Midweek Update: I Do Not Accept This Mission (Impossible)

[Spoilers ahead for Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Part One]

I saw the new Mission: Impossible over a week ago, and I’m still not over how disappointing I found it. The glowing praise from other reviewers has only compounded that disappointment as I honestly don’t understand what I’m missing here (the film currently sits at 99% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes). I like to think of myself a pretty well-versed in the Mission: Impossible movies (I’ve seen all of them more than once and I adore entries 1, 4, 5, and 6) as well as Tom Cruise’s filmography (who has two thumbs and saw the atrocious Lions for Lambs? This guuuuuuuuuy). I also think I have a pretty good handle on why these movies work beyond Cruise engaging in death-defying stunts.

I don’t begrudge writer/director Christopher McQuarrie for trying to break away from the heist-infused formula of the last three movies. What baffles me is that Dead Reckoning makes so many sloppy errors that never seem to serve an exhilarating adventure.

[Here’s where we start getting into spoiler territory, and I’m aware the film officially opened today, so if you haven’t seen it yet, feel free to scroll down to “Recommendations”]

The plot of the film is basically Ethan Hunt (Cruise) vs. A.I. (dubbed here as “The Entity” and which sounds dumb every time someone solemnly intones the name). The film tries to make the stakes a little more personal by having Gabriel (Esai Morales) serve as The Entity’s representative. Gabriel was responsible for killing a woman from Ethan’s past, and that’s all we know about it. Maybe we’ll learn more in Part Two, but it’s the laziest shorthand to say, “You killed the woman I loved!” and I do not even know what this woman’s name is. Not exactly a lived-in relationship between Ethan and Gabriel.

From there, the film awkwardly brings back Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), an amazing character that served as Ferguson’s breakthrough performance, only to discard her and call in Grace (Hayley Atwell). At this point, it seems like Dead Reckoning is consciously pulling in callbacks to earlier entries. You have the return of Kittridge (Henry Czerny) and now a master thief similar to Nyah (Thandiwe Newton) in Mission: Impossible II. But in execution, you’re asking the audience to buy into Grace at the expense of Ilsa, which is a tall order. Ilsa earned our affections over the last two movies, and Grace is simply a thief who seems to be trying to get paid. Beyond that, there’s not a lot of coloring in her character, and unlike Ilsa, she doesn’t seem to be either Ethan’s equal or someone who understands where he comes from.

The Entity then forces Ethan to “choose” between Grace and Ilsa, which, aside from being a false choice, doesn’t have much in the way of stakes for the audience. Granted, this goes to Ethan’s belief that no one life is more important than another, but for an audience, The Entity may as well have chosen the bartender at the club or the cab driver on the street against Ilsa.

And then Gabriel kills Ilsa on a bridge (or at least he seems to; maybe she’s still alive since this is Mission: Impossible, but her entire character in Dead Reckoning plays as both an afterthought or that Ferguson’s filming schedule barely allowed her to be in the movie), which Luther then explains to Ethan as The Entity’s calculation of cutting Ethan off from ever finding it by killing Gabriel.

I have to pause here because Dead Reckoning is filled with long, awkward scenes of exposition with rooms full of characters discussing the threat of The Entity. McQuarrie cuts these scenes with dramatic camera angles (again, a conscious callback may be that the film repeatedly reverts to the visuals of Ethan and Kittridge’s memorable confrontation in the first Mission: Impossible), but it feels like trying to cover up the dryness of the conversations (or perhaps these people were rarely in the same room because of COVID protocols). It’s a failure of telling instead of showing because The Entity is basically Skynet but also one that wants to hire itself out to whichever country can get its hands on it, so that’s weird. Also, since The Entity doesn’t speak for itself (it basically shows up on screens looking like a nefarious Siri), you would need its representative to be impressive, and the film doesn’t give Morales much to do, especially when you compare him to the far more memorable Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) from the last two movies.

Here you could argue that the use of A.I. as the villain is once against Cruise and McQuarrie layering in a subtext about stardom like they did with Top Gun: Maverick. With A.I. on the horizon as a way to replace talent for Hollywood, Cruise—who has fashioned himself as the movie star to end all movie stars—will defeat it with only the charisma he can provide. That’s a fine sentiment, but here it plays as clumsy because both The Entity and Gabriel are so poorly defined. Both feel as threatening as A.I. today, which is something you build up in your head, but if you ask it to put Star Wars movies in order, it fails miserably. To put it another way, Skynet isn’t that scary in The Terminator. What’s scary in The Terminator is Arnold Schwarzenegger/a robot with glowing red eyes and human teeth.

So you have Ethan against a nebulous enemy that never plays as particularly threatening, new supporting characters that are never as compelling as the ones we already know, and then you pile on set pieces that feel like they go on for far too long. I really don’t know what happened here since McQuarrie is working with the same editor from Rogue Nation and Fallout, but the film set pieces feel exhausting. Perhaps it’s because they lack the structural neatness of previous installments of “plan, obstacle, failure, improvisation,” but there’s a chase scene in Rome that simply doesn't have the same punch as the chase scene in Paris from Fallout or the Morocco chase in Rogue Nation (maybe Cruise is just better on a bike than a car, although I did love that his special spy car in Dead Reckoning is a tiny Fiat). Even the vaunted cliff diving scene feels less impressive than Fallout’s HALO jump.

