At the start of production on “Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One,” the seventh film in the “Mission: Impossible” series, writer/director Christopher McQuarrie asked producer and star Tom Cruise what he wanted to do in the movie. Cruise, who has played IMF agent Ethan Hunt for the past 27 years, performing his own increasingly daring stunts in the franchise, said he wanted to drive a motorcycle off a cliff. McQuarrie wanted to wreck a train, putting his stamp on one of cinema’s finest traditions.
In 1896, the Lumière brothers’ “The Arrival of a Train” had one of the first film audiences fleeing the theater in fear, and the same impulse to arouse a potent visceral reaction is what animates Cruise and McQuarrie’s desire to keep pushing the envelope of what action movies can be.
McQuarrie, who co-wrote the screenplay with Erik Jendresen, knows that spectacle is nothing without story, characters and authentic relationships, because the stakes have to feel real. Ethan’s focus is on his objective, but it’s also on what matters most to him — and for he and his scrappy crew of IMF agents, what matters most are the friends in their earpieces, and keeping each other alive.
Ethan is just a man on a mission, even though his reputation in the CIA ranges from “the living manifestation of destiny,” to “mind-reading, shape-shifting incarnation of chaos,” as he’s described by a no-nonsense agent, Jasper Briggs (Shea Whigham), in hot pursuit of Hunt in “Dead Reckoning Part One.”
McQuarrie and Cruise like to remind us that Ethan is a mere mortal, especially in the middle of his feats of derring-do. The stunts are, of course, mind-boggling but Ethan is not an all-powerful being — how boring, humanity is much more interesting. Heart rates rise when we see him quake in the face of an oncoming train, question the best angle at which to fling himself and a motorcycle off a mountain, or quell his rising emotions when those he loves are threatened. Though it’s Cruise’s body executing these stunts, it’s his incredibly expressive eyes that are his greatest tool in performing them: reacting, assessing, judging and yearning in every heightened scenario.
Ethan’s mission — and he always chooses to accept it, for better or for worse — in "Dead Reckoning" is to find a key that unlocks the source code to an artificially intelligent weapon, “a godless, stateless, amoral entity” that’s attained a malevolent sentience, watching, listening and penetrating the vast digital systems that knit together our reality, and threatening to become a “truth-eating digital parasite.” This formless entity has a keeper of sorts, Gabriel (Esai Morales), a man from Ethan’s past, and Gabriel has a petite but brutal helper, Paris (Pom Klementieff).
As an all-seeing, all-knowing digital villain, the Entity represents McQuarrie and Cruise’s thesis about one of the greatest threats to our world: a digital reality built of zeroes and ones that offers no tangible existence. All that we can and should trust is the real, the human, the analog — what’s in the room with us right now. It’s an argument for truth found in the real world and in human creation.
In “Dead Reckoning Part One,” McQuarrie never misses a chance to up the ante when it comes to throwing Cruise into situations that test Ethan’s mettle, morality and might. A car chase in Rome sees Cruise navigating a tiny yellow Fiat while handcuffed to a comely pickpocket (Hayley Atwell), taking out every scooter in the city. He sprints through the alleys of Venice while the Entity scrambles the directions from trusty techie Benji (Simon Pegg), and he even manages a shootout in a desert sandstorm while tracking down his trusted ally Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson).
Then there’s the aforementioned train wreck. McQuarrie doesn’t just pay homage to the great train movies of cinema history — he completely eclipses them, staging the most spectacular and suspenseful sequence of railroad-based stunts since Buster Keaton’s “The General.” It’s one of the most incredible and heart-pounding action sequences ever made, until, probably, “Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two.”
With these loving tributes to film history and an uncontrollable digital villain, McQuarrie and Cruise make an impassioned argument for cinema itself, the kind created by humans, shared collectively, in which emotion is integral to spectacle, eliciting a physical reaction. One of the most stirring moments in the movie isn’t action-packed and it doesn’t progress the plot: Ethan and Ilsa simply take in Venice together for a minute. It’s a scene that proves to be crucial for the rest of the film to unfold with the heart and feeling that it does, because we care about these characters, who care about each other, and that’s what matters most.
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‘MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - DEAD RECKONING PART ONE’
4 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: PG-13 (for intense sequences of violence and action, some language and suggestive material)
Running time: 2:43
How to watch: In theaters Wednesday, July 12
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