Flasz On Film

‘Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to engineer a sequel to one of the most interesting action franchises this side of The Bourne Ultimatum. The recent intel suggests that you should be able to infiltrate the box office using standard techniques of stuntmanship and daredevildom. However, you must remember that audience expectations have risen considerably since your last assignment. As always, if you or any of your team members are caught ripping off recent blockbusters too overtly, the studio will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This message will self-destruct in five seconds…’ 

The camera pulls back to reveal Tom Cruise, who has been listening to this recording on a pair of AirPods delivered to him by an unsuspecting courier. He proceeds to remove the earbuds and throws them out the window. A loud bang is heard followed by a symphony of car alarms, all triggered by this surprisingly powerful explosion. Tom Cruise smirks, takes out his phone, dials “1” and waits for the tone to make way for a human voice.  

‘Hello? Hi, Tom!’ 
‘Chris. Long time. You busy?’ 
‘Not exactly.’ 
‘Good. We have a movie to make.’ 
‘What about?’ 
‘No idea. But I got some parachuting lessons to book.’ 

This is how I imagine Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One came into existence. It was a product of momentum driving Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie to reunite and add their stamp to the post-pandemic landscape of blockbuster action filmmaking. They must have felt the need (the need for speed) to out-do their previous effort in terms of scope and ambition of the spectacle and put all those competing whippersnappers in their place. But… I don’t think they had a good enough idea what they would be making that movie about. They knew perfectly that they wanted to make one and that they wanted to get Tom Cruise to jump off a cliff, but they didn’t have a good vision as to why exactly they would get him to do that. 

Now, this isn’t really news, is it? After all, this entire franchise is many things, but built on original ideas it is not. In fact, it is built on familiarity, arguably the conceptual polar opposite of originality. I don’t believe people flock to see a new instalment in the Mission: Impossible franchise to see anyone reinvent the wheel. We openly expect Ethan Hunt to go rogue again and to hang onto his shoulder as he gets disavowed in pursuit of another McGuffin; and it honestly does not matter one iota if the McGuffin in question is a list of spies, a virus, a code, a person or… a fancy key that opens Jesus-knows-what. We equally expect to see an infiltration sequence or two, we cherish the notion of seeing people don masks, change their voice and use cool gadgets. It’s all part of the Mission: Impossible experience and the only modicum of originality we desperately yearn for comes in the form of seeing what kind of Evil-Knievelery Tom Cruise will happily oblige to take part in against the wishes of his insurers.  

So, you might say that Mission: Impossible movies have over the years carved out a nice little niche for themselves, found comfort in a testable and successful formula and out-Bonded James Bond himself. What I find fascinating in this seemingly innocent comparison is that this newest instalment in the series – awkwardly titled (deep breath, Jakub) Mission (colon) Impossible (dash) Dead Reckoning (punctuation missing because we didn’t know if it was OK to use the colon twice) Part One – shows that just like Bond movies did in the 80s, this series has surrendered its trend-setting supremacy and opted to ape other action franchises. And that’s a slightly different kind of familiarity, to be perfectly honest.  

Thus, you will be excused if you experience frequently reoccurring bouts of déjá vu while watching this movie, because it is purposefully built to look that way. After a Bond-esque cold open appealing to our familiarity with the series and perhaps a modicum of nostalgia towards The Hunt for the Red October which also establishes the central McGuffin of the narrative, the movie takes us into the desert where we meet up with Ethan Hunt on horseback, as he shoots at people. Which is something you’ve seen this year already in John Wick: Chapter 4. He reunites with his old friend Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and the story trots to Dubai after an obligatory infiltration sequence in the USA where some more details are laid out and where we find out this whole McGuffin is extremely topical as it is needed to neutralize some kind of nefarious AI that has become sentient under our noses and threatens to wipe out humanity. Or something. Doesn’t matter.  

What matters is that the story shifts again to expectedly familiar territory. We reunite with Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames’s characters, partake in a twisty McGuffin exchange set piece that ends with the team of rogue agents onboarding a professional thief (Hayley Attwell) and with Tom Cruise sprinting across the roof to the thunderous tune of Lorne Balfe’s score that could just as well have been commissioned wholesale at a trailer company like Two Steps from Hell or Audiomachine. It’s brutal and needlessly relentless, as though through the music itself the movie wanted to implicitly communicate its desire to overcompensate.  

