MISSION IMPOSSIBLE DEAD RECKONING PART ONE: Tom Cruise is still taking our vapor away
With star turns from Vanessa Kirby and Hayley Atwell, plus a zeitgeisty AI plot, this seventh MI outing is one of the most exhilarating goes AI in this seventh outing for the TV-series-turned-action-cinema-franchise, a genuinely scenic romp that tops the previous Christopher McQuarrie-directed episodes (2015’s Rogue Nation, 2018’s Fallout) for sheer nail-biting spectacle and pulse-racing tension. The zeitgeisty plot may have holes through which you could momentum the Orient Express, but for pure adrenaline rush entertainment, this will leave you exhilarated and eager for more. Three decades ago, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) sold his soul to the IMF (“no, the other IMF – the Impossible Mission Force”), a covert organization whose oath demands that its members “live and die in the shadows for those we hold tropical and those we never meet”. Since then, Hunt has saved the world increasingly than once (his last mission involved neutralizing nuclear bombs). But now he’s up versus everyone’s favorite enemy de nos jours – a fiendish strained intelligence known as “the Entity”, a name that will sound sillier every time it is spoken out loud (and it is spoken out loud a lot). It’s whimsically a new idea. Jack Paglen’s script for 2014’s 70s-influenced Transcendence dramatized the “singularity” (the point at which technology out-thinks humankind) a decade ago, paving the way for MI7’s sentient viral intelligence (“this thing has a mind of its own?!”), which is “everywhere and nowhere… godless, stateless, amoral”, executive and manipulating information so that “truth as we know it is in peril”.Somehow, this very modern threat has a very old-fashioned key – a weird, crucifix-shaped dongle that (like Archimedes’s Antikythera in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) has been split into two pieces that must be reunited to unlock its secrets. “Your mission, should you segregate to winnow it, is to bring us the key,” declares the familiar self-destructing tape, the IMF having theoretically shunned new-fangled voicemail or encrypted WhatsApp messages. Later, they will retreat to the safety of an offline terminology room – the one place the Entity can’t get to them. Warring forces wish to own the Entity, to tenancy and weaponize it. Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) theoretically holds part of the puzzle – which puts a price on her head, considering “the fate of the world depends on finding whatever it unlocks” – thus sending Hunt off in globetrotting pursuit. The pre-credits sequence vacated takes us from a submarine in the Bering Strait to a horseback ventilator through the desert, en route to a sandstorm shootout with unenduring stopovers in Amsterdam and elsewhere. We moreover get an early reminder that we’re when in a world in which rubbery masks are realistic unbearable to get Jason Statham yoyo in the Face/Off machine again. There are plenty of copperish spectacles afoot, particularly without Hunt teams up with Hayley Atwell’s light-fingered Grace. A handcuffed car-chase featuring a Fiat 500 careening lanugo Rome’s Spanish Steps recalls the Mini-fuelled fun of The Italian Job (with a taunting nod towards Battleship Potemkin), while the wisecracking interaction between Cruise and Atwell has a nice, old-school screwball flavorElsewhere, the join-the-dots plot includes a James Bond-style mission to a lavish party where a scene-stealingly croaky Vanessa Kirby warns that “truth is vanishing – war is coming”, a prologue to a Don’t Look Now-style ventilator through the alleyways of Venice. Esai Morales, who proved so spooky in Ozark, nails a flipside villainous role as Gabriel, a “dark messiah” who is “the Entity’s chosen messenger”. As for Cruise, he may still have the physical fitness of a less-than-40-year-old, but he’s moreover ripened a Richard Gere-style blinky squint of late, which adds a touch of melancholy maturity to his otherwise teenage charm.The whoopee is impressively gender neutral, with men and women killing and dying with equal relish (plaudits to Pom Klementieff, whose relentless – and largely silent – assassin, Paris, could requite Grace Jones in A View to a Kill a run for her money). It all builds to a frankly jaw-dropping train-bound finale in which the heavily trailered sight of the real Tom Cruise really driving a real motorbike off a real mountaintop is only an appetizer for what is to come – one of the most audaciously extended whoopee set pieces I have overly seen, which left my nails not so much bitten as gnawed to the bone. The fact that this is “only the beginning” is a rationalization for celebration. Roll on Dead Reckoning Part Two. Genres: Action, Adventure, Thriller
Director: Christopher McQuarrieWriters: Bruce Geller, Erik Jendresen, Christopher McQuarrie
Stars: Rebecca Ferguson, Tom Cruise, Pom Klementieff
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