“The key is only the beginning.”

There’s a missing wheel and fifth gear and a deeper meaning to Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One holding this film back. The over the top action doesn’t disappoint, the charm does its job, and there are moments of genuine laughter. Everything we see on the IMAX screen looks and sounds gargantuan. But as the supposed penultimate chapter in this franchise, (which, if we’re being honest, really can’t exist without Tom Cruise), the film doesn’t seem to know how things are going to end or where the finish line really even is. Dead Reckoning Part One pinballs around between set pieces and action sequences, often languishing in exhausting bouts of robotic exposition, and features one of the most puzzling and boring antagonists I’ve seen in quite some time. Ethan is used to saving the world, but in this case it’s the woeful script that needed his utmost attention.

About 10 minutes into Dead Reckoning Part One, I heard a fellow moviegoer behind my friend group whisper to the person beside them; “Are you sure this is the Mission: Impossible movie?” It was a valid question, as the picture boldly chooses to ditch Tom Cruise’s visage from the start and instead plunges us deep into the hull of a Russian submarine evasively maneuvering around the Bering Sea. It’s well shot and edited, albeit overlong (as is the movie as a whole), leading to Ethan Hunt stepping out from the shadows and the eventual drop of the title card nearly 30 minutes into the movie, where the film traditionally shows every big moment to come in micro glimpses sure to make the TikTok generation happy, at least until they’re asked to continue sitting still for another 2 hours. The open shows a lot but tells us little to nothing. It needed a concise rewrite.

There’s a two part key (perfectly analogous for a two part film) that nations are chasing, and Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) is in possession of one half. The disavowed MI6 agent has a bounty on her head, because a spy thriller needs drama and she’s used to being on the run. Ethan intercepts her and works his magic in the desert. Cut to Abu Dhabi and team members Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames) are hunkered down to help Ethan locate and eventually secure the other half of the key. Things don’t go as planned, a pickpocket named Grace (Hayley Atwell, a welcome breath of fresh air at every turn) enters the foray, and the sequence ends with Tom Cruise sprinting across the terminal roof as he evades Jasper (Shea Whigham) and his partner Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), who just magically appear and serve no point besides chasing Ethan from one sequence to the next. The beats of the film really are that simple, and they’re drawn out to inexcusable lengths.

The story involves an AI labeled as “The Entity,” which is about as scary as a pair of strobe lights pulsing to the beat at a late night dance club. What The Entity can do is terrifying but it doesn’t have any physical weight behind it. And so the film introduces us to the omnipotent proxy Gabriel (Esai Morales), an old foe of Ethan’s and one of the most underwritten villains I’ve ever seen in one of the most expensive films ever made. That juxtaposition alone is stupefying. Dead Reckoning Part One gives us an excellent opening that should’ve been boiled down to 5-10 minutes, and wastes so much time that the central antagonist gets a minute long flashback. Gabriel is a poorly written character, one entirely lacking motive and agenda, adding little to no humanity outside of his clumsy knife wielding physicality. I told a friend I didn’t really enjoy the film, and that I didn’t know who the bad guy was. He messaged me back, “It was Gabriel.” To which I said, “Yeah…but who is Gabriel?” The response was crickets.

Dead Reckoning Part One is heavy on sermons, way too dependent on Dutch angles for a film this long (although it honors De Palma’s original), and too short on logic. Mostly though, it makes me wish that the production team had shown less before the movie was released. The stunts are out of this world, but there’s a bit of magic lost when you’ve already seen through the fairy dust and know how things were pulled off. In that regard, it explains why the film’s hilariously extended car chase and the homage laden train sequence were the most thrilling. The chase echoed early Bond and the train crash seemed to be inspired by the game Uncharted, sprinkling in beats and shots directly lifted from Stallone’s ’93 film Cliffhanger and Jan de Bont’s impossibly perfect film Speed, all while channeling the ingenuity of Buster Keaton’s The General. The inspiration is there and it’s obvious. Where the film fails is on a human level. Maybe that’s what happens when AI plays such an integral role.

“Trust is vanishing. War is coming”

Rating: 3 out of 5