Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part One (2023)

As I walked out of the theater for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One (a movie title with far too much punctuation), a woman sitting in the hallway asked me, expectantly and warily, “Is it any good?” With a hasty sigh, I assured her, “It’s fantastic,” realizing only then that the movie had taken my breath away. “Lots of action?” she asked, and I promised, “You have no idea.”
 
I hope she enjoyed it – indeed, I almost stuck around to see if she had, because as much as I’ve hemmed and hawed with blockbuster movies lately, as much as I’ve been besieged by fatigue and corporate horse-trading, Dead Reckoning is the first theatrical release in a long time that felt like an absolute blast: ten out of ten, no notes.
 
Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is back, on the trail of two halves of a mysterious key that will unlock one of the world’s deadliest weapons. His newest mission reunites his old friends Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) with the disavowed MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) against the shadowy Gabriel (Esai Morales), his assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff), and pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell), caught in the middle of a case that goes back to Ethan’s first days with the IMF.
 
Your mileage may vary on the first two Mission: Impossible films, but there’s no question that the series well and truly hit its stride with 2015’s Rogue Nation, the fifth in the franchise and the first pairing Tom Cruise with director Christopher McQuarrie. Dead Reckoning is McQuarrie’s third outing with the IMF, and if there’s a pocket he’s firmly in it. Since McQuarrie’s arrival, Mission: Impossible has been a racecar in the red, constantly accelerating and delivering consistent thrills that somehow, time and again, find a way to make a tense situation even more nail-biting. What’s not to love about an action film so confident that its first trailer consisted merely of a single stunt and the relentless insistence that, yes, Tom Cruise really drove a motorbike off a mountain? 
 
And even while we’ve seen that stunt over and over again, there is nevertheless a charm and an intensity in the film finally reaching that moment – and then overpowering it, again and again, in a climactic sequence that protracts the audience’s anxiety by making a certain situation unfathomably worse and worse. As a third act setpiece, it’s a definitional moment for the film, which packs all its character beats and espionage plots into one orchestral symphony of chaos aboard the Orient Express. Agatha Christie, eat your heart out; Poirot’s mere murder inquiry can’t hold a candle to the finale of Dead Reckoning. 
 
At two hours and forty-three minutes, Dead Reckoning has a runtime that would make any lesser action movie buckle. Even Dial of Destiny, which I more or less loved, felt a little baggy at two-thirty-four, yet Dead Reckoning clips along, even through preposterous scenes of outlandish didactic dialogue. Buoying even clunky exposition like “The only thing that’s real is this conversation,” what sells the film is the earnest investment we feel between these characters, the genuine care they have for each other. I rewatched the films about two years ago, and even so the chemistry between Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg did more heavy lifting for me than my memory of their friendship in the preceding films. If they’re being playful with each other, we know things will be fine, but the script deftly maneuvers into those moments where conversation becomes deadly serious, raising the ante to a painful degree.
 
Even in a franchise where anyone could be wearing a rubber mask, where death is often just a fake-out, the tension in this film is almost unbearable. The audience knows that Ethan Hunt – that Tom Cruise – is bulletproof, and yet I found myself wheezing with fear each time he flirted with sudden death. McQuarrie is a master magician in this sense, fully immersing the audience in the cinematic illusion of danger. In my review of Fallout, I had said that McQuarrie seemed constantly to be asking, “But what if it were on fire?” And that impulse to ratchet up the stakes persists into Dead Reckoning; there’s a car chase, yes, but the car has no doors, and its occupants are handcuffed in a way that makes driving a challenge – and, of course, there’s a baby carriage in their way. My audience was laughing and gasping in equal measure, a rapturous burst of applause just when things cleared up, only to reveal the light at the end of the tunnel to be, quite literally, an oncoming subway train.
 
That pesky Part One in the title gave me some degree of pause. I thought we’d cleared that hurdle back in the days of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, and yet we have films like Across the Spider-Verse and Dune taking a year’s hiatus without fully concluding their narratives. There’s so much more to come in Dead Reckoning, Part Two, and yet McQuarrie hasn’t given us half of a story. He’s given us a full film (and then some), albeit with a major door left open for the sequel. That’s not to say that I couldn’t have easily gone another three hours – I could have – but at least this time I don’t feel like my attendance at the next film is taken for granted. Rather, Part One more than earns the right to expect me to come back for more. 
 