And then the story leapfrogs to Rome where the filmmakers stage one of their more intricate set pieces: an audacious car chase through the city that begins like something taken out of John Frankenheimer’s Ronin – which is cool and tactile – but immediately begins to look like something you’d have seen in the cinema this year as well. That’s because what happens in this movie is made to resemble the Rome sequence in Fast X, only without the comically ridiculous bomb prancing down the streets of the Windy City. But that’s not even the half of it. The very same Rome sequence also sports a Rome sub-sequence which can and perhaps should look as though it was trying to re-enact the Arc de Triomphe scene in John Wick: Chapter 4, at which point nobody should have any doubts as to what’s on offer here.  

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is a movie that openly, blatantly and shamelessly rips off other extremely recent movies, as though Tom Cruise had spies on the sets of these movies working for him and relaying exactly what kind of set pieces Chad Stahelski and Louis Leterrier where designing and then attempting to do a “the same but better” trick on them. Which works… partially. While I can definitely attest to the fact that Mission: Impossible outfasts Fast X, it doesn’t outjohnwicks John Wick; it merely johnwicks… if that makes any sense at all. It coasts as a John Wick ersatz as it also falls into the same pitfalls as Stahelski movies in that it also stages its set pieces – in stark and nearly criminal contravention of how the previous instalments would go about this process – effectively in a barren world filled with NPCs, not people. This is proven in the Venice sequence, which also conveniently takes place at a night club and where club goers seem not to mind one bit that spies are beating one another into a pulp on the dancefloor and just continue with their day… which is a scene conceptually transplanted from John Wick: Chapter 4, only with less razzmatazz. 

And even that’s not the end of the overcompensatory ripoff festival, as the movie eventually finds its climax on a train where its johnwick-isms immediately translate into a secondary ripoff of David Leitch’s Bullet Train, which ripped off John Wick in its own special way already. This is where Ethan Hunt finally faces off against the unusually ludicrous villains of the movie, one of whom could just as well have been cosplaying as the assassin from Bullet Train, the McGuffin changes hands a bunch of times and the movie reaches its climactic conclusion only to remind you that you will have to wait a year to see another nearly three hours of this poopshow.  

It’s. Just. Not. Good.  

No. Scratch that. 

It’s terrible.  

I am honestly shocked and dismayed at just how much (inhale) Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One disappointed me. It is as though these people – McQuarrie and Cruise – were officially out of ideas or that they were afraid they were slipping behind the times, seeing how Fast and Furious and John Wick were the top of the pops, awash in the cool factor. The movie looks like an attempt at pop cultural reverse engineering during which its creators surrendered the spirit of what made the previous instalments so uniquely great. They replaced grounded and immersive spectacle rooted in exquisite stuntmanship with heightened, self-aware jackassery. Sure, it will probably appeal to youngsters who love when their movies – led by the Marvel donkeys – undermine their every attempt at dramatic stakes because they want to stay cool and meta. But it will alienate those who come looking for a Mission: Impossible experience, which has always had a charm of grounded yet elusive escapism.  

There has always been something special about Mission: Impossible movies because they pushed the boundaries of what’s possible and allowed within the Hollywood system and which offered a unique mix of their own brand familiarity, the edginess of their stuntmanship and the sheer ambition of their set pieces. These movies were in a league of their own and they ruled the top shelf of American action movies. But this instalment has effectively surrendered this supremacy to competitors it so desperately attempted to ape.  

Maybe it is a function of cruel irony that the Mission: Impossible has been for a long while referred to as the modern-day equivalent of the James Bond franchise, only evolved and free of misogyny. It’s just sad to see a movie devoid of interesting ideas so badly that it makes otherwise inferior movies look passable in comparison. Sure, Ethan Hunt and Hayley Attwell racing in a Fiat 500 in Rome look way better than the ball chase in Fast X. The desert sequence also looks better than the one in John Wick: Chapter 4. But that’s not the point. I think Brian De Palma and John Woo will agree with me when I say that I don’t want to walk into a Mission: Impossible movie with an expectation of having to compare how it stacks up to its immediate competition.  

These movies used to be their own competition! They were in a game of one-upmanship with each other, not with the box office at large. And the fact this is no longer the case proves that they’ve run out of steam. I don’t think I’d ever say that but (one more time, Jakub) Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is tiresome and boring, not exhilarating and fun. It’s an 80s Bond movie that lost its identity and chose the easy path of appropriating the zeitgeist and incorporating it into its own genetic code.  

Problem is, 80s Bond movies were terrible. Without exception.  

Therefore, I have no choice but to disavow this movie. It’s now a rogue agent. For all I care, Dead Reckoning Part Two will be a stealth remake of Moonraker. My disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined.