Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One review: Tom Cruise take practical filmmaking to dizzying new heights

By all accounts, Dead Reckoning is likely Tom Cruise's last outing as Ethan Hunt. (Photo courtesy Paramount Pictures and Skydance)

There is this hyped and much-publicized sequence that makes up the crackling climax of Mission:Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One. Perched on a tall, gargantuan cliff-side, Ethan Hunt, played by the indomitable Tom Cruise, must take that famed leap off of a mountainside on his bike. It’s not a great way to travel, not least for a man who is well past middle age. You also know, owing to the well-publicized stunt, what’s coming. In fact, your anticipation is somewhat dimmed by the predictability of it all. We have all played the video a thousand times over, guffawed at the sheer bravado and stupidity of it and may even have wondered if it is worthwhile giving a stunt as iconic as that, away. And yet, when that moment comes, your stomach falls, the hair on your skin rise in ovation as Cruise, bewilderingly does the expected, the mesmerising and the debatably mad. Even that one eagerly anticipated but familiar stunt, however, is worth the price of the ticket.

Tom Cruise is back as Ethan Hunt, in possibly Hollywood’s most consistent action franchise. Even the pre-credits scene for this seventh instalment lasts a good 20 minutes as Hunt and his group go against a topically contemporary villain in Artificial Intelligence. Typical to the film’s accessible and somewhat churlish vocabulary, here it is referred to as ‘The entity’. A software program that predicts your actions, can get to you anywhere, can turn your tech against you, and worst of all, answers neither to geographies nor governments. It is in a sense ‘everywhere and nowhere’. Ironically, and maybe amusingly, the key to controlling this indefinable thing is an actual key that has been divided into two parts. Hunt must, of course, secure this key, but more importantly, find what it unlocks or in a more specific sense, unleashes. ‘War is coming’, a character chimes at one point, and it does feel like a relevant warning, considering the zeitgeist this film is rather cleverly trying to address.

Dead Reckoning isn’t as maniacal as maybe the franchise’s recent films, nor is it is as sprawling. Built like a crescendo it obviously travels the world, parsing through action sequences that get wilder by the numbers, until the film blows the lid off of practical stunts with a climax that might make your toes curl. A desert battle is followed by a car chase in Rome. A taut, claustrophobic on-foot chase in Venice finally leads to a train sequence that your fingernails ought to receive a warning about. We’ve seen action sequences on trains, but not of this tenacity or manic, almost incredulous, design. It confirms Cruise’s status as the man prepared to go where no entertainer would. The fact that this franchise contrives to revisit old tricks, while being self-aware enough to also comically feel the masks and alarmingly hack the tech, tells you it is also willing to erase, in order to create. It echoes conviction that is unafraid to both embrace inanity and sport silliness, to momentous, life-altering effect.

Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and Rebecca Ferguson (Photo courtesy Paramount Pictures and Skydance)

Ethan Hunt is obviously assisted by a familiar bunch in Benji (Simon Pegg), Luther (Ving Rhames) and Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson).  Joining the cast is Grace, played by the disarming Hayley Atwell, who adds welcome zing to a film that is possibly also the funniest of the franchise yet. A car chase in Rome, builds on the metaphorical dictum of an out-dated but stubborn old man competing with the machinery of modern filmmaking, with old-school tools of grit and gut. Cruise continues to single-handedly confront contemporary wisdom that scale, in modern filmmaking, is unachievable without the centrality of CGI and computerized visual effects. MI instead builds sequences the old-fashioned way where physicality is visibly tested, the horizon manifestly clobbered into submission, and entire landmasses forced to yield to the daredevilry and vision of a solitary man. Land, water, desert, there is an element of the earth in everything Cruise is trying to build and possibly conquer. Almost as if he intends to leave no stone, wave or breath unturned for the slightest chance it may offer thrill or excitement.

Esai Morales, Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie on the set of Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning - Part One from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.

Possibly the only grouse with a film so audacious, is that it can at times feel a little too long (2 hours and 40 minutes). This is also a film that is twisty and wicked in a more unanimated sense and can at times feel a bit bloated.

That said, there is something inexplicably thrilling about watching a man run through tight cobbled alleys under the night sky, even though we have seen him do this for decades. A whole set piece, in fact, is quite simply built on Cruise, running and running some more without making it in time. It perhaps points to the man’s waning powers, the spectre of age so obviously beginning to reflect off of his drooping shoulders, his lined face and choreographic strain. And yet, it’s like watching adrenaline mix with the moving image, the very concept of tactile, tangible cinema as a 61-year-old man runs, feverishly, desperately to some sort of cinematic podium. ‘The incarnation of chaos,’ a character describes him aptly as he bears down on us, thankfully not for the last time, with the improbable and the impossible.