Tom Cruise is flying high. The 61-year-old actor and Scientologist’s latest film, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, paraglided into cinemas this week. It’s the seventh and (supposedly) penultimate entry in a franchise which has never been in such fine fettle: Dead Reckoning has been pelted with glowing reviews from every direction. It’s got a zeitgeisty plot, which sees Cruise’s rogue counterintelligence agent Ethan Hunt embark on a convoluted intercontinental hunt for a key, in a bid to prevent the rise of a sinister, seemingly all-powerful AI system known as “The Entity”. The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey described the film as a “muscular, extravagant, thoroughly old-school work of ingenuity and craft”. Rotten Tomatoes currently indicates that 98 per cent of critical verdicts are favourable (the highest figure of Cruise’s career). The only problem? When it comes to Dead Reckoning, the consensus is dead wrong.
Written by director Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen (Band of Brothers), Dead Reckoning sees the Mission: Impossible franchise self-destruct before our eyes – without even the courtesy of a five-second warning. To the film’s credit, there are plenty of well-constructed (and, in Cruise’s case, age-defying) stunts. My problem isn’t the logistically impressive but horribly protracted car chase in Rome. Or the sequence in a cavernous Venetian party, which so nakedly strives to imitate a recent Keanu Reeves vehicle that Cruise might as well start calling himself Tom Wick. Or even the dubious acting from Cruise (intensely, unshakably odd) and Esai Morales, who plays the film’s villain Gabriel with an air of absurd nonchalance, save for one angry yell that makes William Shatner’s notorious bellow in Star Trek: Wrath of Khan seem like the picture of subtlety. No, Dead Reckoning’s real dealbreaker is the screenplay. There are times when it feels like Dead Reckoning was itself written by AI. A lazy joke, sure – but not a million miles from the truth.
