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

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.