Back when Fallout debuted, I called Mission: Impossible “the little franchise that could.” But after 27 years and seven outings, I think it’s safe to say that it’s the persistent and consistent franchise that shows everyone else how it’s done.
 

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violence and action, some language, and suggestive material.” Directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Written by Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen. Starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, and Henry Czerny.

Dune (2021)

There’s a moment in Denis Villeneuve’s long-anticipated Dune that will take your breath away. However, I can’t tell you what that moment is – not because it’d be a spoiler to do so, but because there are so many of these moments in Dune that it’s impossible to predict which one will do it for you. It isn’t likely to be the next Star Wars as its marketing declares, but Dune is majestic in its enormity, and even with its simultaneous release on HBO Max it demands to be seen in the largest, loudest auditorium available. 

Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) reckons with his destiny as an ersatz “chosen one” when his father, Duke Leto of House Atreides (Oscar Isaac), is assigned custody of the unforgiving desert world Arrakis – a planet populated by colossal sandworms, the native Fremen people, and the hallucinogenic drug known as spice. While Paul and his mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) study his prophetic dreams, the corpulent Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) schemes against House Atreides in his quest to retake Arrakis. 

 

These are only some of the things that happen in Dune, and there are so many more characters who don’t fit into a brief plot synopsis. The scope of the film is compounded by the fact that Villeneuve is consciously adapting only half of Frank Herbert’s dense 600-page novel, with a fairly logical if abrupt breaking point midway through the story. I say “abrupt” only because by that point Dune is so resolutely in its groove and the audience is well and truly vibing with the film that any stopping point would feel jarring; put another way, I would have been just as content to see another two hours and thirty-six minutes. It’s not that the movie is unsatisfying, but rather that it’s too satisfying to stop, like a theme park dark ride you don’t want to get off.

 

Perhaps appropriate for a movie set largely on a desert planet, Denis Villeneuve is on a real hot streak. I haven’t seen his 2013 Enemy yet, but every other film since that year – Prisoners, Sicario, Arrival, and Blade Runner 2049 – has been a winner. Particularly in the latter two, both science fiction films, Villeneuve is finding his niche: speculative futures of overwhelmingly immense scale, where humanity is both dwarfed and magnified in the shadow of the profound. Amy Adams had to reckon with an expanding sense of the cosmos in Arrival, while Blade Runner 2049 was Ryan Gosling’s confrontation with his own ebbing humanity in a foreboding neon cityscape. Here, in the year 10191, everything is enormous – the worms, the spacecraft, the political maneuvering, and the veritable heft of destiny (manufactured or genuine) – and no filmmaker is better equipped than Villeneuve to carry those weights.

 

An IMAX screen so perfectly befits the size of Dune, but its speaker system is perhaps even better suited for the task. Throughout the film your bones will rattle, thanks to Hans Zimmer, who turns in the Hans Zimmer-iest score imaginable. (Equally Zimmer is the sprawling release of the score, which spans three albums and nearly five hours of orchestration.) It’s atonal, lingering, and eclectic, perhaps the only film score in recent memory to include both an electric guitar, bagpipes, and a didgeridoo. The bass shakes to the point where it’s unclear whether you’re hearing a spaceship in flight or Hans Zimmer in action; either way, the sound design is so meticulous and acute that it becomes a character in and of itself. See also the moments when Paul and his mother use “the voice,” a kind of Jedi mind trick that erases free will; the first time we heard “the voice,” its bass shattering eardrums before the words make it to our auditory canals, everyone in my theater sat up a little straighter.

 

I think diehard fans of the novel will enjoy what Villeneuve has built, and it seems that more casual filmgoers are digging it, too. I came to Dune from the unique position of having just read the book – or, at least, half of it; I had wanted to finish the novel entire before seeing the movie, but as it stood I got within twenty pages of the film’s chosen ending. (I promise I’ll finish before Dune Part II, the sequel which seems inevitable now.) In the process of translation, some of the characters got flattened, particularly and disappointingly the Duke himself. Duke Leto is a terrific character in the novel, torn between his duty, political machinations beyond his control, and his personal loyalty to his bloodline; he’s heroic, chivalric, and gracious, but the film seems content to let Oscar Isaac’s natural charisma do most of the character work. Conversely, Timothée Chalamet’s Paul is more human and accessible than the novel’s distant and aloof protagonist, perhaps because of his increased self-consciousness of his place as the manufactured messiah of Arrakis. 

