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Whether “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” turns out to be a massive hit or merely a hit, it’s certainly the franchise action picture of the year, the one that truly knows what it’s doing, front to back.
It’s gratifying in its eagerness to deliver a dishy variety of scenery and violence with panache, aplomb and various other French-derived adjectives. It’s full of sound (that Lalo Schifrin theme!) and fury and Tom Cruise, running, cliffhanging, flying, with periodic rest stops for brooding. The brooding looks the toughest, at least for him. At this point in his movie stardom, Cruise plainly feels most himself when defying death for semi-real. So far, so good! Cruise was 59 when filming on “Dead Reckoning” started. He’s 61 now. His roll has not slowed.
“Mission: Impossible” itself is four years younger than Cruise. Ever since the CBS TV series took off in 1966, we’ve been running around with Schifrin’s brilliant music in our subconscious anytime we have a mission to fulfill, even if it’s just a three-block sprint to Walgreens before closing. The new film, cowritten and directed by Christopher McQuarrie in his third “M: I” project, runs longish, at 2 hours and 43 minutes. But it percolates.
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In “Dead Reckoning,” the sniveling villain Gabriel (Esai Morales), former ally of the human: unkillable Ethan Hunt of the Impossible Mission Force, now lusts for control of an artificial intelligence entity known as The Entity. The Entity, hacker supreme and borderline sentient, wants very much to take its natural next step of world domination.
The key to The Entity’s mission (mission statement: You’re all going to die) is a literal cruciform key, two halves of a nasty whole. Hunt and his crew must get both halves before The Entity does. We hear variations on that reminder fairly often in “Dead Reckoning.”
When they’re not patiently reexplaining the importance of the key to the audience, screenwriters McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen gin up lively ways of whisking us from the depths of the Bering Sea to Abu Dhabi to Venice to Rome to the luxe Orient Express. It’s great to have Rebecca Ferguson back as Ilsa Faust; great, also, to get Hayley Atwell aboard as an international con woman of mystery.
She’s also Hunt’s latest reason for personal dread. Every woman Hunt gets close to, in any way, dies, dies, dies. It weighs on a guy. On Cruise, too: Often in preoccupied close-up in “Dead Reckoning,” gliding along a canal at dusk in Venice, for example, he exerts what looks like a touching combination of a character, brooding, and a movie star and producer, mulling potential cost overruns. Whatever. This time, all the COVID shooting delays and such have mysteriously made the result pretty special.
Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg return, as game and polished as ever. Director McQuarrie’s facility for complex but lucid lines of action returns as well. The fight choreographers set up amusing challenges for themselves: In Italy, for example, one assassination attack on Cruise takes place in the world’s narrowest alleyway, without a lot (or any?) evident spatial cheats.
On the other end of things, there’s Cruise and Atwell, in a train about to plummet off a collapsing bridge over a high gorge, in what turns out to be a combination of Buster Keaton’s “The General” and Christopher Nolan’s “Inception.” To have a movie stretch out and settle into a longer-than-usual (also much better than usual) train sequence offers a retro-hip payoff we haven’t gotten in anything else lately. Much of the outrageously prolonged climax, a series of killings and cliffhangers set aboard the Orient Express, was filmed in England, far from the actual Orient Express, along the North Yorkshire Moors Railway line also featured in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” Funny how the same stretch of track can be used so excitingly by one movie and not another.
“Dead Reckoning Part Two” arrives next year. I’m ready already.
“Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: PG-13 (for intense sequences of violence and action, some language and suggestive material)
Running time: 2:43
How to watch: Premieres in theaters July 11
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune