Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.There’s a scene in the first act ofMission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part Onethat continues to astound me, even days after I saw it. In it, a national security task force has been assembled to assess the threat of The Entity, the all-seeing AI villain thatTom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt’s been tasked with taking down. But it’s not the conversation that blows my mind — rather, watching the scene unfold, as the camera reveals one massive cameo after the other. Flashing on the screen in the span of two minutes are the faces ofMark Gatiss,Indira Varma,Rob Delaney,Charles Parnell(reteaming with Cruise afterTop Gun: Maverick), and finally,Cary Elwes. A veritable cornucopia of experienced, immensely talented actors, each one a bigger shock than the last as they appear on screen. It was immense fun for me, eager to see new blood join the 30-year-old franchise.
Unfortunately — and this is the part that gets me — Elwes is the only one who outlasts the five-minute conversation about a threat to global cyberspace. After the exposition about The Entity has been effectively dumped, Ethan Hunt arrives in all his mask-trick glory, knocking out everyone with sleeping gas in order to get to Eugene Kittredge (Henry Czerny). Once their bodies hit the floor, all but Elwes disappear for the rest of the film, never to be seen again — effectivelyMission: Impossible’s version of celebrity cameos, even if it meant making Gatiss and Varma do strange American accents. And even Elwes only shows up for a brief second scene later in the film, aDread Pirate Roberts-shaped MacGuffin forPart Two.
That single scene is, unfortunately, symptomatic of the problemDead Reckoning Part Onehas at large: there are too many spies on this damn mission. For the first hour of the film (which is pushing three hours), audiences are introduced to a barrage of new faces with seemingly no end, a rotating carousel of new cast members. Each person is set up as vitally important to the new story being told, and as a result, everyone — even the beloved IMF agents we’ve known for years — gets short-changed, taking minuscule slices of the storytelling pie in a movie that only creates diminishing returns.
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The names on the call sheet are huge: aside from the aforementioned cameos, the film also starsPom Klementieff,Esai Morales,Hayley Atwell, andVanessa Kirby, alongside Cruise and the returningVing Rhames,Simon Pegg, andRebecca Ferguson. Each comes with a unique set of talents, but for a film that’s almost as long as twoRisky Business-es put together, none of them seem to make any kind of impression as the film hops from one action sequence to another. DirectorChristopher McQuarrieseems far more concerned with said sequences than developing any of his characters, and while I understand thatthis is the first of two parts, and there’s certainly much more waiting for us down the line, that doesn’t negate those issues, especially when the film was praised as being able to stand entirely on its own.
Given the film’s off-kilter pacing, it’s difficult to learn much of anything about the antagonists chasing after Ethan and the gang in order to get the other half of the Entity’s cruciform key. For as talented as Pom Klementieff has proven herself to be in theGuardians of the Galaxyfranchise, she’s given little more to do than screech wildly while driving an armored truck through the streets of Rome. She’s the epitome of the classic faceless goon, but while she looks like she’s having the time of her life as a murderous assassin, I was surprised that she barely existed beyond said wild screeching when she’s been advertised on every single poster I’ve seen for the film. She’s even advertised more than Esai Morales’s Gabriel, the sinister human guardian of The Entity and major Big Bad for the next two films.
He, too, is lackluster compared to mostMission: Impossiblevillains. Compared to thebicep-cockingHenry CavillinFallout,he just made me uncomfortable, and not in the “love to hate him” kind of way. Despite Morales giving one of many dedicated performances in the film, Gabriel exists as little more than a face for The Entity and a half-baked backstory meant to motivate Ethan — where’s the intrigue? The complicated criminal history? A personality, even? Because the villain of the film is really an AI, an intangible mess of code, he becomes part of the furniture. The other half of the equation is a knife fighton top of a train, a body for Ethan to punch instead of a whole person.
Even CIA agents Briggs (Shea Whigham) and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) felt awkwardly out of place chasing after Ethan, despite their interactions with Kittredge and key role in the film’s final set piece. While they were easily my favorite part of the film, they felt like they existed in a different one entirely, a buddy-cop piece that I would’ve much preferred watching if it meant that Davis got more than one small scrap of dialogue. (Top Gun: Maverickproved he’s funny and charming. Let him be charming!)
The bigger problem, though, is how this stuffed-too-full situation affects Hayley Atwell’s Grace, a new key component in Hunt’s battle for the truth. Even if she weren’t a shameless (and significantly less entertaining) replacement for Ilsa, the narrative ofPart Onedoesn’t let her exist enough to develop a personality beyond being the pickpocket damsel Hunt has to save across the film’s many action set pieces. She’s neither a complete idiot — being wanted for dozens of crimes in dozens of countries — nor is she truly super-spy material, as evidenced by one too many car chases where she unceremoniously slams headfirst into other cars. Because she gets shoved out of frame for the sake of other, smaller plotlines, she becomes a whole handful of nothing, simply an unfunny nuisance in the face of an equally uninteresting villain. To watch her effectively replace Ilsa after a bridge fight that stuffs Ferguson’s character directly in the man-pain fridge feels like an insult, a last-ditch effort to get us to care about a woman who only distracts us from whatever insanity Tom Cruise is attempting this time.
All of this comes to the detriment of the core gang, the IMF agents we’ve followed through so many movies. Pegg and Rhames get one (count ‘em: one) significant scene in the entire film, trying to diffuse a bomb in the Abu Dhabi airport, and Ferguson almost feels like an afterthought, especially in the face of Grace’s wild inability to do much of anything. The joy I felt watching them work together as a team inRogue Nation,Ghost Protocol, andFalloutis diminished, and it almost feels like those beloved characters are being intentionally written out, like it’s time for a new generation of heroes.
The ‘Mission: Impossible’ Franchise Needs to Put the Focus Back on the Characters
Dead Reckoning Part Onestands in stark contrast to Cruise’s last film, the blockbuster megahitTop Gun: Maverick. Despite both focusing on a rather nebulous enemy,Maverickputs all its focus on the eight people flying planes at ridiculous speeds, knowing that audiences will come to care about the mission because they care about the people involved in it.Dead Reckoning, on the other hand, is so over-involved in the semantics of fighting back against an AI that knows your every secret that by the third act, I’d lost all interest in everyone except Briggs and Degas, mostly because I have agiganticcelebrity crush on Greg Tarzan Davis.
I get it. I really do.Dead Reckoningis an action film, the seventh in a series that’s been around longer than I’ve been alive. Audiences expect a certain amount of gun fights and watching Tom Cruise nearly die doing aerial stunts, and I can’t say that McQuarrie and team didn’t deliver on that part of the bargain. (I do genuinely enjoy watching them come up with new ways to put Cruise’s life and limb at risk.) But when it comes down to it, when I’m sitting through a three-hour film, is it so much to ask to care about the characters doing the stunts too?