 

Instead of diving deep into the characters, it seems that Villeneuve has gone the more unconventional route of letting his visual design do the character work. There are some lines about backstory, and there’s a clever narrative device in the form of Paul’s talking schoolbooks, but largely Villeneuve lets the images do the talking. It’s a mode of storytelling that seems to have fallen out of favor of late, trusting your set designers and cinematographer to do their job well. The Harkonnens are the villains because of their unfathomable ugliness, their unlit home and grotesque bodies belying the depravity of their souls; save for his distinctive voice, it’s almost impossible to recognize Stellan Skarsgård beneath the mass of flesh that is Baron Vladimir. Likewise, the Atreides are the heroes because of how gosh-darn pretty they are, warm and human. They’re also the only ones who seem to be having any fun, especially Jason Momoa as the swashbuckling (and brilliantly named) Duncan Idaho, about whom I would surely watch a miniseries or two. 

 

Dune is a movie into which you can easily sink, like a hot bath or a deep hill of shifting sand (both of which figure prominently in striking images within the film). It’s as much an atmosphere as a narrative, like the moodier bits of Blade Runner 2049 dialed up to eleven. Most importantly, Dune is like a dream, as in the best cinema can be, from which one does not want to awaken. Maybe it’s a little obtuse, maybe it’s bigger and more ambitious than it ought to be, but Denis Villeneuve has earned the right to make idiosyncratic science fiction. Dune is an event, a kind of heraldic “welcome back” moment for moviegoers who may have forgotten (as indeed I did) what kind of narrative spectacle best belongs in the cinema. 

 

Dune is rated PG-13 for “sequences of strong violence, some disturbing images, and suggestive material.” Directed by Denis Villeneuve. Written by Jon Spaihts, Denis Villeneuve, and Eric Roth. Based on the novel by Frank Herbert. Starring Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Zendaya, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa, and Javier Bardem.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)

In a word, wow. I’m a week late to the Mission: Impossible – Fallout party, and while I would have liked to have seen the film in an entirely packed house, the fact is that Fallout is such a punchy film, so aggressively laced with adrenaline and bombast, that I suspect it’d work just as well on an airplane headrest as in a half-packed IMAX auditorium. It’s a film bursting with energy, firing on more cylinders than you knew a film could have, with a clever knack for surprise. The more hyperbolic in the review community are calling it one of the greatest action films of all time, and while that’s a bridge I’m not ready to cross just yet, I’ll say it’s an appropriate accolade because Mission: Impossible – Fallout is one of the finer action films in recent memory.

In the fallout (see what we did there?) of Rogue Nation, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is still working to dismantle the terror network organizing in the wake of Solomon Lane (Sean Harris). After his team (comprised of Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg) loses a cache of plutonium to Lane’s successors, Ethan is assigned a CIA escort (Henry Cavill) to make sure the weapons are recovered. Little does Ethan know that former MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) is also chasing the plutonium, in a globetrotting chase that will lead Ethan closer to Lane than he imagined.

As someone who still hasn’t seen the first three Mission: Impossible movies (and with no legitimate reason for not having done so), I’m always a little surprised to think that this is a 22-year franchise with six films, a consistent lead, and an ability to persist without getting bogged down in reinventing itself or in lingering slavishly on the past. It is, in a sense, the purest version of a franchise, shaving off what didn’t work in the last installment and inheriting only a bare skeleton on which to hang a powerful action story. With returning director Christopher McQuarrie (the first time the franchise has brought back a previous helmsman), there are nods back to Rogue Nation, but the story is constructed in such a way that Fallout may as well be a standalone.

And boy does it work. The action setpieces are remarkable, literally breathtaking in a way that lets you temporarily forget the indestructibility of Tom Cruise (both on screen and, evidently, in real life, thanks to his much-ballyhooed refusal of a stuntman). These action scenes are refreshing for their clarity, astonishing in their choreography, and addictively compelling for their ability to raise the stakes like a cinematic Shepard tone. There’s a second-act car chase in Paris that feels like The Dark Knight had a baby with The French Connection, which includes also a motorcycle chase, a shootout, and a marine getaway for good measure; just when you think the fever has pitched, McQuarrie finds a way to raise the mercury with another twist. It’s as if McQuarrie, pulling double-duty as screenwriter, looked at each bad-as-it-can-get moment in the film and asked, “But what if it were on fire?”

