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!”

Teaser Trailer for 'Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One' is out

 

After having leaked online for a couple of minutes, the official trailer for the seventh outing in the Mission: Impossible film series initiated in 1996 is finally out. Dead Reckoning is the first chapter of a two-part stories and will be released in July 2023, with its second part set for a June 2024 release.

The trailer promises great action scenes and a huge challenge for Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt as his old IMF superior Eugene Kittridge, returning from Mission: Impossible and once again played by Henry Czerny, forces him to "pick a side". James Bond fans will see Christopher McQuarrie homaging Tomorrow Never Dies and For Your Eyes Only as Hunt and Grace, played by Hayley Atwell, escape handcuffed on a very small car in Italy. Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby) are also returning along with regular IMF members Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames).

Stay tuned for more news about this film!

Ready to Save the World Again: Heroes, Guardians or Spies?

Something got me thinking after my latest view of Mission: Impossible – Fallout, which made me relate it to the whole James Bond and the many heroes of the fictional spy world. It deals with the very last scene of the recent Christopher McQuarrie film, so I should advise to stop reading now if you don’t like to be spoiled.

SPOILERS BELOW THIS POINT

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is convalescing from his body wounds after the death-defying chase and fight he had with his enemies in order to avert a nuclear bomb going off. His former wife, Julia (Michelle Monaghan), is happy with her new husband and she thanks him for letting her be where she belongs and for the fact that, thanks to his work, they’re all safe and sound.

Remember that in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, we know that Julia had to break up with Ethan and became a “ghost” in order to preserve her life. In this new film, thanks to Luther (Ving Rhames), we know they were happy for a while until they realised they belonged to different worlds and that their marriage was avoiding Ethan to “save the world”.

In a similar way, we understand that a man like James Bond (despite being much more a loner than what Ethan Hunt is) can’t engage into serious relationships or think of a family because of his dangerous life. The two times he tried, the girl died, either gunned down by the villain (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) or committing suicide after revealing herself as a double agent (Casino Royale).

So, the question to debate is: what kind of heroes are Ethan Hunt and James Bond?

There’s often a mediatic manoeuvre or a popular culture feeling of placing spies, detectives, policemen, and any other kind of action heroes in the place of Batman, Superman or even Zorro. But at what point operatives belonging to government intelligence (or branches of it) take the place of justice seekers that are many steps above security forces or the army? Or even these agencies as a team?

Even tough Alec Trevelyan asks Bond if he’s “ready to save the world again” in GoldenEye, that doesn’t give him superhero qualities. While 007 is a successful professional and one has the feeling the world depends on him, he could perfectly retire one day and let someone else to do the job. The same goes to Hunt and he did it at the end of Mission: Impossible – III. The only reason he left Julia was, essentially, because audiences wanted a new M:I movie just like audiences wanted a new James Bond movie after On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Are we really assuming that these men didn’t have a normal childhood and teenage years and were adrenaline addicted since they were born, as the Young Bond novels often makes us believe? Of course, they’re not per se Bond adventures but we have a 13-year-old boy escaping captivity, getting tortured and averting a villainous scheme against the world, something highly trained operatives in their 30s or 40s failed to achieve just because of bad luck.

It’s not that I dislike –from a marketing point of view- the heroic qualities one gives to the big screen and literary secret agents, and that in the fiction it looks like they’re the only ones who can beat a lunatic man after an army has failed. But when that involves fiction, it all feels a bit cheesy.

Batman, Superman and Zorro have double lives, they have an inner feeling to save the world they live in and the whole nation or town depends on them, which makes the idea of the initial Alejandro-Elena break up in The Legend of Zorro, where he wanted to go back in action again because he seemed to be one step above the militia and the only one for the job.

But what’s the case of MI6 and the Impossible Mission Force? The British Intelligence Service has many operatives, some bearing the 00 number just like James Bond to perform an assassination in the course of the mission. This way, 009 was sent by M to kill Renard in The World Is Not Enough, 003 to recover a microchip from Zorin Industries’ plant in Siberia in A View to A Kill, and there are two occasions where M threatens Bond to have him replaced by 008: Goldfinger and The Living Daylights. That should leave the door open for James Bond (as a human being) to retire one day.

Likewise, the IMF is formed by a group of five or six operatives with a team leader: Jim Phelps in 1996’s Mission: Impossible and Ethan Hunt in the other five adventures, taking the place of Phelps when he was revealed as a traitor and killed in action.

His marriage with Julia Meade in the third film of the saga meant us believe he was leaving the field. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol let us know that she had disappeared of Hunt’s side to find a new life and in Mission: Impossible – Fallout, it looks like it’s thanks to that break up that the world is in safe hands because Ethan was doing the role of a guardian.

In the case of James Bond, the girls he loved turned up dead, so he came back to his life as a “hero”. In the case of Ethan Hunt, Julia was still alive, far from him and the safety of the world was bigger than the love he felt for her. The point is: if Ethan retired and stayed next to her, is there something that any of the other IMF team operatives couldn’t do? As spectators, we know that Hunt is the hero and is more capable than all of the others and has the role of a leader, but does that reasoning extends to each of the characters of the fictional world?

It feels a bit far-fetched to have supporting characters also believing the marketing propaganda of the movie they belong to.

Nicolás Suszczyk