Tom Cruise runs! Tom Cruise jumps! Tom Cruise drives a motorcycle off a cliff and then opens his parachute! It’s the Tom Cruise show again this summer, which means it’s time for Ethan Hunt to sprint his way through another ballet of bombast, symphony of spectacle, and gamut of endearing greatness. Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning (Part One) is the seventh installment in the franchise and as expected, the movie decides to go big instead of going home as the superstar reportedly plans to say goodbye in Part Two.
Written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, the film brings back numerous characters from the previous entries — including Ving Rhames’ expert, Simon Pegg’s comedic relief, and Rebecca Furgeson’s hit women. More significantly, he brings back an emphasis on action. The entire reason we go to these movies is to see Cruise pull off death-defying acts that get crazier as the series goes on. The actor himself partakes in many of these stunts, which is more remarkable the more he ages. This time around he’s got more show-stoppers than ever.
In the span of two hours, he runs atop a moving train, jumps off a falling bridge, drifts a motorcycle around the alleys of Rome, and flies a parachute across the valleys of Austria. It’s the kind of thing that makes you question if Cruise really is the greatest stuntman ever? Did Buster Keaton or Jackie Chan ever do something this cool? The movie obviously wants viewers to live in the moment, soak up every stylized detail, and not worry too much about the plot.
But there is a story. Reckoning is the first part of the franchise’s two-part finale, which means the beginning is almost completely devoted to exposition dumps. The villain is back from Brian De Palma’s original since every one of these codas needs to see a hero deal with their past, their mistakes, and the collateral damage after years of saving the world from mass destruction.
The mission starts with the usual message, this time warning of a machine that has taken on a life of its own (as if Chat GPT wasn’t scary enough). Now Hunt has to get his posse together to stop Gabriel (Esai Morales) from retrieving the device. A cavalcade of carnage ensues.
As in the last MI movie, 2018’s Fallout, Reckoning drops the plot for flights of fancy, gunshots and car chases that kick the movie into Cruise control. Ethan is motivated to extreme acts of courage because his friends are in peril, and clearly, the narrative is more of an excuse to see the man who plays him jump off things.
If you take away the stunts, all you have is another spy flick with espionage tropes you’ve seen a thousand times before. Fans of big popcorn flicks like this don’t care, of course. As long as Cruise can defy logic, gravity, and the laws of physics, these movies are worth seeing, the bigger the screen the better.
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