Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning
Ethan Hunt is called upon former boss, and now Director of the CIA Kittridge to recover a set of keys that may unlock the ‘source code’ to an AI program that has gone rogue, and now known as The Entity.
His journey introduces him with master thief Grace, who has been hired to get the key for a mystery employer. Ethan also comes face to face with his past in Gabriel, an agent for The Entity who wants to control it himself.
Cast/Characters
Tom Cruise and Ving Rhames return for their 7th outing, and long time cast member Simon Pegg returns for his 5th.
Rebecca Ferguson returns for her 3rd (** spoiler ***) and last outing as disavowed MI6 agent Ilsa Faust, and Vanessa Kirby is back for her 2nd and final too.
Hayley Atwell joins the cast as Grace, as do Esai Morales and Gabriel and the MCU’s Pom Klementieff as his assassin for hire Paris. Fellow newcomer is screen legend Cary Elwes as the Director of National security
Henry Czerny is back for the first time since the first film as now CIA Director Kittridge. Angela Bassett is seen in picture form, now hinted that she is the President of the United STates
Screenplay/Setting/Themes
Seventh film in the franchise, and the first to ‘confirm’ that the narrative would be split over two films.
The ‘modern’ antagonist – being the sentient AI ‘Entity’ – and the more cartoonish than threatening Gabriel – who has history with Ethan. This is only very briefly touched upon, and should have been developed more.
Was the woman Gabriel killed a friend/lover of Ethan? What did Ethan do that could have caused a life time in prison vs join the IMF??
The film does take more liberties in what happens to some long time characters ( *** spoiler but RIP Ilsa*** ), which is a first for the franchise.
There are also some underdeveloped antagonists, especially Klementieff’s Paris. Thankfully she gets more to do in the following film. Personally, I found her to be one of the better parts of the film.
The action scenes are both; well made, fun and basically believable (the car chases through Rome, in many cars, motorcycles etc), to the completely absurd (the train top fight, followed by running through falling train carriages). But… since the franchise started with Cruise fighting the bad guy on top of a train – this wasn’t out of the realm of believability.
Hayley Atwell as Grace is a welcome addition, which is clearly due to the real life scheduling issues of Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa. I quite liked her character, who is seemingly a carbon copy of Ilsa – who was a fan favourite by this stage in the franchise.
At almost 3hrs, this is the longest film to date, and you do come out of the film with some ‘action fatigue’ watching Hunt’s almost superhuman feats throughout, especially in the entire train sequence, including ‘that’ cliff jump.
Speak of, despite all the hype around it – and the many clips I saw around it before the release, the end result was… a little underwhelming. Had they not hyped it up so much (and added the unrealistic CGI ground) then it would have been far more impressive.
Score/Soundtrack
Quite an impressive score, with several key scenes that stick out, including when Hunt escapes from the airport amongst others.
Overall
Yet another exciting adventure from the collab team of Cruise and McQuarrie has plenty of ups, and a few downs.
Still a banger, but is not as good as some of what we got before hand.
3.5/5