Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 is a gripping, exciting, often quite funny, occasionally quite sad tour de force that unleashes the rambunctious action this franchise is known for in bigger, more audacious ways than ever before.
Tom Cruise reprises his role as Ethan Hunt and along with his team—Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa Faust, Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn and Ving Rhames as Luther Stickell—they go on a wild goose chase for a pair of magical keys that have the power to stop a powerful AI called The Entity. It’s basically Mission Impossible’s take on Season 3 of Westworld, or Neuromancer.
Newcomer Hayley Atwell joins the fray as Grace, a thief who finds herself in the middle of all the scheming and double-dealing and violence. Esai Morales plays Gabriel, the diabolical avatar of The Entity. Shea Whigham goes big with agent Jasper Briggs, a man hot on the pursuit of Hunt who “always goes rogue.”
It’s a great cast and they have a lot of fun, though despite the movie’s humor it’s certainly a shade darker than its predecessors. The stakes are higher, too. Stray observations without too much in the way of spoilers:
- One of the opening scenes involving a shootout in the desert made me feel like I was in a live-action movie version of Call Of Duty. It was Warzone’s Al Mazrah map come to life.
- Later we might as well have been in Gran Turismo or Forza Horizon as Ethan and Grace zip around Rome in one of the funniest, most exciting car chase scenes I’ve ever seen in a film. I don’t remember ever laughing so hard during a car chase.
- In an exciting train scene we not only get one of Simon Pegg and Tom Cruise’s funnier conversations, we also get a massively tense scene that feels straight out of Uncharted 2.
- If that’s a lot of video game comparisons, forgive me. I play a lot of video games! I watch a lot of movies and play a lot of games and this one feels like a fun intersection of the two.
Since I’m trying not to spoil too much, I won’t say much more. I was highly entertained from start to finish. Morales’s Gabriel is a compelling villain and the European locales—Rome, Venice, the Austrian Alps, etc.—are gorgeous and fun to spend time in, even if it’s often just backdrop to brutal fight scenes or car chases.
My one problem—and I feel like a broken record every time I say this—is that the movie is simply too damn long. Dead Reckoning Part 1 is just shy of 3 hours, at 2 hours and 43 minutes. And it’s just the first part of a two-part movie! (Unless they make it a trilogy). There is no universe in which a Mission Impossible film needs to be nearly three hours long. It could easily be 20 or 30 minutes shorter. I bet you could shave it down to a clean 2 hour runtime just by shortening some of the sequences and paring down some of the exposition dumps.
As fun as this film is, I doubt I’ll ever watch it again simply because it’s too long to sit through a second time. I’d rewatch a 2-hour movie, though. This may be a pet peeve of mine, but I think it’s a genuine problem in cinema right now. Very few movies require this runtime. Epic historical dramas. Not action spy thrillers.
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