‘Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One’ Review: Tom Cruise Amps Up the Electrifying Action but Story Is Strictly Secondary

It says a lot about Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, the first chapter in the $3.5 billion franchise’s two-part seventh installment, that detailed footage of one of the film’s most spectacular stunts was released in full online last December. The extended clip showcased the meticulous planning and execution of a sequence in which Tom Cruise as superspy Ethan Hunt drives a motorcycle off a cliff and plunges 4,000 feet into a ravine, separating from the bike and BASE jumping the final 500 feet to the ground.

Most action thrillers would save that kind of daredevil money shot for the release, praying that nobody leaked the footage and diminished the awe factor. But director Christopher McQuarrie, in his third turn at the helm, has stuffed the espionage saga so full of breathtaking stunt sequences, visceral fights, gunplay and high-speed chases that there’s loads more to keep his audience glued to every moment.

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The movie’s sustained adrenaline charge is both its strength and its shortcoming. Comparing part one of Dead Reckoning with Brian De Palma’s terrific 1996 opener, which upgraded the CIA’s covert Impossible Missions Force from its 1960s television origins to the big screen, is an illuminating insight into how audience expectations have changed in the past 27 years — or perhaps more accurately, how the major studios have reshaped audience expectations.

Working with screenwriters David Koepp and Robert Towne, De Palma assembled the nuts and bolts of an admittedly convoluted story with patience and care. He allowed his characters space to breathe while building to stylishly choreographed action sequences that bristled with the director’s customary Hitchcockian flair.

Notable among them was a nail-biting CIA heist operation in which Cruise’s Hunt was lowered into a state-of-the-art Langley security vault to copy a highly prized classified document. It set the tone for a series driven by jaw-dropping stunts, redefining the actor’s career at the same time.

In the almost three decades since that film, Cruise has become a much better actor. It’s hard to take the younger Ethan seriously now when he’s grinning like a cocky schoolboy in exchanges with Vanessa Redgrave’s smooth-as-silk arms dealer, Max — like some high school jock trying to impress the head cheerleader.

His Ethan has become more careworn, jaded, emotionally bruised; he’s acquired the gravitas that comes with loss. And the passionate, hands-on commitment with which the actor approaches each stunt, emphasizing practical execution over effects, has only intensified through the years. No one can accuse Cruise of being a performer who fails to deliver what his audience wants. Which includes running. So much running.

In that sense, Dead Reckoning Part One works like gangbusters. If something has been discarded in the storytelling craft along the way, it’s unlikely that the core fanbase will mind. But McQuarrie, who co-wrote the screenplay with Erik Jendresen (an Emmy winner for Band of Brothers), invests so much in the almost nonstop set-pieces that the connective narrative tissue becomes virtually disposable.

Sometimes it feels as if he’s boiled down the most thrilling elements, not only of the Mission: Impossible series, but of the Bond and Bourne movies, and threaded them into a sizzle reel. There’s less sense here of a story that demanded to be told in two parts — this one running two-and-three-quarter hours — than of McQuarrie and Cruise having a bunch more jaw-dropping stunts they plan to pull off and new travel-porn locations on which to unleash mayhem.

Tapping with uncannily sharp timing into a very now anxiety, the plot revolves around artificial intelligence gone rogue — “the perfect covert operation” — and the suavely sinister terrorist seeking to control it, Gabriel (Esai Morales).

The A.I. development harnesses the power to make everything from people to vessels of war undetectable, to turn allies into enemies, commandeer defense systems and manipulate the world’s finance markets. It has become a monster with a mind of its own that knows everything about everyone and can be controlled only with a cruciform key made of two bejeweled parts lost in the Russian submarine disaster that opens the movie.

As the motivation for a globe-hopping hunt to find the two halves of the key and slot them together to tame the A.I. renegade before Gabriel can get his paws on it, it’s a serviceable plot. But it’s elaborated in numbing scenes lumped in among the fun stuff, with Ethan and his associates trudging through leaden exposition dumps, intoning gravely about “The Entity,” as it’s come to be known. Ominous statements are batted about like, “Whoever controls the Entity controls the truth,” which I guess is tangible enough as a threat to world order.

But when we get to see the digital mega-brain at work, looking like a giant fibrous, pulsating cyber sphincter, the whole thing becomes a bit silly. And if after the first half-hour or so you’re still following the plotting intricacies of how the parts of the key got to wherever they are, whether they’re real or fake, who has them and how the IMF crew plans to get them back, congratulations.

