Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
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.

THE 4K UHD DISC
by Bill Chambers Paramount brings Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One to 4K UHD disc in a presentation that’s something of a departure from form for this franchise. For one thing, there is no 1080p version of the film on offer, although there is a Blu-ray devoted to 31 minutes of special features, which seems wasteful from an environmental standpoint and in terms of maximizing storage space. For another thing, despite an abbreviated IMAX release last summer, the film does not, unlike its immediate predecessor (Fallout), ‘open up’ its aspect ratio for the big set-pieces. I suspect this is because of the sheer diversity of cameras that were used to capture the action in Dead Reckoning, some too compact to accommodate a 65mm sensor, but I could be wrong–it could just be an aesthetic choice, as Rogue Nation also ditched the IMAX sequences after Ghost Protocol‘s embrace of them helped return the franchise to box-office glory. Nevertheless, the 2.39:1, 2160p transfer is a strong one, slicker than its immediate predecessor by virtue of being an entirely digital production. Not that it looks overbearingly sharp or uncinematic in motion, just that it features next to nothing in the way of noise or other artifacts. I was struck by the flawlessness of the compression in an early scene where Ethan Hunt emerges from the shadows to intercept a message at a safe house in Amsterdam. (The macroblocking will surely be out of control here on streaming.) Only a handful of times does the image falter and err on the video-ish side, and they’re restricted to the chase through the Venice canals at night, where much of the “diegetic” lighting, starting at around 1:34:32, suddenly takes on a dim, solarized appearance. It’s clearly a baked-in problem, as this clipping shows up in 1080p/SDR excerpts on the second platter, and it defeats an otherwise impeccable use of HDR10 that, among other things, enhances the icy lighting associated with the Entity and enriches the subtly nostalgic glow of Fraser Taggart’s cinematography. And thanks to the wide colour gamut, that yellow Fiat really pops.

The attendant Dolby Atmos track slaps, even in its 7.1 TrueHD mixdown. Music, effects, and dialogue are in perfect balance, while the sidewall imaging during the Fiat chase is startlingly transparent. Bass response leaves you shook, literally and figuratively, without fatiguing the ears. This is probably the best-sounding action movie since, well, Top Gun: Maverick. Also on board: Lorne Balfe’s score, isolated from the feature in lossy DD 5.1, plus a film-length audio commentary pairing co-writer/director Christopher McQuarrie with editor Eddie Hamilton that is, by their own admission, for dorks, specifically anyone interested in the relationship between technology and technique in the filmmaking process–like when the two point out that cuts to Cruise are landing on other people’s lines because they’re saying what Ethan is thinking. Listen carefully and you realize these movies are written on an Etch-a-Sketch by expert vampers given unprecedented support at the studio level. Tom Cruise, for instance, was directed to stroll through the Abu Dhabi airport saying random adverbs that could be Kuleshoved into responses to questions as yet unwritten. Later, Cruise would insist on shooting himself running towards Rebecca Ferguson, thinking it might serve a narrative purpose eventually; it did. I love all the talk of camera gear–these films are proving grounds for the latest toys–and lenses (60mm: when you want the feeling of a telephoto closeup without the flattening properties of a long lens), and there’s a funny moment where McQuarrie reveals that the shot of Esai Morales removing a mask was something a sound mixer suggested in post to clarify how Gabriel communicates with the Entity. McQuarrie is surprised when Hamilton says the mixer was scared to speak up, especially since strangers have no problem bombarding his social media with unsolicited advice. If there’s such a thing as a hardcore Mission: Impossible geek, this yakker will be manna from Heaven.

The bonus disc meanwhile houses six HD featurettes–“Abu Dhabi” (4 mins.), “Rome” (4 mins.), “Venice” (4 mins.), “Freefall” (9 mins.), “Speed Flying” (4 mins.), and “Train” (6 mins.)–devoted to the picture’s globetrotting, spectacular stunts, and the burnishing of Cruise’s legend, sometimes all at once. Without the wonkish illuminations of the commentary track, the brevity of these segments would probably be more of an issue. In “Rome,” for example, McQuarrie cites the Z CAM as a tool that proved particularly useful in filming the Fiat chase, but what it does and why that is go unexplained. As it stands, these are visual aids–and indeed, hearing about Cruise driving a motorcycle off a cliff is not the same as seeing him do it multiple times on a bike without a speedometer, forced to judge his speed by sound with plugs in his ears. Although Cruise and co. definitely beat the “practical effects” drum a bit too loudly considering the hundreds, maybe thousands, of “digital artists” credited on screen, McQuarrie is right that this is bound to be one of the last times a production builds elaborate physical sets, including a fully functioning locomotive they crashed into a river in Norway for real. (Orson Welles was right.) As an aside, though speed flying might not be the same as skydiving, it sure looks like it on film; an adrenaline rush isn’t always worth its weight in cinema. Various subtitle options (English, Cantonese, Czech, Danish, German, French (Parisian and Canadian), Spanish (Spain and Latin American), Italian, Japanese, Korean, Hungarian, Mandarin, Danish, and Norwegian) adorn this video-based bonus material. Bundled with the discs in both the U.S. and Canada is a voucher for a digital copy of the film.

163 minutes; PG-13; UHD: 2.39:1 (2160p/MPEG-H), HDR10; English Dolby Atmos (7.1 TrueHD core), English DVS 5.1, French (Parisian) Dolby Atmos, French (Canadian) DD 5.1, Spanish DD 5.1, Isolated Score DD 5.1; English, English SDH, French (Parisian), French (Canadian), Spanish, Danish, Dutch subtitles; BD-100 + BD-50; Region-free; Paramount