Going in for Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One, an early thought I had was that it was only a matter of time before Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) would run out of villains. Rogue Impossible Mission Force agents, KGB scientists, arms dealers, nuclear weapons – there’s only so many ways to script the end of the world in a spy franchise (unless thy name is Christopher Nolan). To be honest, I didn’t have my hopes up. I was bracing myself to see another villain from Hunt’s past to show up spouting vague profundities, warning him of the impending doom. But in Dead Reckoning, the villain rarely speaks and isn’t visible to the human eye. Ethan Hunt might have met his most formidable adversary of the series – an artificial intelligence (AI) programme called The Entity. It’s an interesting upgrade from silly “mysterious” trench coat-wearing men walking around with cases of stolen plutonium. Nuclear weapons are merely a means to an end here – not the punchline. The threat in Dead Reckoning is far more insidious. In one scene, we see these world-weary spies, who have surmounted every obstacle they’ve come across, forced to second-guess themselves. What if The Entity has already predicted their response, and is ready for them? “You can’t be playing four-dimensional chess with a machine,” Luther (Ving Rhames) warns Hunt. Making someone who has saved the world from annihilation a few times, doubt their abilities – has to arguably be the greatest feat a villain has pulled in this series. And therefore, in a time, when most franchises are more complacent and insufferable than ever, Dead Reckoning manages the unthinkable. It improves on its predecessor – Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018).Dead Reckoning begins on a Russian submarine, Sevastopol, testing its stealth functions when it ends up detecting an enemy. When it chases the enemy, it disappears from its radar. More pressingly though, the torpedoes it had fired at this enemy were somehow rerouted and now aimed at Sevastopol itself. The submarine explodes and director Christopher McQuarrie leaves us with he chilling visual of a dozen corpses – crew of Sevastopol – floating under a frozen sea. We learn that it was The Entity – employed by the US, as a test – to hijack Sevastopol. However, the AI programme becomes aware of its sentience and goes rogue. The only way to control The Entity is with two parts of a key, which bears an eerie resemblance to a Catholic cross. One half of the key lies with Ethan Hunt’s sweetheart, Ilsa Faust, played by Rebecca Ferguson – who has perfected the art of looking mysterious in the last few years. As much as the world’s intelligence powers are chasing the key to control The Entity, to have limitless power at their disposal, even the Entity has identified someone from Hunt’s past, a man with an impeccably pruned silver beard called Gabriel (Esai Morales), employing him to retrieve the key, so it doesn’t have to answer to humans.Hunt’s mission, should he choose to accept it – is to retrieve one half of the key from Faust and track down the other half. As it usually happens – Hunt accepts, only to realise he will have to go above and beyond, to save the world. The key in the ‘wrong hands’ would mean too much power for one individual. A still from ‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’.McQuarrie, the man who resuscitated the franchise from certain decline with the robust fifth instalment, Rogue Nation (along with the last one, Fallout), builds Dead Reckoning around his action set-pieces. There’s one in the Namibian desert, where Hunt leads a pack of hit-men into a desert storm; a long sequence inside an Amsterdam airport – which would make for a superb short film by itself. A hilarious car chase in Rome, in a conspicuous-looking yellow Fiat 500, where Hunt and his fresh accomplice, Grace (Hayley Atwell) – a slippery thief he recruited during the Amsterdam sequence, take turns to drift their way through narrows alleyways of Rome, while being handcuffed to each other and pursued by three sets of adversaries. There’s the gorgeously choreographed fight between Gabriel and Ilsa on a bridge in Venice, and the astounding (I don’t use it lightly) set-piece that involves a runaway train in the Alps, a cliff and a motorbike. It could be argued that the impact would be significantly more jaw-dropping, had the film’s marketing not gone on an overdrive before the release and showed us its ‘making’ for over two months. A still from ‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’.McQuarrie has never been shy about paying tribute to the franchise, and his greatest talent as a director – especially as a Mission Impossible director – is his excellent taste in callbacks. Whether it’s invoking the mask trope at a crucial plot-point in Rogue Nation, or getting Cruise to turn back the years and flex his acting muscles, which could get buried in a flippant action movie. In Dead Reckoning too, McQuarrie lovingly pays tribute to the paranoia of the first film by Brian De Palma – especially in the manner he chooses to do slanted close-ups of his actors. The Venice sequence employs a similar misty evening aesthetic in narrow lanes behind gates, just like the Prague mission in the 1996 film. He also brings back the character of Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) from the first film. A sequence towards the end of the film where Hunt and Grace are dodging pianos and all kinds of furniture – seems like a throwback to Chaplin and Buster Keaton.As much as Simon Pegg continues to play a comic relief in Dead Reckoning, the makers also bring in Shea Wingham as Jasper Briggs – tasked to capture Hunt and bring him in. Wingham – a huge ‘character actor’ in Hollywood circles – seems resigned to the limited scope of his roles in tentpoles. So, he throws down his lines like they mean nothing – especially one where his colleague is requesting passengers of a train to get in the back. He starts respectfully, in French, only for Wingham’s character to swoop in and scream in less sophisticated American “Get in the back, y’all.” It’s a hilarious scene.McQuarrie is arguably Cruise’s biggest cheerleader, especially if you see the phrases coined to describe Ethan Hunt’s legend – “living manifestation of destiny” in Rogue Nation, and here he calls Hunt the “reincarnation of chaos”. It’s foolish to pretend that the Mission Impossible films are little else than a launch pad for Ethan Hunt to showcase his selfless, faultless saviour self. Another way of looking at a film like Dead Reckoning would be approximating how Tom Cruise views himself – as fuel for the Hollywood dream machine. And they get bigger and bigger. The biggest triumph of the Mission Impossible films is that when it was reported that Tom Cruise might film a stunt on the International Space station, most of us reacted with – “Of course, he is!”
