Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

****/****
starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny
written by Christopher McQuarrie & Erik Jendresen
directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw I’ve liked every film in this series to some extent, the last few very much. Yet, pressed, I couldn’t tell you what any of them are about. If you ask me to recount the plot of this latest entry, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (hereafter Dead Reckoning), I would have a tough time only a few minutes out of the screening. This isn’t an inherently bad thing. If you were to ask most people who’ve seen North by Northwest, they wouldn’t know it’s about microfilm being smuggled in South American figurines, just as they will not question whether a crop duster is the best way to kill someone waiting for a bus in the middle of nowhere. They wouldn’t remember that Notorious is about radioactive ore hidden in wine bottles, or that Psycho is about a petty embezzlement scheme. That’s because it doesn’t matter. You’d probably even get pushback about how that’s not really what those films are about anyway, which is correct. Hitchcock called those things that matter a lot to everyone in the film–and almost nothing to anyone watching it–the “MacGuffin.” The Mission: Impossible films are the quintessential modern example of an old concept: if you do everything well enough, if you understand how to keep things snappy and populate the story with characters who feel like real, live people (thus imbuing all the noise with stakes), well, it doesn’t matter what the picture’s about, because what it’s actually about is so instantly relatable. Will they survive? Will they fall in love? Archetype and craft. There’s nothing simpler and nothing more complex.

I wouldn’t be able to tell you what any of these movies are about, although I can recount at least one extraordinary action sequence from each of them: the wire suspension; the duelling motorcycles; the shootout with helicopters on a bridge; scaling the Burj Khalifa; the yellow dress at “Turandot” (sweet holy Jesus); and the bathroom fight where Henry Cavill “reloads” his arm. Dead Reckoning adds a remarkable train sequence, a chase through Rome in a tiny yellow Fiat, and a motorcycle/base jump that gave me full-body chills once the various geographical elements were established on an IMAX screen: the ramp, the runway, the drop, and those stakes again. Not the fate of the world, but rather if a woman with well-founded trust issues is going to be disappointed again immediately after placing her faith in someone else. Not to say the fate of the world isn’t at stake in Dead Reckoning, because of course it is. This time there’s a rogue AI that can only be defeated with a two-part puzzle key, which leads to a pretty standard quest narrative. But just as I can recall a remarkable action sequence from every installment of this franchise, I can recall small, human moments from them, too. I love especially that Tom Cruise has let his co-stars be the heroes, the choreographers of his heroics and, literally in the case of Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust, physically and intellectually superior. I can recall how funny they all are, especially under Christopher McQuarrie’s stewardship (Dead Reckoning is his third time at bat)–self-deprecating in precisely the way Jackie Chan’s masterpiece period was littered with reactions that took in the ridiculousness of what he made look effortless with a real sexy arrogance. And lately, I’ve been asked to think about how lonesome Ethan Hunt (Cruise) is, and how strange all the loss he’s experienced has made him.

There’s a moment in Dead Reckoning where Ethan tells master thief Grace (Hayley Atwell) that protecting her life is more important than preserving his own. She protests that he doesn’t even know her–none of Ethan’s team, consisting of Ilsa, Luther (Ving Rhames), and Benji (Simon Pegg), knows her. Mystified, Ethan says, “Why does that matter?” It’s a laugh line, but I’ve been sitting heavy with it. What is Ethan? He reminds me a lot of my conception of the Superman character: alone by requirement of who he is, pathologically protective of his identity, and constantly in mourning for a parade of loved ones he’s proved incapable of saving despite his supernatural physical prowess. He is what every one of us has surely desired in our lives. Someone who will save us, recognize our inherent value, and be there when we need him. Two people cry in this film–the two new characters, Grace and the assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff, who between this and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is the chaos agent du jour), both at the moments they realize they have stumbled upon a person who cares whether they live or die. There’s maybe nothing more emotionally essential than feeling valued and loved, the sensation that another human being will note that you are gone and miss you until you return. The constant in these melodramas is Ethan. In a flashback in Dead Reckoning to a time before he became an IMF agent, we see his first loss at the hands of angel of death Gabriel (Esai Morales), who fascinatingly resurfaces as the human representative of the evil AI. Ethan does this work in these films as essentially a volunteer (“…This assignment, should you choose to accept it…”), I think, because it accords him a measure of control over his destiny, but he’s really a superhero trapped in a nightmare feedback loop with his creation story repeating infinitely with a parade of new faces.

It breaks him, and the series is now about a broken man who can do anything except keep entropy, and attrition, at bay. This is the only thing making Ethan Hunt even remotely relatable, but it’s enough. The world is dying; there’s new evidence of it daily. Bad people suffer no consequences, hate is easy and winning, and our technologies have ensured we remain siloed by our mental illnesses into perverse and radicalized archipelagos. There isn’t a single thing I can do about that. I can’t protect the people I love from the way the world is designed. It doesn’t have to be a huge conspiracy with terrorists and shadow governments, assassins and private armies, sentient computers and shapeshifting technologies. In fact, the truth of it is that the stupidest, greediest, most religious, most ignorant, most worthless people in the history of this country are firmly in control of our unchecked downward slide. We’re doomed because the worst of us are filled with passionate intensity, so the fantasy that there’s some grand and brilliant plan for our downfall is actually super flattering. We’re all broken and helpless. Dead Reckoning is who we are as surely as Sophocles was who the Greeks were: funny, bawdy, violent, bleak, and critical of a corrupt system and leaders who are forging our way to dusty death, unchecked by reason or decency. There are no happy endings in these films, just fewer pied pipers. And the rats keep getting bigger. Dead Reckoning is about raging against the dying of the light and figuring out how important it is to find the right people with whom to ride out the last few pathetic spasms of our time here. And that train gag, folks! I haven’t had so much fun at the movies since the last one of these, whatever it was about.