The Mission: Impossible franchise, like its star, doesn’t seem to be running out of breath any time soon. Its latest entry, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, has managed to raise the bar higher than Mission:Impossible — Fallout, which should have been impossible.
In the seventh Mission:Impossible film, Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is an analogue guy in a digital world, his running, jumping, diving, driving, all pitted against an all-pervasive rogue AI — very unimaginatively — named the Entity. Oh the Entity has its human face and gives Ethan something solid to fisticuff with, but it casts a very large shadow that can plunge the world into absolute chaos, more than the nuclear bombs in Fallout ever could.
Ethan’s mission, should he choose to accept, is to retrieve one half of a cruciform key that, when united with the other half, will give whoever holds the complete key control over the AI, or so they believe — no one seems to know exactly what the key does — setting off a race amongst nations to get their hands on it, and Ethan on a MacGuffin chase across the world. The first destination is to the deserts of the Middle East where Rebecca Fergusson’s Ilsa Faust is hiding with one half of the key that Ethan has been tasked to recover. The M:I special face masks come into play soon after and, just like that, Ethan has gone rogue, again.
Many locations are hopped in the course of the film and many new people are introduced, including Haley Atwell’s Grace, but it is in Rome that both the good and the bad start happening. The good thing is the two incredible action sequences. The car chase through the streets of Rome sees Ethan and Grace out-manoeuvering the local police, the CIA and the bad guys, which despite seeming impossible at times, is accomplished at breakneck speed and with some old school banter between the two. The second scene belongs more in a James Bond or John Wick movie — a gigantic party where all the players of the film come together and chaos ensues and ends with the bad thing (we are sooooo angry about the bad thing!).
Like Fallout, the action sequences come one after the other, each more daring than the next and at a pace that never lets up, not even when the exposition dumps happen or at the few quietly poignant moments. The highlight of course is the stunt in which Cruise jumps off a cliff. On a bike. With a parachute. Seems impossible, but this is Cruise we are talking about and he makes it possible (and did so for seven takes!). But the train top fight, though reminiscent of another M:I film (there are old characters who also make an appearance), is nothing to scoff at, nor is the scene where Ethan and Grace escape a falling train from a broken bridge (Indian audiences, please note, King Khan and Pathaan did it first!).
Cruise is, of course, the beating heart of the film, his twinkly-eyed charm now mellowed with maturity. But the standout performances belong to Haley Atwell’s Grace, a nimble-fingered, self-serving, kickass woman who has incredible chemistry with Cruise, and Pom Klementieff’s Paris, a silent ass-kicking assassin. Esai Morales’s Gabriel is smooth as a villain with enough menace to be scary but without any of the oomph of Henry Cavill in Fallout. Of Ethan’s usual band of merry men, and women, Ilsa Faust gets the least amount of screen time and it is an absolute shame (yes, we are Faustians till the end) that Fergusson gets the short stick.
Many loopholes that one can drive a Humvee through aside, Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie have made yet another impossible mission possible and kept the 27(!)-year-old franchise going from strength to strength. And though there are signs in Dead Reckoning of the baton being passed on, it seems impossible that Cruise will stop running full steam ahead any time soon.
