Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part 1

Rating: 9/10

Director: Christopher McQuarrie

Writers: Bruce Geller, Erik Jendresen, Christopher McQuarrie

Style: Action, Adventure, Thriller

Rating: PG-13

Time: 2 hours, 43 minutes

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avz06PDqDbM

Reviewed by Mike Szymanski

It’s never really explained in the film, but “Dead Reckoning” means how you navigate a moving object by using a previously determined position, incorporating speed, heading and elapsed time.

Writer and director Christopher McQuarrie pointed out in an interview, “There are many things emerging from Ethan’s past. ‘Dead reckoning’ is a navigational term. It means you’re picking a course based solely on your last known position and that becomes quite the metaphor not only for Ethan, but several characters.”

What’s dead-on again, is how Tom Cruise plays the lead character of Ethan Hunt with such suave self-assurance and humor, and nails the character so perfectly no matter who or what the nemesis is. (In this case, it’s more a what, than a who.)

Also serving as the producer, Cruise is obviously putting together the right pieces and creating a killer franchise with this late-1960s, early-1970s TV show-turned-big-budget movies. I think there’s no doubt that this first ‘Reckoning, Part 1’ will do well.

Don’t let the title fool you. It really shouldn’t have “Part 1” because that will make people frustrated about waiting for the second part. It doesn’t end in an unsatisfying way, and you don’t have to be familiar with all the past Missions to jump into this film. It does stand alone.

However, word is that the second part of this Reckoning won’t be until next June. (At least it won’t have to be five years, like this latest Mission: Impossible.)

Partly the delay was due to Covid quarantines and some of the same characters from the last 2018 hit, “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” team are back. Most notably, Luther (played by Ving Rhames, who was in the first of the movie franchise back in 1996, and Simon Pegg, as Benji, who joined the Mission Impossible Force in the third film, “Mission: Impossible III” in 2006.

Also returning is the former MI6 agent Ilsa Faust, played by Rebecca Ferguson, whom Ethan rescues from a terrorist group in the desert, and Vanessa Kirby as the White Widow, the mean heiress who is the daughter of Ethan’s early nemesis played by Vanessa Redgrave as Max in the first movie. Another throw-back to the very first film is Kittridge, played by Henry Czerny, as the shady former IMF director who hasn’t made an appearance since that first film.

The movie starts off with a dramatic scene in a cramped submarine (which has a bit of awkward timing since the recent sub tragedy exploring the Titanic wreckage). A computer malfunction makes it look like a missile is headed in the direction of the sub.

Then comes the traditions from the old TV show. There’s the recorded message mysteriously delivered to Ethan with a message of a mission “should you decide to accept it” and the self-destructing tape. There’s the high-action sequences and double-crossing that was going on even in the hour-long TV shows, and fast-beating score, and my favorite: pulling the rubber face-mask off from a flawless disguise. I can never get enough of that.

All of that is going on, but this one has more.

The goal is to find two halves of a key that can control a super-computer that seems to have gone rogue. Lots of bad-guys including the White Widow and Gabriel, played by Esai Morales, want a piece of that key.

Yes, Tom Cruise does his own stunts again, including one that is supposedly one of the most dangerous stunts ever performed for a movie. He is seen getting up on a horse flawlessly (I marveled at that one), and there are incredible chase scenes through the streets of Rome near the Coliseum, but the biggest stunt is the motorcycle jump off a cliff in Norway.

You’ve already seen it in the trailers or any promos, it looks like he’s jumping out of a plane, but he’s driving off a cliff in a motorcycle and then paragliding down to land on top of a speeding train. (Yeah, no kidding.)

At 60, the indestructible Cruise did the jump and the paragliding: which is one of the most dangerous sports in the world because it has smaller wings and goes faster. It’s also unpredictable and Cruise had to dodge rocks and ledges as he came down. The director was freaking out on the set that day.

McQuarrie is also one of the three writers, including Bruce Geller who wrote for the TV series and the first movie as well as teamed with McQuarrie for “Fallout.” And, Erik Jendresen joined the writing team.

In the past, the Mission movies were helmed by well-known directors such as Brian De Palma (“Dressed to Kill”), J.J. Abrams (“Star Trek” and two “Star Wars” films), John Woo (“Face/Off”), Brad Bird (“The Iron Giant”) and McQuarrie is the only one to do more than one. He directed “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation,” “Fallout” and now these two parts, and has history with Cruise in “Jack Reacher.”

McQuarrie won the Oscar for writing “The Usual Suspects” and also wrote Cruise’s super hit last year “Top Gun: Maverick” and the sci-fi epic “Edge of Tomorrow” starring Cruise.

New interesting characters included in “Reckoning, Part 1” are Hayley Atwell as a mysterious character named Grace, Cary Elwes (“Saw”), Pom Klementieff (Mantis from the Marvel Comics Universe) and others.

This movie is complex, as expected, and as the movie progresses, one of them ponders: “We are playing 4-dimensional chess with an entity.”

It’s filled with beautiful scenery, exotic locations, an incredible series of stunts. The train scene is reminiscent of what’s going on in the latest “Indian Jones” film, but also borrows from the best train crash scene ever in “The Fugitive” and the falling bus scene with Jeff Goldblum in “Jurassic Park: Lost World.”

There’s also a great sense of humor, mostly between the team that Ethan puts together. They even joke while trying to disable a nuclear bomb in less than five minutes, and while Cruise is flying blindly through the air to try to land on a moving train.

And, of course there are a few cheesy lines. This computer entity asks riddles, and some of them we all know.

“What’s always approaching, but never arrives?”

I’ll let you know, tomorrow.

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