★★½

Both the good and the bad of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One can be summed up by a sequence early on that told me more about the film than anything else on its own did.

A group of government heads are having an intelligence meeting about the central threat – a rogue A.I. – and central mcguffin – the dual keys to unlock it.  The scene is tiresome from the beginning with all of the people in the room doing the classroom reading exercise where every sentence in the same expository paragraph is said by a different person.  The A.I. that they’re describing is a kind of absolute infiltration unit.  Meanwhile, the facility and room are infiltrated by a suspicious, unblinking Rami Malek lookalike.  The dialogue is awful and undramatic, but the scene is cut together well, with the suggestion that this robotic figure is himself the A.I. personified or an augmented agent of the same.  Then something changes and undoes it in a way that’s less clever and with the followup dialogue being even worse, but far more physically dramatic and exciting.

It’s a bad scene with an intriguing idea that turns into a decent scene, but the long term problem is that Dead Reckoning Part One can never make the A.I. truly threatening ever again, no matter how much people talk about it.  Nor can the contrast between Ethan Hunt – the rogue, unpredictable human being who will always predictably let the villain escape with the weapon of mass destruction rather than sacrifice a friend – and the cold, calculating algorithm whose motive we never really learn ever be dramatized again.

The threat of human displacement by a superior form of technology, be it a drone, a computer, or an algorithm, seems to have been on Tom Cruise’s mind lately.  In Top Gun: Maverick, a film made around the same time as Dead Reckoning Part One, Maverick’s stagnant career as a test pilot in the Navy stands athwart the designs of his superiors to phase out conventional pilots in favor of drone programs until a combat mission that requires human adaptability and his specific expertise gives him one last chance.  The theme is hammered again and again by the film, from Maverick tossing the F-18 manual into the garbage to his final conversation with Iceman to taking out two “Fifth Generation Fighters” in his old F-14 Tomcat.  Even his name “Maverick,” which in the original Top Gun was a symbol of his recklessness but in the sequel represents the traits that make him the Navy’s most vital asset, promotes it.

Dead Reckoning Part One has the same things on its mind, but they are superficial and visually inert.  The only dialogue that makes a viewing tolerable is that which facilitates the immediate setting and action objectives.  That’s where the work on the screen is.  Cruise and Director Christopher McQuarrie all but admit that they prioritize the principal locations first and figure out how they’re going to be worked into the story afterwards, and by god does it show.  When characters are talking about anything other than what they need to do in the next moment, it’s a wasted script.  The film insists that the central antagonist is someone from around the time of the first film who haunts Ethan Hunt’s past, but never convinces.  There is no character hook that rivals the story of regret we saw in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, or the story of loyalty we saw in Mission: Impossible – Fallout.  Hunt is less of a character here than he is a mere representative of Maverick.

In effect, both the story and the action take the scenic route.  Dead Reckoning Part One is a busy film that is also too long, even with the action sequences being about as well crafted as they could be.  The most dramatically exciting sequence takes place at the Abu Dhabi International Airport, primarily for the way it introduces Hayley Atwell to us.  It’s a lot of fun because she fits right in and frustrates just about everyone.  But the more important her character becomes to the rest of the film, the less Atwell can offer it.  The airport sequence doesn’t quite reach the height of the shopping mall sequence in Minority Report, but it tries like hell to get there, and it is also where Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and his cool guidance are the most heavily involved.  Take away these character habits, and Dead Reckoning feels more trying and copying than succeeding.  The motorcycle jump is impressive, but underwhelming and in some ways incomplete, and the train sequence never rivals the bullet train in the first Mission: Impossible.  It takes ideas from Tomorrow Never Dies, Furious 7, and The Lost World, sometimes to impressive effect, but the effect is the extent of it.

When J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci, and Alex Kurtzman were asked to reset the series with Mission: Impossible III, it resulted in a mcguffin-obsessed mess of a plot that survived only because of the stellar new cast from Philip Seymour Hoffman to Simon Pegg.  Its raw elements were refined into perfection by Brad Bird and his IMAX cameras filming Tom Cruise climbing the Burj Khalifa and attending Indian parties with Paula Patton in Ghost Protocol – the highest peak of the series.  With Abrams’s continued involvement as a producer, Christopher McQuarrie expanded the universe but tightened the spaces, thereby accelerating Cruise and his stunt work to another peak in both Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and Fallout.  But now it would seem that McQuarrie has outlived his usefulness to the series.  The plot of Dead Reckoning Part One is, once again, mcguffin obsessed and futile.  The speed and adrenaline he had brought to the prior two films has slowed down.  And as the political scope has grown wider, looser, and more existential with each successive film, the character connection and meaning has weakened.

Perhaps Dead Reckoning Part Two will prove Part One’s concepts.  Some will argue it doesn’t need to.  But Tom Cruise is not merely the Steve McQueen of the modern era.  He is one of America’s greatest physical performers, one of the best actors of his generation, and a gift to a starved, unnourished, and rotting culture.  It will always be fun to watch him work, and there is no shortage of it to be had here.  But the problem with taking the scenic route is that people end up talking too much.  As thoughtful as Part One fancies itself, it has little to say and sometimes even less to show.

– Vivek