Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One Balances Intimacy and Immortality

A scene in Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One defines all Tom Cruise is and will ever be, arguably charting—in the language of death-defying action and in the voice of Hollywood A-lister beatitudes—the whole arc of contemporary blockbuster franchise filmmaking. Recovering with his team of Impossible Mission Force (IMF) agents following one of the worst catastrophes they’ve yet faced, Ethan Hunt (Cruise, asexual and totemic) admits to a new team member that, while he can’t guarantee he will keep them safe, he can guarantee that he’ll care more about their lives than his own. Not expecting such unmitigated humanity in the midst of such potential worldwide cataclysm, the new agent stares through welling tears. “But you don’t know me,” they say. “Does it matter?” Tom Cruise and Ethan Hunt both respond.
The sentiment’s nothing new to the Missions: Impossible. In 2018’s Fallout, Ethan loses stolen plutonium cores to one of the series’ many international terrorist organizations because he chooses to save teammate and best buddy Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames)—by Ethan’s side since Brian De Palma’s 1996 original entry—rather than prevent nuclear capabilities from falling into the hands of world-wreckers. Even nemesis Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) reminds Ethan of the film’s titular conceit: “The end you always feared is coming, and the blood will be on your hands—the fallout of all your good intentions.” Millions of lives would never have been threatened had Ethan never chosen the one over the many. Maybe the impossible missions were the friends we made along the way, etc.
And maybe that’s ironic. In Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh Mission: Impossible film, Ethan Hunt must reckon with the past six films worth of choosing the safety of his loved ones over the safety of the planet. In Dead Reckoning Part One, Tom Cruise must reckon with the past six films as testament to the many times he’s risked his life for these movies—for millions of people watching at home he doesn’t know—rather than ensure one more day with his loved ones. In the wake of Top Gun: Maverick, where Cruise mined his past with both eyes on his legacy to achieve the clearest pinnacle of his career, the weight of what exactly Cruise is doing with his life feels thrillingly heavy.
Whether Cruise is capable of making a film that doesn’t reckon with his legacy? That’s not this one’s job. Helmed by director Christopher McQuarrie on his third go at M:I, Dead Reckoning Part One reaches back 28 years to the first film, not only bringing back Kittridge (Henry Czerny) as the head of the IMF, appointed apparently after Director Hunley’s (Alec Baldwin, ejected from the franchise with impeccable timing) murder in Fallout, but culling reverently from De Palma’s penchant for paranoid close-ups and canted angles, for long-held shots obsessed with the creased faces of defiantly sweaty men, studying their buttery eyes for omens. Back are Rhames and Czerny and Simon Pegg as the lovable milquetoast-cum-superspy Benji Dunn. We’re also gifted the bloodshot, exquisitely pompadoured visage of Shea Whigham as Agent Briggs, the latest government heavy sent after Ethan Hunt in the wake of him being labeled an enemy of the state for the countless time, a phenomena already pointed out incredulously by previous government heavy Walker (Henry Cavill). Likewise, Briggs briefs his men on Hunt by describing him as an “agent of chaos,” a vessel for the unexplainable human imperative to succeed beyond all reason and fortune. In Fast X, when government chump Aimes (Alan Ritchson) explains that Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his family don’t answer to the laws of physics as they increasingly treat their vehicles more like EVAs than luxury sports cars, his bit of fourth-wall-breaking doesn’t make the overblown spectacle any less numbing. But in a Mission: Impossible film, when a character describes Ethan Hunt as an elemental force, it’s because Tom Cruise has done elemental feats.