9/10 Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One has been the movie of the moment since December 2020, when audio leaked of producer/star Tom Cruise tearing into a couple of technicians for standing too close to each other. In the almost three-minute rant that has become like a Bible verse to me, Cruise screeches-

“We are the gold standard! They’re back there in Hollywood making movies right now because of us! Because they believe in us and what we’re doing … You can tell it to the people that are losing their fucking homes because our industry is shut down! It’s not going to put food on their table or pay for their college education! That’s what I sleep with every night, the future of this fucking industry! We are not shutting this fucking movie down!”

Cruise and the Mission: Impossible series are indelibly linked. The series began in 1995 as Cruise’s personal outlet to keep doing his own stunts when productions would no longer shell out to insure him risking his incredibly lucrative face, and as the series and his career resurrected in the early ‘10s, they’ve done so as icons of the type of hardcore filmmaking that is quickly fading into history. It’s beyond fitting that this is the guy who was fighting insurance companies to keep making movies during the COVID-19 crisis, the guy who passersby catch hanging out on the roof of a train between takes.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One turns out to be even more of the moment in 2023. In the film, the artificial intelligence apocalypse is already underway – a rogue, self-aware AI referred to as “the entity” has already made its way through all the nuclear powers’ intelligence systems by the time Ethan Hunt (Cruise) is made aware of it. He sets off in search of a two-piece cruciform key that will unlock physical access to the machine so it can be destroyed, but he and his team can no longer rely on any internet-accessible technology. He must also contend with several competitors – Grace (Hayley Atwell), an unrelated pickpocket who’s mixed up in all this; Jasper Briggs (Shea Whigham), a CIA agent who’s been sent after Hunt preemptively this time; and the entity’s chosen scion, Gabriel (Esai Morales).

The film is strikingly prescient not only for its inclusion of an algorithm as the main villain, but with the emotional reactions this algorithm elicits. Hunt’s handler uses a lot of pandemic- and Jan. 6-appropriate language about objective truth having been defeated – production was first scheduled to begin Feb. 20, 2020 in Venice, which was already being ravaged by COVID by then, so the script should have been completed well before these events, but writer/director/producer Christopher McQuarrie’s screenplays for these things are usually pretty light, so they may have written the really relevant stuff on the fly.

What couldn’t have been written on the fly is the disturbing holy treatment of AI in a movie that comes out months after generative models frequently described as “artificial intelligence” have taken the world by storm. Gabriel behaves as a prophet, boasting about the information provided to him by his algorithmic god – that’s not interpretive, Hunt at one point threatens, “I will kill you and your god.” The two keys he hopes will help him do this are both ornate crosses, and much of the movie takes place in Rome, but we wouldn’t want to speculate about religious messaging in a Tom Cruise film.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is another Mission: Impossible movie. They’re the gold standard. People make movies because they believe in what Mission: Impossible is doing.

Cruise and company have joined up with a line of spectacular action movies committed to actually doing the stunts, in contrast to many dominant blockbusters that are mostly comedies with stunts that might have been cool if they were actually performed drawn in. I generally point to Mad Max: Fury Road for codifying the trend in its current form, but John Wick and its offshoots do the heavy lifting. Mission: Impossible is obviously much older, but recent installments draw clear inspiration from both.

I adore Mission: Impossible – Fallout, so it’s no surprise I view Dead Reckoning as a step down, but it suffers from how direct a step down it is. The base-jumping sequence, which was central to all of Dead Reckoning’s marketing, wasn’t recorded very well and feels like a lesser version of the astonishing one-take HALO jump sequence early in Fallout. Similarly, the massive car chase in Rome feels choppy and hard to follow compared to Fallout’s similar sequence in Paris, composed of longer shots from wider angles. It feels more like a stylistic difference than a direct drop in quality, but the style is harder to follow and gets into tonal whiplash territory pretty quickly.

Dead Reckoning is the first Mission: Impossible movie to be shot digitally, and this is crucial – the mountain ramp Hunt jumps from in this scene isn’t natural, it was animated over a gigantic ramp they built for the sequence, and his jump was shot with drones that had to be digitally removed from each other’s shots in post-production. It’s an impressive but unfortunately limited stunt, especially when it’s following up a sequence that was created by skydiving with the cameraman.

Dead Reckoning is much more fun and light-hearted than its predecessor, but it also digs into the subtheme of choice, particularly the choice to join the Impossible Mission Force contrasted against the choices Gabriel and the algorithm claim humans don’t really have. The entity is depicted as behaving similarly to a chess engine, reducing every possibility down to a stack of binaries to simulate precognizance. I suspect Part Two, which is partially produced for a scheduled June 28, 2024 release but on hold for the SAG and WGA strikes, will lean more into this, but it’s a fully fleshed theme already.

The stunts may not be shot as widely, but they’re still the real deal. It’s still got the sharp visual storytelling that incorporates small acting moments to tell a layered story quickly. There’s still a keen sense of joy and adventure that’s become far too rare.

Leopold Knopp is a UNT graduate. If you liked this post, you can donate to Reel Entropy here. Like Reel Entropy on Facebook and reach out to me at reelentropy@gmail.com.