Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
An actual notebook this week. Stray thoughts on Christopher McQuarrie's (and definitely Tom Cruise's) Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1.
Useful start: Intrigue with a Russian submarine in Arctic waters—maybe a little generic for an opening sequence, but it nicely apes the 007 curtain-raiser feel and excels at little specifics (like the eerie thump of a body as it connects with the surface ice). A couple of fake-outs manufacture just the right number of question marks.
An early scene in the desert: Cruise's Ethan Hunt (I still can't get with that name, which sounds like it came from a 1990s word processor) finds Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson), who has possession of one of the movie's laughably flimsy gizmos—and don't get me wrong, in the spirit of the TV show, I like my laughably flimsy gizmos. Here again, a nice touch with the specifics, namely a glint of light from the desert sun at a well-timed moment.
Cruise still looks good in action, not so much in repose, unless it's a brooding close-up (Kubrick got this right). Case in point: He must lean against a balcony over a Venice waterway, deep in thought. It doesn't come off, even if it sets up a parallel scene later.
I can't find something to approximate M:I Fallout's suggestive sub-theme, which was about Ethan's struggle to justify sacrificing one person for the benefit of many. That worked nicely as the backbone of a crazy action movie. Closest thing here to something like that (and it isn't really a theme, just a plot device) is the movie's fretting about how the virtual cloud-based world will be vulnerable to takeover by either a super-villain or an AI entity that can access everything about us; thus scenes with the CIA scrambling to convert their efforts to analog methods, including a glorious vision of agents pounding away at manual typewriters. That made my heart sing. Hope the sequel has more of this.
At some point, DR Part 1 falls off from the pep of its predecessor. That must have a lot to do with the "Part 1" of the thing. Even with that, though, things are a little tired—a climax with hero and villain atop a moving train? Hmmm, you don't say.
When it comes to actresses, this movie has a type—or somebody does. Ferguson, Hayley Atwell, and Vanessa Kirby all have similar facial structure around the middle. Not unlike Tom Cruise. They are all overqualified, but very nice to have in the picture. (The film also has Pom Klementieff, who is delightful in spots but whose character doesn't entirely make sense, except to provide a very movie-movie arc.)
McQuarrie can be counted on for a few instant-classic lines. Here, an exchange: "You don't even know me!" "What difference does that make?" It lands well in context, and resonates in time.
The main achievement here is flow. There's an extended set-piece around an airport, where we first meet Atwell's character, and the action weaves in and around the various complications, and then it keeps going and morphing in a delightful way—this is the M:I appeal. When this clicks, the movie is propulsive, although that very quality makes the occasional slowdowns for dialogue a little puzzling in their lengthiness, an effect exacerbated by McQuarrie's tendency to shoot these sequences in matching and sometimes monotonous close-ups.
So: I'm mixed on this one, yet looking forward to the finale next year. And one more appreciation: McQuarrie and Cruise seem very aware that their storytelling beats are a metaphor for moviemaking: meticulously prepare and plan, and then vamp wildly when something goes wrong, and brazen it out before the fade to black. What, the machine that makes incredibly lifelike rubber masks suddenly goes on the fritz at exactly the most crucial moment? No problem; Ethan will just motorcycle-jump onto a moving train—except that that goes wrong, too, and so—well, you know. Tom Cruise will think of something.
September 8, 2023
Robert Horton is a member of the National Society of Film Critics.