Coming after the series high of 2018’s Fallout, in which McQuarrie found an ideal balance of story, character and turbocharged spectacle, this aspect of the film, it must be acknowledged, is disappointing. If De Palma’s Mission: Impossible was considered overly complicated, the storyline here is an absolute maze. But then, as soon as Ethan starts going at it with a pair of trained assassins in a tight Venetian vicoletto, or any number of other bravura sequences in beautiful locations, you’re unlikely to care much about all that Entity blather.

Besides, the strong cast, high-gloss production values and constant wow factor of the action offer plenty of distraction from the storytelling deficiencies. And the fact that Gabriel aims to wound Ethan by harming the people he cares about gives the film a few genuine emotional moments, even if McQuarrie seldom lingers long over them.

In a nice full-circle touch, Henry Czerny is back as Kittridge, Ethan’s prickly CIA boss. Seen previously in the De Palma film, he brings with him a personal history with Ethan and a deep knowledge of the agent’s past that add tension when Hunt once again goes rogue in the new mission. Returning from Fallout is slinky arms dealer Alanna, known as the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), the daughter of Redgrave’s Max, representing another link back to the first film.

In her strongest screen role, Rebecca Ferguson continues bringing smarts, sharp moves and personal — if not sexual — chemistry with Cruise to her character from Rogue Nation and Fallout, MI6 agent Ilsa Faust. She’s first encountered here holed up in the Arabian desert with a $50 million bounty on her head. Ethan’s loyal core backup remains trusty field agent Benji (Simon Pegg), supplying the wisecracks and whipping up those masks; and expert hacker Luther (Ving Rhames), who somehow gets through awkward mouthfuls like, “Ethan, you’re playing four-dimensional chess with an algorithm!”

Chief newcomer, sparking up a flirty cat-and-mouse rapport with Ethan, is Hayley Atwell as Grace, a Brit who pulled herself up from poverty by becoming a master thief. Being a cheerfully amoral opportunist, she’s after the key to sell to the highest bidder but gets roped in by Ethan and thrust into a series of life-threatening situations, through which she handles herself with aplomb.

Among the various figures trailing them — both U.S. Intelligence agents and Gabriel’s hit squad — the most memorable is an ice-cold killer known as Paris (Pom Klementieff), a deadly force behind the wheel of an armored truck and a ready-made action figure with her bleach-blond mop, pleated plaid mini and snug leather jacket.

Paris is in hot pursuit in one of the stand-out set-pieces, on the tail of Ethan and Grace amusingly squeezed into a yellow Fiat 500 on a wild ride through the cobbled streets of Rome that conveniently takes in almost every major tourist attraction before capping it off with a doozy of a sequence on the Spanish Steps. A swanky party at the Palazzo Ducale in Venice yields more suspense on the city’s bridges and in its canals. And the early desert action segues to a tense race against the clock at Abu Dhabi Airport, the undulating roof of the new Midfield Terminal giving Cruise a challenging new course to sprint.

The climactic action is another bookend nod back to the original movie, with a faceoff among almost all the principal characters aboard an out-of-control train — this time the Orient Express, hurtling toward Innsbruck. We’re barely into the summer and already we’ve had two occasions to wonder, “Why do bad guys always want to scramble onto the roofs of high-speed trains?” At least this time, unlike in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the edge-of-your-seat sequence is not marred by glaring CG fakery. There’s even a cool Poseidon Adventure moment with a tumbling grand piano.

In terms of sheer entertainment, the movie has plenty to offer. Editor Eddie Hamilton keeps his foot on the accelerator with breathless pacing, and cinematographer Fraser Taggart’s dynamic camerawork keeps the visuals fluid and exciting. Much of the propulsion is also due to Lorne Balfe’s pounding score, incorporating a thunderous remix of the classic Lalo Schifrin TV theme music.

For a series now well into its third decade — and continuing next summer with Dead Reckoning Part Two — Mission: Impossible has remained remarkably consistent, with ups and downs but never an outright dud. Some of us might lament the madly busy overplotting at the expense of more nuanced character and story development, but that’s endemic to Hollywood studio output these days, not just to this franchise. And as one of the few relatively grownup big-budget alternatives to comic-book superhero domination, I’ll take it.