4 out of 5

Directed by: Christopher McQuarrie

No one, at this point, is surprised by a new Mission: Impossible entry of the McQuarrie era being excellent. However, where some other reliable (in whatever way) franchises carry ups and downs from film to film, what I think has been truly inconceivable about this series is how in-tune with itself it is; how there’s an ongoing conversation with the style and execution – surely helped by sharing a clearly passionate key cast ans crew along the way – that makes every subsequent entry not have to one-up the one before, but still feel like a massive evolution of and on the series. …While not alienating or lessening the previous films, which are by and large still massively entertaining themselves!

I use the term conversation, because that’s how it comes across: as a back-and-forth between friends; Dead Reckoning is confident enough in its familiarity to bring back old M:I faces without flashback explanations, and to nod to the previous flicks without also winking, and nudging. And yet, the movie also works without that foreknowledge. These are not bastions of sophisticated plots, after all – and one of Dead Reckoning’s few downfalls is how kind of boring and plainly told its core conceit is – but I don’t know that super secret evil villains need the most complicated of plans, and that’s where McQuarrie and Cruise have learned to dial this in: bring in the IMF when shit gets real, but it’s still gonna boil down to money or power motivations. Better to apply the writing craft to characters, and scenarios; and the filmmaking craft to the choregraphy, the framing, the execution.

And man, does that just shine here.

While I wouldn’t dare describe this film as anything less than a blockbuster, it is fascinating to me how Marvel movies (and the like) have created a particular kind of cultural blase for CGI spectacle, and the more “grounded” actioners a la John Wick that sprang up arguably in response to that have also had difficulty navigating visual overkill and scope creep; meanwhile, Dead Reckoning uses its wondrous set pieces as characters – wind swept deserts; crowded Rome streets – and can thus include them in the aforementioned conversations, where there are surely many peaks, but even the whispered moments feel important: even the downbeats in M:I DR are quite thrilling, told in a perfect score by Lorne Balfe, and all of the dialogue that can be left out because of how in tune we are with what’s going on onscreen. The movie gets almost comically pantomime at points, communicating via glances and look-over-there eyebrow waggles (like, to the extent where you are asking – how come the baddies aren’t noticing this obvious signaling?), but it also feels so organic and earned, even with new characters such as Hayley Atwell’s thief, Grace, that you’re just in it, despite acknowledging the somewhat silliness.

Though back to that, in regards to plot: Dead Reckoning is an “AI takes over the world” story, which we’ve been doing for a million years, but has gained kinda-sorta new relevance with publicly available AI learning tools, and the way they’re being applied for any minimal opportunity, creative or commercial. The seriousness of the threat frankly doesn’t get there, but the seriousness of those who want to control or work with the threat does, particularly via the blind faith of the main antagonist played by Esai Morales, and his badass underling, played by Pom Klementieff. Swinging back to a different point, then, McQuarrie and his cowriter Erik Jendresen do do some requisite exposition dumping regarding the AI and then toss the IMF at it –  or rather the key MacGuffin that might affect it – but the movie fairly linearly follows this trail; it is doggedly straight-forward, refreshingly so, essentially allowing for our familiarity with this plot that can be found dating back to the earliest tech-fears sci-fi to fill in the blanks.

Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning is an excellent action movie. I don’t think I need to say that – though that’s ridiculous! No series should be this consistent! – but I do want to underline how much this is content over style: that this movie succeeds by not trying to up the ante, but by working with its, and the audience’s, history with the series. Oh – but it’s plenty stylistic as well.