened this franchise in 1996, and Alana Mitsopolis aka “The White Widow” (Vanessa Kirby) returning from Fallout. Throughout this -particularly- unpredictable mission, Hunt will meet a professional thief, Grace (Hayley Atwell) and will get reacquainted with a shadowy man of his past, Gabriel (Esai Morales), who receives orders directly for the Entity and uses that to predict everyone’s movements. Ethan’s connection to this man involves the cause for which he was forced to take the “decision” that led him to become IMF’s top man.

Dialogues abound and many characters try to take a piece of the pie in Dead Reckoning Part One, so it may be hard to follow during a first watch given how fast things happen. Although it may look overwhelming at first, the extensive dramatis personae only contributes to making the plot more appealing and –in a similar case to GoldenEye– nobody feels unimportant or redundant, from the Director of National Intelligence played by Cary Elwes to CIA enforcer Briggs (Shea Wiggam), whose surname –only revealed in the credits– brings back memories to the man who led the IMF in the first season of the 1966 TV series. Morales’ villain might not unleash all of his potential considering his personal beef with Ethan, yet the glimpse we are offered in this movie leaves us intrigued to see what he has in store for the upcoming instalment in the saga. Cruise and Atwell, beautiful from every angle, have a great chemistry and she is a great addition to the cast even though her scenes opaque Ferguson a little in comparison to the previous two films. The interactions between Hunt and Kittridge are a delight to watch and handled with great humour, but who steals the show is Pom Klementieff’s femme fatale Paris: initially a seemingly robotized Xenia Onatopp who moans and laughs every time she does something naughty until you discover she’s a little bit more human near the end.

Some scenes and situations may feel not satisfactorily explained, but considering there is a second part coming in around two years, you can be assured this was done to leave us craving for more and doing several speculations – particularly regarding the abrupt send-off of a character and the pre-IMF pasts of the hero and the villain.

The cinematography, by Fraser Taggart, contributes to making this film an immersive experience and you’ll share the panic of Ethan and Grace as they cling from the falling carriages of the very same train that served as the battlefield between James Bond and Red Grant and Hercule Poirot investigated the murder of Samuel Edward Ratchett. Lorne Balfe’s music continues the eloquence he provided in the soundtrack of Fallout, missing the exotic location-flavoured touch of Michael Giacchino and Joe Kraemer in Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation but still doing a serviceable job with his variations of Lalo Schifrin’s main theme or the eerie sound for the underwater scenes.

Should we wait for Part Two to qualify Part One? Most likely, but seeing this follow-up isn’t coming anytime soon, I dare say this is so far my third favourite entry in the franchise after Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation and –depending on how things turn out on Part Two– this may very well surpass the 2015 film in my list.

More than a movie, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One feels like a great gift. The Cruise/McQuarrie production comes with the impact of a beautiful girl who kisses you when you are at your worst or the barbecue someone prepares for you when you are famished. Precisely something that comes exactly when you need it the most.

After the slap on the face (or kick in the groin, actually) that No Time To Die meant for those who grew up admiring James Bond, the Mission: Impossible franchise is showing us that at least a cinematic spy is going down the right track. Considering that Bond has been reduced to ashes, I take the liberty of finishing this review with the words Kittridge says at one point...

“The world doesn't know it, but they're counting on you. Good luck, Ethan!”