• Fun

‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’

In Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and the IMF finally come up against a mission that actually seems… impossible to beat (if only because we know the story is incomplete). There’s really no way around it: the villain of this movie is literally artificial intelligence — rather timely, isn’t it. Cruise spends nearly the entire movie trying to fight his way to a computer, but in typical Mission fashion, he does this against fun new adversaries like Pom Klementieff‘s Paris and Shea Whigham‘s exasperated Agent Briggs, across multiple countries and a handful of set pieces culminating in the one we’ve probably all seen by now, when he rides a motorbike off a cliff and just… lets go. Cruise and writer/director Christopher McQuarrie follow the classic Mission formula again, but if it’s not broken… you know the rest. The real surprise of the movie, though, is Hayley Atwell, who joins the franchise as Grace, a pickpocket whose path crosses with Ethan’s at a crucial point in the movie and leads to one of the series’ best car chases. Though in the end, Dead Reckoning Part One does fall slightly short of it’s predecessor, the franchise high point that was Fallout, it’s still a wild ride from start to finish with an ending that’s satisfying enough for now with the promise of more to come.