Fallout is a movie that feels like anything could happen, but all under the umbrella of certainty that the good guys will prevail and, in fact, that they always already have it in the bag. Between the rubber face-changing masks, the continual double-cross reversals, and the sheer unstoppability of Ethan Hunt (who can, if the occasion requires, pilot a helicopter with no training or reorganize a hostage extraction with minimal time to prepare), Fallout is a movie that just feels right, leaving an audience with a big dumb grin. It’s a movie that doesn’t need a lot of frilly analysis because the movie is very no-frills in its approach to earnest straightforward action. There are a lot of moving parts in the film, with action sequences evolving and morphing even as the plot splinters and diverges. At one point, just when things start to go smoothly and umpteen new challenges arise, Cavill bursts out, “Why do you have to make everything so f—ing complicated?!” If Fallout is overly complicated, it’s in service to the immense satisfaction to be gained once Ethan barrels through the problem with a direct and unilateral solution that takes not a single human life. Ethan Hunt is an American James Bond, yes, but he’s also at home in the superhero genre because of his abiding belief that no mission is worth the life of a teammate; his super power is that aforementioned jack-of-all-trades ability to roll with any punch and salvage any mission gone awry.

The real thrill, then, is not in whether Ethan and the IMF will save the day, because of course they will. It’s in how much will be thrown their way, how much they have to overcome, and how creative a solution they’ll devise to get there. It’s in the payoff when you discover all the steps that have led to this moment, all the ways Ethan has prepared to get what he needs and how much he’ll have to improvise along the way. It’s a lot of fun; I can’t overstate how compulsively fun this movie is and how thoroughly it earns all the moments you want to stand up and cheer, little frissons when Chekhov’s gun gets to fire. If Sicario was the unlikely franchise, Mission: Impossible is the little franchise that could, and it’s earned its day on the hill.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout is rated PG-13 for “violence and intense sequences of action, and for brief strong language.” Written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Starring Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Sean Harris, Angela Bassett, Michelle Monaghan, Vanessa Kirby, and Alec Baldwin.

The Girl on the Train (2016)

It’s impossible not to compare The Girl on the Train to 2014’s Gone Girl (or, in the world of the not-cinematic, to compare the two source novels by Paula Hawkins and Gillian Flynn, respectively). Both are wildly successful novels by women novelists, texts about missing and presumed murdered women, told by unreliable narrators with the spotlight of suspicion cast on nearly every character. They’re page-turners, and they’re both told with a competence that one might not expect from a narrative which might otherwise be fare for a Lifetime Original Movie.

In any other context, Tate Taylor’s adaptation of The Girl on the Train would be a runaway hit. And perhaps it is unfair to compare The Girl on the Train to Gone Girl, but it is to my eyes unavoidable and Tate Taylor isn’t David Fincher, and so Train becomes a distant second. It doesn’t do anything wrong aside from not being Gone Girl, which – when the comparison is so strongly invited – ends up a bit of a dark shadow.

Emily Blunt stars as the eponymous girl, Rachel Watson, an unreliable narrator if ever we’ve seen one. Amid a fog of mass transportation, substance abuse, and her own internal brokenness, Rachel thinks she observes the key piece of evidence in the disappearance of Megan Hipwell (Haley Bennett). Complicating matters, though, Megan lives a few doors down from Rachel’s ex-husband and his new wife (Justin Theroux and Rebecca Ferguson), who suspect that Rachel’s escalating derangement poses a danger to their family and to Megan’s.

First of all, Emily Blunt gives a commanding performance as Rachel. Fans of the book will not be disappointed by her interpretation of the character, which is compelling in its unflinching precision in depicting her battle with alcoholism, her dispiriting recidivism, and those moments where book-readers will recall wanting to shake the poor woman by the shoulders and implore her to come to her senses. Indeed, I almost wonder if Blunt will end up filling out a lot of Best Actress lists come December. Ferguson and especially Bennett do good work too, the latter displaying a range I wouldn’t have expected after last month’s Magnificent Seven outing; as Megan’s psychology is unveiled in the film, Bennett keeps strong pace with the character, such that a pivotal water drop in the film’s third act becomes intensely significant and vividly understandable.

