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.

Briggs is on Ethan’s trail yet again due to the personal overtaking the geopolitical, when Kittridge sends Hunt to Dubai to find a unique two-part key that “unlocks”…something…and Hunt never returns. Only a shadowy, malevolent, seemingly invisible villain (Esai Morales) from Ethan’s past knows what the key can do, though every government on earth wants the key to, they assume, gain control of the Entity, an AI that’s developed self-awareness and, in Luther’s superhacker parlance, is capable of being anybody. Ethan, of course, wants the key to destroy the Entity. 

Kittridge tells Hunt that half of the key is in the possession of Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), a former MI6 agent dear to Ethan’s heart, while the other half is still in the wind. Oh, also, there’s a $50,000,000 bounty on Ilsa, because someone (usually their own government) always wants our heroes—the people Ethan loves—dead. Ethan would never let anyone collect on that bounty, so of course he finds the key half but refuses to return to Kittridge, thus setting in motion the now-expected disavowal on behalf of the U.S. government and dissolution of the IMF. Enter the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby) to broker the deal for the other half of the key, as well as Pom Klementieff as our villain’s cherished right-hand maniac and Hayley Atwell as an international thief in over her head, and we have a ripe playground for identity-shifting, back-stabbing and conspiratorial monologuing. If anyone can be anyone, and the enemy can be anyone better than anyone, then nothing is ever as it seems. Having recently defeated motion smoothing, McQuarrie and Cruise now set their sights on AI. 

Unsurprisingly, Dead Reckoning Part One’s plot, as convoluted as the best in the franchise, comes together stupendously. Though the scenery-gnawing spycraft and expositional dialogue tends to take second bill to the spectacle of Cruise’s beautiful Thanatotic trajectory towards oblivion, McQuarrie and cinematographer Fraser Taggart (John Wick: Chapter 2) convey hefty conversations and table setting with intimacy and slight gestures, making small rooms with duplicitous government personnel seem smaller and twice as duplicitous. To then spread out to a setpiece—to sweeping drone shots of the rock ramp from which Cruise will speed a motorcycle to clear the mountain and skydive onto a moving train, for example—is as awe-inspiring as cinema can get. Because we understand, in a purely visual sense, what is viscerally at stake. Every punch registers somewhere in the bowels—a car accident is always consequential, even if Ethan Hunt unbelievably gets up afterward. If Ethan Hunt got up, then Tom Cruise would get up too. And by this point, McQuarrie knows exactly how to weaponize Cruise’s death wish. A climactic dangling train sequence, even with some obvious CGI, is among the series’ most astounding. Every facet, from sound and set design to Cruise’s sheer athleticism to how McQuarrie knows exactly where to place the camera to embrace that athleticism, coalesces into a very real, often breathtaking sense of peril that’s mostly absent from every other IP that’s lasted this long. 

So where does Ethan Hunt end and Tom Cruise begin? Cruise’s idealistic movie character swearing to throw his flesh in the way of fate is perhaps the sincerest soul-bearing we’re likely to get from the guy. His personal life is so inextricable from controversy and estrangement that his films are the only evidence we have of him operating at his least earthbound—physically, because in the movies his body literally soars, but also emotionally, what with the lack of reasons to stay alive, family and its absence being a very publicly sad issue for the actor. Tom Cruise doesn’t know us, but it doesn’t matter, because that parasocial relationship is the essence of what he’s putting on the line. No children or loved ones can hold him back from doing what no other actor has ever done: Possibly dying in thrall to the magic of the Hollywood machine, manifesting the power of motion pictures in the structure of his molecules. Box office hardly matters next to the epigenetic trauma of snapping your ankle then almost falling off a building and that being the shot that makes it into the final cut. What’s left for Cruise is the un-magic of sacrificing his life for our entertainment and, in a way that grows increasingly acceptable for every one of these he survives, for the sake of entertainment itself. Cruise is showing us what kind of death it takes to achieve the immortality cinema promises.

Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Writers: Christopher McQuarrie, Erik Jendresen
Starring: Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Hayley Atwell, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny, Shea Whigham, Greg Tarzan Davis, Cary Elwes
Release Date: July 12, 2023 

Dom Sinacola is a Portland-based writer and editor. He founded a blog on Werner Herzog movies, The Werner Herzblog, and he’s also on Twitter.