That’s not to mention all the weird disconnects where it feels like McQuarrie is setting up his own rules only to break them. We’re told that the team can’t rely on technology as The Entity hacks the team’s communications and disguises itself using Benji’s (Simon Pegg) voice, but then later Benji is using GPS and a self-driving car. The magic mask machine is back in action when Grace uses it to disguise herself as the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), but she doesn’t put in some fake contacts even though the Widow has Kirby’s striking grey-blue eyes and in disguise, Grace still has Atwell’s deep brown eyes. You could argue that this shows Kittridge is a lousy spy when he meets her, but she’s also still with her brother Zola (Frederick Schmidt) who would probably notice his sister has a different eye color.

I am not trying to nitpick or arguing that these movies have to be airtight, but on a first viewing, Dead Reckoning is loaded down with problems on both a macro and micro level. Sure, the film has its moments because Cruise and McQuarrie want to give the audience bang for their buck, but there are a litany of missteps that simply were not present in the past three installments. More than anything, Dead Reckoning doesn’t feel particularly fun. No one seems to be enjoying themselves, the humor is largely absent, and the plotting is clumsy instead of the well-oiled machine of McQuarrie’s earlier efforts.

Maybe there’s something I’ve missed. Maybe on a repeat viewing, it will all click into place. But for now, it feels like the new Mission: Impossible self-destructed.

Recommendations

No new Substacks to recommend this week (if you’d like for me to consider your Substack, just message me and let me know!) but it is currently “Prime Day,” or “Amazon Realized July Was a Slow Sales Month and Built a Marketing Campaign” so you can peruse the site for deals, but honestly, I’m sticking with half-off Criterion stuff. Yesterday saw the 4K release of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, which is a hoot. Griffin Dunne plays a NYC desk jockey trying to get laid, and his night goes horribly from a combination of bad luck and the fact that he sucks. Anyway, there is no genre that Scorsese cannot conquer.

What I’m Watching

Because I’m late to every TV show, I’ve only now started watching Season 2 of The Bear, and the show is still incredible. Pay these writers whatever they want.

Elsewhere, I finally watched all five of the Anthony Mann/James Stewart westerns (The Man from Laramie, their fifth and final western together, leaves Criterion Channel at the end of the month, so get cracking). The five films range from good to excellent, and I wish actors and directors had this kind of freedom today outside of a franchise. If made today, Stewart would have to play the same character five times and Mann would likely have to adhere to similar visual style for all five movies. Serialized storytelling is fine, but there’s also a glorious freedom at work here where Mann and Stewart got to do a series of darker westerns, but each with their own flavor and tone.

What I’m Reading

I finished reading Lolita, and it is both a literary masterpiece and one I can’t ever imagine returning to. Nabokov’s writing is incredible, but the subject matter is so nauseating and the perspective so infuriating (prepare for a lot of a narcissistic pedophile casting himself as the victim) that I felt relieved when the book was over. Now it’s time to shift gears into something a little less heavy, although I’m not sure what.

In Other Reads:

‘My Films Had So Much Anger’ John Woo reflects on a career driven by action, ambition, and artistry. by Bilge Ebiri [Vulture] - Director John Woo has had a fascinating career, and this is an interview worthy of that journey. Woo is one of the most influential action directors of all-time, but in an age of streaming, his biggest Hong Kong movies (A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard-Boiled remain notoriously difficult to find due to rights and licensing issues). While his American movies are getting an overdue reappraisal (Hard Target and Face/Off are now regarded as action classics of the 90s), Woo never found the same level of success in the U.S. as he did in Hong Kong. My only qualm with this interview is I wish it were longer (tell me about Paycheck, Woo!).

How an AI-written Star Wars story created chaos at Gizmodo by Pranshu Verma [The Washington Post] - I linked to this story a bit earlier in this issue, but it bears sharing out directly because while it’s tempting to look at A.I. as some cutting-edge tool that will define the future of the Internet, in practice, it is, as one Gizmodo writer notes in this piece, “a solution looking for a problem.” For those looking to employ A.I., like the heads of G/O Media, it’s a dream come true: an unpaid labor source that can generate cheap article that will then spur ad revenue. The issue here is that it harms both writers and readers. Any attempts to “help” the bots is simply putting yourself out of a job, and for readers, you have to sit through garbage content in the hopes that one day it stops being terrible. Anyway, I’ve stopped going to G/O Media sites for the time being since any site that thinks I want bot-generated content over a human doesn’t respect me as a reader, so I have little reason to respect it as a publication.

The Mayor Had a Photo of a Fallen Officer. Was His Story About It True? by Emma G. Fitzsimmons [The New York Times] - This story is wild and certainly part of a pattern of Eric Adams being a liar who lies about stuff. I also think it’s emblematic about our current politics where we’ve been so inured to the idea that “politicians lie” that they now do it with impunity. If someone calls them on it, they just double down and then blame the media. This is a problem because we actually need a credible political class while also being adults about the limits of their power. If a candidate makes a promise while running for office but can’t deliver because of various matters beyond their control, that’s not a lie. If you say you’ve been carrying a picture of a dead co-worker for decades but really just doctored a photo so you could back up your story, that’s pathological.