Review: ‘Dead Reckoning’ Delivers Exhilarating Thrills

It doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to make its own sense. This is what I tell people who complain about movies like the MI series not being “realistic.” There are many reasons to go to the movies, and seeing impossible (yeah, I know what I just did) things happen is certainly one of them. What’s most important about a film like Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning is that it exists plausibly in the world it has created, not in the one we live in. 

Of course, the biggest part of what makes this now venerable American answer to the Brit’s 007 is its lead. No one can sell the modern action hero like Tom Cruise. The cruiser may not be the biggest guy, but his level of fitness and no faking it stunt man derring do helps suspend your disbelief even when you can’t believe a human being would want to or be able to hang from a cliff, plane, rocket ship, whatever like he does. He’s so far from normal that he normalizes the abnormal by being the one guy you know and believe can do what you are seeing on screen.

It may be hard to grasp it now, but the first Mission Impossible film is now more than aquarter of a century old. When Cruise’s first film based on the TV series from the mid-60s debuted in 1996, it was certainly a success, even if DePalma’s chilly direction left some (including me) a little underwhelmed. Sure, there were great set pieces in the first MI film (particularly the computer lab scene and the wild helicopter finale), but you couldn’t quite love it.

For the second installment in 2000, Cruise went with the great Hong Kong director John Woo, but Woo’s stylistic flourishes didn’t blend well with the material and MI2 was considered a disappointment (although oddly, it’s the highest grossing of the series when you adjust for inflation). 

For the third film in 2006, Cruise had to battle the sense that the series was never going to take wing. Despite the fact that MI3 is by some distance the lowest grossing film of the first six, it actually began to right the ship just as it appeared to be taking on water. JJ Abrams may not be the most original director (I’m being kind here), but what he is good at is investing fantastical material with genuine emotion. Cruise and co-star Michelle Monaghan had terrific chemistry as husband and wife, and the late great Phillip Seymour Hoffman was a genuinely terrifying villain. 

Still, with the huge drop in box office from MI2 to MI3 (an $80 million plunge), a lot was riding on the fourth film, 2011’s Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Director Brad Bird, who was previously known for working in animation (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille) made a terrific live-action film debut with MI4. What he also did was set the template for what would come next. Bird’s film was sleeker and more muscular than the previous installments, and the viewing public responded by turning out and breathing new life into the series. 

If MI4 had more physical grit and flex, Cruise’s next director, Christopher McQuarrie, injected the fifth film, Mission Impossible Rogue Nation (2015) with steroids. McQuarrie introduced a thudding, crunching quality to the action sequences that would make your teeth rattle almost like you were in the scene yourself. Never would that skill prove more evident than  in McQuarrie’s return engagement with Cruise in 2018, Mission Impossible: Fallout. The bathroom battle between Cruise and co-star Henry Cavill is one of the most rugged, brutal, and effective fight scenes that you will ever see in a mainstream action film. With Fallout scoring $220 million at the box office, the luster of the series was in full glow. 

Being no dummy, Cruise and McQuarrie have now reteamed once more for Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One. I’m not going to waste much of your time focusing on the plot, but let’s just say it’s another in a long line of films about an artifact or device that holds the key (in the case of Dead Reckoning, two keys) to world domination and or destruction. But hey the trope works, and it doesn’t hurt that the wonderful Esai Morales makes for an excellent enemy.

While the focus around Artificial Intelligence and the dark possibilities contained therein are certainly timely, I don’t know that they are all that important. What does matter is how the movie makes you feel while you are watching it, and however outrageous one might find Dead Reckoning, it’s hard not to find the film exhilarating—especially in the film’s remarkable centerpiece involving a series of train cars falling off an exploded bridge while Cruise and co-star Hayley Atwell (who may finally have found her long-deserved breakout role) attempt to move from one car to the next before one after another falls off what’s left of the bridge. There’s a moment where Cruise and Atwell hang from a suspended car with nothing but the earth below them that is positively vertigo-inducing.

I was also surprised by how emotional the film became in the back half after a beloved regular in the series meets their demise. Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is genuinely affected, and when he tells Atwell that he will always put her life before his, he invests the moment with true ache. Dead Reckoning didn’t need a moment like that to be successful as an actionfilm, but I sure admired the desire to give the audience something more than explosions and Cruise running at top speed (still one of the greatest joys of Tom Cruise films—the running of the Cruiser). 

I’ll be honest, I can’t really tell you what happened in any of the previous MI films in terms of what was solved, who was saved (other than the world), and why any of it mattered, and I suspect six months from now, I’ll probably feel the same way about Dead Reckoning. But here’s why that’s okay: not every film needs to take up space in your memory bank as perhaps a so-called “art movie” would. That’s not to say that the MI films aren’t artful, they are. It’s just that what they mostly are is a good night out that rewards repeat viewings even if the films start to blend together. 

And you know what you sometimes need from a movie? A good night out. Something Dead Reckoning delivers in spades.