As I said above, though, Tate Taylor isn’t David Fincher, and so Girl on the Train simmers with these strong performances rather than Fincher’s film, which positively crackles with its kinetic energy. Setting aside the similarities in plot, both films use voiceover narration (which I usually deplore), Train doing so less effectively than Gone Girl, but I would give points to Train for finding ways to communicate visually the unreliability of Rachel as a point-of-view character which the novel expressed in its narration. Even Danny Elfman seems to be doing his best Trent Reznor impression on score duty.

There are moments, then, when I don’t feel the comparison to Gone Girl is unfair, because it does seem at times that Taylor is aspiring in the direction of David Fincher. Points in favor of Taylor (and Hawkins) – the film passes the Bechdel Test with far more grace than Gone Girl ever did. It’s surprisingly loyal to the book and very successful as a page-to-screen adaptation, but what Girl on the Train doesn’t do is transcend the Lifetime ethos with the fluidity of Gone Girl, nor do I expect Train to remain as rewatchable as Gone Girl. The Girl on the Train is very good at what it does, but what it doesn’t do is end up as essential as Gone Girl.

The Girl on the Train is rated R for “violence, sexual content, language and nudity.” Directed by Tate Taylor. Written by Erin Cressida Wilson. Based on the novel by Paula Hawkins. Starring Emily Blunt, Rebecca Ferguson, Haley Bennett, Justin Theroux, and Luke Evans.

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)

I think I missed a memo, because in the last few years, Ethan Hunt has managed to become the American James Bond (Jack Ryan might have had that title long ago, but I was one of only a few who liked his most recent appearance). It’s a bit of a surprise that a franchise which began nineteen years ago is having something of a resurgence in the last five years, but if the series continues to be as good as its latest outing, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, Tom Cruise may end up giving 007 a run for his money. (He’s already played the part longer than anyone played Bond, besting Roger Moore’s 12 years.)

After a Senate hearing disbands the IMF, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) finds himself cut off in the middle of a global search for the invisible Syndicate, a network of terrorists whose existence is doubted by nearly everyone. With the scantest of leads, Hunt seeks help from his tech-savvy comrade Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) while continually crossing paths with the mysterious Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), whose true allegiance is perpetually in doubt.

The James Bond comparison is really and truly invited by Rogue Nation (perhaps more than its immediate predecessor, Ghost Protocol), which begins with a Bond-style opening sequence in which Ethan boards a plane mid-flight from the outside. This audacious stunt, which Cruise performed himself, sets a tone for the film that roots Rogue Nation in an era where action films tried to show moviegoers something they hadn’t seen before, rather than aim first to outdo the competition or just outthink the audience.

As I said of Ghost Protocol, the joy of these films is that they don’t focus so much on transcending the genre as they do on playing very well within the established conventions of the espionage narrative. What’s even more refreshing is the way the films recall the early Bond films’ one-and-done format, without baiting the audience back for a sequel or relying on their memory of a small detail from movies past. As someone who hasn’t seen the first three (but who now wants to, desperately), it’s striking how well the film introduces its main characters, some of whom have been around since 1996. I hadn’t met Ving Rhames’s Luther before, but I had a good sense of who he was and how he fit into the story because the film has a very acute sense of narrative integrity, respecting its audience enough to give us a complete experience.

Rogue Nation is spectacle cinema doing what it ought to do with neither pretension nor laziness. With each Mission Impossible film directed by a different person, I think there’s less of a burden to outdo oneself or someone else, and more room to focus on the quality of the experience itself. Director Christopher McQuarrie, reuniting with Cruise after the very compelling Jack Reacher, has a knack for stories told well without compromising clarity, and the surprising sense of humor from Edge of Tomorrow (which he cowrote) is present also in Rogue Nation, punctuating moments of tension with unexpected moments of delight.

I had gone to see Rogue Nation because an action film always looks better on the big screen, and I’d had such a good time with Ghost Protocol that I wanted to give the franchise another look. Now that Mission Impossible is two for two, it’s probably time for me to go to the back catalog, because now I have a brand that I trust. If nothing else, I have something to tide me over until Ethan Hunt’s British counterpart returns to theaters, and something to which I can look forward when the inevitable sixth Mission Impossible film debuts. That’s my mission, and I do choose to accept it.

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation is rated PG-13 for “sequences of action and violence, and brief partial nudity.” There are quite a few action set pieces with chasing and fighting, but it’s mostly bloodless; there’s a somewhat intense scene where a character is deprived of oxygen for minutes at a time. A woman removes her top, but it’s seen from behind with no visible nudity.