Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning – Snapshot
Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning is as action-packed as you can get. Submarines, airports, car chases, motorcycles, sky jumping, and a massive train wreck – all just in part one. For many, though, this is an endurance test so rest up before your viewing. (4*)
Where to Watch:
Stream: Prime
Rent: Fandango/Google ($4)
Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning – The Oscar Buzz
Oscar Nominations (2) / Oscar Wins (0) :
Visual Effects (Wuttke/Coco/Sutherland/Corbould)
Sound (Munro/Mather/Burdon/Taylor)
Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning is a visual and sonic experience and the Academy recognized that with these two Oscar nominations.
Both director Christopher McQuarrie and lead actor Tom Cruise eschew green-screen movies where most of the visual effects are computer generated. That’s not to say that they don’t choose to use CGI techniques, but it is usually employed in the background as a way to enhance the overall experience, not as the main event. Even so, the movie credits 905 people working on this movie’s visual effects, mostly the team from Industrial Light and Magic. Although Academy rules only allow five people to receive an Oscar in any given category, clearly they represent a much larger team. Nonetheless, the team has been busy as they received nominations for two other movies this year, Napoleon and The Creator (those reviews are coming up). In past years team members won Oscars for Gravity (13) and Gladiator (00) and nominations for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Snow White and The Huntsman. What I liked about the FX in this movie is that they are employed as a way to communicate the story, not just to wow the audience – although they do that too! (Just as a contrast, Godzilla Minus One listed only 35 people doing the visual effects, a small fraction of the team credited here.)
The sonic experience comes from the technical work to create sound effects and the mixing of sounds all in a pleasing balance. Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning received a nomination for Sound and employed previous Oscar winners and nominees in movies like Top Gun: Maverick, Black Hawk Down, Gravity, Captain Phillips, Belfast, 1917, No Time to Die, and The Martian. A good action movie relies just as much on sound as it does on visual effects. The engineers on this movie clearly generated a sound field that enhances the tension of the movie. When watching at home, turn the volume up as loud as your neighbors can stand it.
Christopher McQuarrie directed and wrote the screenplay for Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning. He didn’t receive a nomination but action films rarely receive Oscar nominations for direction or writing. This is only his fifth film as director but his writing has been recognized before. Last year his screenplay for another Tom Cruise vehicle, Top Gun: Maverick, was nominated in the Adapted category. And almost thirty years ago he won the Original Screenplay Oscar for the much lauded movie The Usual Suspects.
If there is an immediate creative parent of Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning, it would have to be the previous movie in the franchise, Mission Impossible – Fallout (18). Although that film did not receive any Oscar nominations, McQuarrie and Cruise used almost exactly the same technical team and much of the same cast to make this movie. That practiced synergy and teamwork may well explain why this film works so well.
Of course we can’t leave the team discussion without bringing in the cast of characters, led by the legendary Tom Cruise as IMF team leader, Ethan Hunt. Although now over 60 years old, Cruise still insists on doing much of his own stunt work. In this movie that includes the climactic motorcycle jump off a cliff. It is my understanding that he did seven takes of that stunt, which most of us would run away from even standing on the edge! Between his Mission Impossible and Top Gun movies, Cruise has become a recognizable name in the action genre. Cruise was not nominated for anything in this film, but he has received three nominations for roles in more dramatic movies including Born on the Fourth of July (89), Jerry Maguire (96), and Magnolia (99).
As would be expected in a Tom Cruise film, there are multiple female roles and all of them were filled by talented and beautiful women. Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson comes back as an old flame of Ethan’s who plays a prominent role in this thriller. Vanessa Kirby, nominated for leading actress for her terrific performance in Pieces of a Woman, returns as the villainous White Widow. Pom Klementieff, Mantis in the MCU world, is terrifically aggressive in a big Hummer and again in a small alley with a big stick! And finally, the main female person of interest, and Ethan’s reluctant partner in this escapade is Grace. Hayley Atwell, Peggy Carter in the MCU world, gives a sexy and fun-loving performance. The women may not be able to equal Tom Cruise in the action world – can anyone do that besides James Bond? – but they give him a good run for the money.
Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning – Related Movies
Mission Impossible – Fallout (18) (Director/Screenplay/Musical Score/Cinematography/Editing/Sound/Visual Effects/Cruise/Rhames/Pegg/Ferguson/Kirby)
Mission Impossible – Rogue Nation (15) (Director/Screenplay/Editing/Cruise/Rhames/Pegg/Ferguson)
Top Gun: Maverick (22) (Direction/Screenplay/Editing/Sound/Cruise)
The Usual Suspects (95)/The Mummy(17)/Jack Reacher (Screenplay)
Ready Player One (18) (Cinematography/Sound/Visual Effects/Pegg)
Gravity (13)/Black Hawk Down (01)/Belfast (21)/Captain Phillips (13)/No Time to Die (21)/1917 (19)/The Martian (16) (Sound)
Napoleon (23)/The Creator (23/Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (16)/Gladiator (00) (Visual Effects)
Magnolia (99)/Jerry Maguire (96)/Born on the Fourth of July (89) (Cruise)
Pieces of a Woman (20) (Kirby)
Marvel Universe Films (Atwell (as Peggy Carter)/Klementieff (as Mantis))
Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning – What Others Think
Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning may not rate quite as high as Godzilla Minus One, but audience ratings still place it fourth out of all 24 general interest movies this year (tied with The Holdovers and American Fiction and behind Oppenheimer, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, and the Godzilla movie). Positive comments include “Tom Still the King” and “Best franchise currently going”. Some other audience reviewers compared it to Fallout – “Good but a step down from Fallout.” And another wrote “Great entertainment but feels empty and soulless”.
Critics weren’t as enthusiastic ranking it closer to the middle of the group (9 out of 24, tied with May December. James Berardinelli (ReelViews) identified what is, in my mind, the biggest problem with the movie “At 163 minutes, Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning turns into a bit of an endurance contest. That’s too long to keep viewers on edge without exhaustion setting in.” He lauds the action but summarizes it as “… an oversized, big budget popcorn flick, with all the positives and negatives one associates with that sort of glorious but ephemeral brand of filmmaking…”. Brian Tallerico (RogerEbert) called it “a ridiculously good time” that “prioritizes movement – trains, cars, Ethan’s legs…” with “wonderfully choreographed” action. Manohla Dargis (New York Times) echoes that notion saying “Cruise has once again cranked the super spy dial up to 11” and he “doesn’t need a suit; he was, after all, built for speed. He just needs to keep running.” And run he does, everywhere.
Overall, combining audience and critical rating scales, Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning comes in fifth out of all 24 general interest movies (tied with Anatomy of a Fall) and tenth out of all 38 nominated films. Like Godzilla Minus One, this is another must see movie, as long as you can sit on the edge of your seat for almost three hours!
Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning – Special Mention
The IMF in TV and Film – Mission: Impossible was one of my favorite television series that ran for seven seasons starting in 1966. It was revived for two more seasons in 1988. The series was created by Bruce Geller, who also created Mannix. The original series starred Peter Graves (James Phelps), Steven Hill (Daniel Briggs), Martin Landau (Rollin Hand), Barbara Bain (Cinnamon Carter), Greg Morris (Barney Collier) and Peter Lupus (Willy Armitage). Each of the cast members contributed something unique to the team that was used as part of the plan to accomplish the Impossible Mission. Later replacements and new team members included Leonard Nimoy, Lynda Day George, Lesley Ann Warren and Sam Elliott. Every episode they were assigned to an “impossible mission” which, of course, they always managed to pull off.
