Score: 4.5 / 5
It's all a matter of taste, but the Mission: Impossible movies are probably my favorite action/spy franchise. I do not like the Bourne series, Daniel Craig's James Bond was the only one I've enjoyed, and I dearly love John Wick but those aren't, strictly, spies, and so they don't have much of the same trademark inventive humor. Tom Cruise, whatever your opinion on the real person, makes damn good movies, as a producer, an actor, and a stuntman. That's not to say everything he touches is golden -- I'll never understand popular love of Top Gun or its recent sequel -- but when it comes to a franchise like this, he knows full well what his audience wants. More importantly, he continues to challenge himself, increase stakes, push cinematic boundaries, and defy death at an age when most actors start slowing down or shifting genres.
And, other than possibly the third film in the series, Dead Reckoning may be the scariest entry simply due to its topical content. It's a fairly straightforward plot, thankfully, though the specifics of everything are kept annoyingly vague: an experimental AI called "the Entity" has gained sentience and gone rogue, infiltrating the top military and intelligence networks of the world, and so the world powers are hunting a certain "cruciform" key that should enable the wielder to control the AI. Naturally, IMF offers the job of finding the key to Ethan Hunt (Cruise), whose quick impression of the stakes is that control over this monstrosity is too great for one person, so he and his team tentatively plan to destroy the AI if possible. As I said, though, the specifics are intentionally vague: nobody knows what exactly the Entity may or will do, what exactly the key will allow its bearer to do, or even for sure what the key unlocks or where this lock might be. So it's a lot of red herrings and "who knows" amidst this breakneck globetrotting chase.
Which is fine, surprisingly, because the film was always marketed as "Part One," so there's no sudden dissatisfaction from a cliffhanger ending or latent frustration at not having a cohesive story yet. A lot happens during this movie, but the basic plot is so simple it flies by from brilliantly staged action sequence to action sequence. It's roughly 160 minutes long and feels maybe half that. A few scenes in which people drop exposition quickly and thickly are a bit clunky, especially when the dialogue gets repetitive about what the Entity might access and how bad it would be if it fell into the "wrong hands," but apart from those moments, we clip along at a speedy pace that never feels hurried or wasteful.
Sadly, we don't get more of Angela Bassett from Fallout or some of the other memorable players who have briefly appeared in the series, but we do get some exciting new faces. Chief among them is Hayley Atwell as professional pickpocket Grace, who gets unwittingly caught up in this apocalyptic mess and provides most of the film's humor and sex appeal. I cringe a bit saying that, but other than Cruise, it's kind of true; the women in these movies aren't your vapid (or vampiric) Bond girls, and though they tend to fall for Mr. Hunt's charms, they are always strong on their own. And Atwell finds the perfect blend of suavity and clumsiness as her character starts understanding she's in way over her head. She's beautiful and brilliant and funny and I don't know why she hasn't become an A-lister in demand in Hollywood yet because she deserves it.
Speaking of love interests, Rebecca Ferguson is back as Ilsa Faust (who joined the series in Rogue Nation) to round out her story in this franchise. I don't really love her character, but Ferguson is wonderful and I was glad to see her here to wrap up her business with Ethan. Esai Morales pops in eventually as Gabriel, an amoral mercenary who has set himself up as a sort of proxy for the Entity in the real world, a self-described chaos agent hoping to use any means necessary to watch the world burn. He's scary, but there's a lot more to unravel here, so I hope Part Two will give us more of his story. Pom Klementieff shows up for the first time in this franchise as a silent assassin working with Gabriel, and while her physicality is unquestionable, her character doesn't really make much sense and I couldn't stomach her costume or hairstyle; she looked like she stepped out of a totally different franchise, maybe John Wick or Blade Runner, and it just didn't work for me. But we get the wonderful Vanessa Kirby again as the White Widow arms dealer, along with the usual team of Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg.
And then there's Henry Czerny, back for the first time since the 1996 original, as former IMF director Kittridge. He's wonderful, of course, and his presence keyed me into something special about this installment. It feels more like Brian De Palma's first film than any other in the franchise, even after the soft reboot of aesthetics and style with Ghost Protocol in 2011. Director and writer Christopher McQuarrie seems ecstatic to be able to close the loop, so to speak, and bring things back to the beginning. It's not just in casting, or even in themes, though the screenplay works hard to open up Ethan's mind for us as he questions why he's doing these impossible tasks and what end he imagines for himself. It's hard, given Cruise's age and work, not to read lots of parallels between the actor and the character, and that was much the same back in 1996. But McQuarrie and his cinematographer also use a lot of similar visual cues in this film that hearken back to the original, most often with the close-up Dutch angles during intense conversations. Similarly, this film relies on two key things often associated with this franchise if in lesser amounts: earned suspense (not just action), and a focus on constant kinetic movement, perhaps best summed up in the climactic fight atop a speeding train.
I suggested it earlier, but coming back to it now: there's something scarily timely about a celebrity like Tom Cruise attempting to stop AI while questioning his livelihood and purpose. Of everything I anticipated and expected from this movie -- and it was considerable, after Fallout quickly climbed the list of my favorite action films -- I certainly did not expect to feel so much unease deep in my stomach while watching this amazing movie.
No comments:
Post a Comment