It took a while for Mission: Impossible to find its groove. The Fast & Furious franchise only took four films to figure out what would work … forever. Mission: Impossible took six films just to figure out the cast. Those must have been some loooooooong production meetings, huh?
“Guys, we need to come up with a group of people both likeable enough and malleable enough to constantly make Tom Cruise look sexy, tough, clever, adroit, quick, sharp, commanding, charismatic, magnanimous, committed, loyal, generous, and tall … oh, and they gotta fit with his salary demands as well. Any thoughts?”
–crickets—
–Twenty-two years later—“OK, we think we’ve found the crew. Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson. All of them are likeable, mildly clever, relatively short, and submissive enough to make it look like Tom is always running the show.”
“Fantastic. What happens when we have to kill one off?”
“Just bring them back. It’s an action movie with ‘Impossible’ in the title. People will understand.”
And with that, you’re set to watch Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the film in which we kill Rebecca Ferguson off in one continent only to *surprise* bring her back in another. It’s not really a spoiler. How do you spoil a movie from a franchise that prides itself in perpetual deception?
So where did we leave off? To be honest, while I did enjoy each of the past three Mission: Impossibles, I don’t remember much about them besides some impressive stunt work, Tom Cruise running and people constantly accusing our heroes of “going rogue.” Where are we on the “rogue” status? I think it’s fair to guess that if Ethan Hunt (Cruise) is still getting those self-destructing messages, he can’t yet be disavowed from his organization yet, right? Ok, let’s pretend that Ethan and his crazy pals still have HR support for now.
This Mission involves a two-part MacGuffin, which is the same basic plot in both Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. People? Pay your writers. The Impossible MacGuffin is a key that unlocks (?) channels (?) enables (?) malevolent AI. None of this is terribly clear, but like all good MacGuffins, it doesn’t have to be – it just has be something everybody wants. This stupid two-part glow-in-the-dark key can take over the world somehow? Sure. That it’ll do it. In the opening, the offending intelligence makes a Russian sub see a ghost and then destroy itself.
Owning half the key, Ethan poses as a seller to expose and capture whomever would buy it. This seems a grandiose and stupid plan, but the fun’s gotta start somewhere. The problem is this mock AI is also being employed by the bad guys in order to create live deep fakes. If you’ve seen an Mission: Impossible film, you know it’s all about live-action deception, so seeing Ethan and his boys caught in the same web of “what’s real?” seems not only fitting, but fair. At Abu Dhabi airport, the gang lose their half of the key, but acquire hot thief Grace (Hayley Atwell) -one of seventeen femme fatales in the film- who hides the half she just 
stole and needs to be intercepted in Rome. This all sets up the seventeenth car chase through the Spanish Steps on screen in 2023. Have I seen too many movies? Yes. All seventeen of them.
On a side note: as both a nation and a planet, we are soon going to know the pain of deep fake technology intimately – if we don’t already. Videos are going to surface, likely right before elections, of things that look real, but are not. This goes hand-in-hand with the orange piece-of-shit’s desire to gaslight every person he’s ever met. There’s a world of difference between calling something “fake news” and something that actually is fake news – and we as nation are either going to learn that difference or lose our democracy. That said – no media, channel, corner, podcast, venue or franchise is better at describing deep fakes to the common man than Mission: Impossible. For films about fictional events and fictional crises, few –if any- are better at describing where problems are going to happen in our collective political futures.
So here’s the deal – I like that Ethan and crew meet their deceptive match here. And while the film ran long, the action was quality, especially the extended train sequence to end this half of the two-parter. Had this been a first Mission: Impossible, I might have ranked it among the year’s best films. Such shouldn’t matter; the pressing question is whether or not the film is worth seeing and nothing else. However, a big part of what makes a film worth seeing is whether we’ve seen it before. Sometimes that’s a good thing; audiences love sequels no matter how much we complain about them, but audiences also enjoy variation within the familiar and, at times, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One feels more like “been there, done that” than something genuinely new.
With many plot points so flimsy and tossable
This franchise could make one cross-able
Yet to give it up now
And lose the cash cow
Now, that is a Mission: Impossible
Rated PG-13, 163 Minutes
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Writer: Bruce Geller, Erik Jendresen, Christopher McQuarrie
Genre: Impossible missions
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Is there such thing as an action fan who hasn’t yet seen a Mission: Impossible film? That.
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Did you not like the first six Mission: Impossibles?