The first movie was in 1996 and was headed by Brian De Palma and starred Tom Cruise as IMF lead, Ethan Hunt. Sequels came out in 1999, 2006, and 2011 – each helmed by a different action director but starring Tom Cruise, and several other team members. Christopher McQuarrie took over the directing and lead-screenwriter roles in 2015 with Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, followed by Fallout in 2018. Many critics believe the series has improved with a consistent tone and direction in the last three films. And, of course, Dead Reckoning is only Part One of a two part series – Mission:Impossible: Final Reckoning is expected out in May of next year. I understand the eighth movie will include more outrageous stunts performed by Tom Cruise himself.
Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning – Michael’s Moments
Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning is a fully-realized action thriller of a movie. McQuarrie and Cruise have managed to pack just about everything into it. It starts with a submarine conflict (that isn’t what it seems to be). Then there is an intense battle in the middle of an Arabian desert sandstorm, where a new, or should I say old, character is picked up. The next scene is a meeting of the U.S. intelligence community where important details of what is happening, and a little bit of why, are divulged and it ends with something of a ‘bang’. At 28 minutes the opening credits run.
Then we find ourselves at the sleek, very modern Dubai airport for a chase scene on the one hand while the other hand is dealing with a nuclear bomb, or is it? This is where Ethan Hunt meets the all-important Grace character (I never did catch her last name). Somehow we end up in Rome where our main villains arrive and there is a terrific car chase involving a decked out Hummer for the bad girl and tiny yellow fiat for our hero and his newly-attached good girl. The chase involves navigating the famed Spanish Steps.
Next, gondolas take our friends to a midnight rendezvous at a decadent party in Venice where there is more than a little mayhem and a lot more running and chasing and maybe some killing – or not. If you’re keeping track, we’ve had submarines, foot and car chases and lots of bullets, fists, and blades dodging each other.
But at the two hour mark begins the train scene, on the Orient Express of course. But not everyone we need is on the train at the same time. One of our villains jumps onto the train off a bridge while the other villain is already onboard locked in a large chest. Grace, our hero’s new partner, boards the train looking suspiciously like someone else while our hero is desperately seeking a way to get on the train himself. This is where he uses a motorcycle to parachute into the exact same train car where Grace is just about to be killed. (Now why our hero couldn’t figure out how to board the train from the bridge as easily as the villain, I will never understand. But had he done that, then we would have missed one of the all time great stunts, so, of course, he had to do it the harder way.) Then there is the train crash where everything goes to hell in a hand-basket and our hero gets to save our heroine from pending disaster with – what is this – the help of one of the villains??
So, in one movie we have submarines, cars, airplanes, motorcycles, parachutes, and a train – are we missing anything? Well, possibly the motive for all this, which is summarized early on as the mysterious digital Entity – symbolized in a weird-looking key. But that’s all the plot you really need to know, after all, this is an action thriller, right?
And it works very well. There are handsome people, fast action, and a race against multiple unknown enemies. The thrills and chills are all sequenced and fast paced with a little time in-between each one to reset the adrenaline factories and, in the mean time, get a little bit of explanation. Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning is a fast-paced, jam-packed action thriller. And it should be included on your must see list precisely because it serves those goals so well.
This movie is forty minutes longer than our last film, Godzilla Minus One. And the McQuarrie/Cruise team could have taken a lesson from that much smaller team. As James Berardinelli noted (see above), the film becomes something of an endurance test and I think I have to agree that this movie gets overly infatuated with their own ingenuity for producing action-packed thrill – the movie is really a good 30 minutes too long. Many of the fighting scenes, although nicely choreographed, are just too long and fail to add any real significance to the story. As another example, while the nuclear bomb sequence includes some humor and gives one member of the IMF team some added personality, you could remove the entire sequence, cut the movie by ten minutes, and not change the impact of the film a bit. There are multiple sequences in the film that could have been excised or at least shortened to produce a more manageable experience.
For that reason, and probably that reason alone, I cannot give this movie a full five stars. View it, if you haven’t already, and certainly see it before the concluding sequel next year. But take a nap beforehand so you can plow your way through. (4*)
