[7]
The seventh (and reportedly penultimate) Mission: Impossible film doesn’t quite reach the series high achieved by 2018’s Fallout, but it’s still a solidly entertaining action/adventure flick. Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his trusted teammates (including Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg) are trying to find and destroy an all-powerful artificial intelligence called ‘The Entity’ before it’s harnessed by any number of world governments racing around the world trying to obtain the key to its control. The chase takes place primarily in Abu Dhabi and Venice, reuniting Hunt and his crew with a few welcome familiar faces from previous films: Rebecca Ferguson’s British spy and Vanessa Kirby’s clandestine broker character. A major new character, a cunning thief played by Hayley Atwell (Captain America), spends the first half of the film as a major foil for Cruise and company, but ends up joining the team for the second half.
The first thirty minutes of Dead Reckoning is an uncharacteristically solemn affair, overstuffed with exposition, but afterwards director Christopher McQuarrie (Rogue Nation, Fallout) delivers one remarkable, elaborate action sequence after another, proving himself one of Hollywood’s most skillful and polished directors of action and suspense. Highlights include an epic car chase through Venice and a spectacular sequence in which Cruise and Atwell escape the famed Orient Express while the train plummets into a deep ravine. This film definitely delivers on spectacle and thrills, but the tone is decidedly more serious than previous entries in the franchise. In the tradeoff, we lose a little of the previous films’ fun and character humor. It also ends without resolution, as Dead Reckoning is just ‘Part One’ of the franchises two-part finale, to be resolved in 2025’s Final Reckoning.
If you enjoy McQuarrie’s previous Mission: Impossible films, Rogue Nation and Fallout, this film is a natural continuation of those. If you gave up on the franchise somewhere between the 1996 original and the fourth one, 2011’s Ghost Protocol, it’s worth picking up with Rogue Nation — the franchise really found its stride with that one.
With Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny, and a wonderfully propulsive score by Lorne Balfe.