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.
The Mission: Impossible films have only ever had a flirtatious relationship with reality, but there’s a vast tonal chasm between the nuclear threat of (the previous entry) Fallout, and the nonsensical AI plotline. There is clunky and then there is whatever this is – a jumble of hokey B-movie jargon and perfervid declaratives, with two out of every four nouns being either “key” or “the Entity”’. You could replace the word “Entity” with “magic orb” and Dead Reckoning would make just as much sense.
Stifling laughter during many of the film’s preposterous dialogue scenes is an impossible mission of its own. Amusing, too, are the farcical little flourishes: the moment when Hayley Atwell’s character is asked to initiate a $100,000,000 bank transfer by… entering her bank details into a mobile phone. (Don’t forget the sort code!) When Gabriel rises from a kind of horizontal cupboard he had been hiding in, detaching an elaborate Bane-style breathing apparatus from his mouth. (Surely unnecessary!) A train carriage dangles over a ravine by a single, precarious chain, yet doesn’t budge when a grand piano crashes through its corridor. Time and again, it beggars belief.
But the script’s failings aren’t all so benign. Dead Reckoning features one of the most shameless deployments of “fridging” in recent memory – the sexist trope wherein female characters are killed or injured purely to motivate a male protagonist. It’s explicitly suggested in the film that the villain does away with one of the film’s female leads purely to goad Cruise’s character into revenge – no subtext here, just text, written in all caps.
Increasingly, there is this notion with action films that we should content ourselves to strap in and enjoy the ride. Don’t overthink it. No plot, just vibes. I’m not saying every spy thriller has to be The Conformist, but there’s a difference between simplicity and mindlessness. Good – or at least, vaguely credible – writing is necessary for any sort of real investment in a story. If all you’re chasing is the vicarious aerodynamic thrill of watching Cruise jump off a mountain, you might as well stay home and watch skydiving compilations on YouTube.
I’m aware that pieces like the one you’re reading often seem contrarian. (“That thing you like? It’s bad, actually.”) But I’m sincerely baffled by the unanimous adoration poured over Dead Reckoning. What silliness could the script possibly introduce at this point that would prompt viewers to tap out? Maybe if it forgot a character’s name partway through, or revealed that the whole franchise was just a dream. Perhaps a cross-universe cameo from Jar-Jar Binks. Short of this, it seems the Mission: Impossible fanbase’s collective tolerance for hogwash knows no end.
Rightly or wrongly, the Mission: Impossible films have come to be considered elevated blockbusters – works of genuine spectacle that manage to float above Hollywood’s ever-flowing river of superhero slop. But Dead Reckoning’s writing is as silly and tedious as that of any slipshod comic-book film. So what if the stunts are sensational? It’s like finding chunks of wagyu steak in a bowl of Coco Pops. It’s a disaster masquerading as a triumph. Or to put it another way: lavishing more praise on this film is a mission I simply refuse to accept.
‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’ is out in cinemas now