Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: A Review Of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

“Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One”

For a breezy, unstoppable slab of summery entertainment, the superb “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” has the most serious of underpinnings, prophesying Armageddon as if it were written; the film’s great whatsit is sentient AI but meaning—theme, dramatic, conflict, wry by-play—plays out in orbit-wrecking stunts, sometimes just one footfall after the other. (A momentous movie to have watched directly after the three hottest days ever recorded on planet earth.)

The nutty, elongated title is a placeholder for what could simply have been “M:I 7,” as it will be on multiplex auditorium signage. Someone told Steven Soderbergh that “Erin Brockovich” was a dud title, to which he replied, “That’s not the title, the title is ‘Julia Roberts is Erin Brockovich,'” and he was right. The latest installment of “Tom Cruise, Running” is upon us.

“Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One”

Christopher McQuarrie is one of the great contemporary action film directors, building on the foundation of classical American studio work, clockwork Tomfoolery from a fantastic haberdasher of couture claptrap. It’s clockwork anarchy, the logic of each scene presented as a separate narrative challenge all its own. An implausible (as well as impossible) challenge is set and they get to it.

This level of clever often matches the play of Hitchcock, down to the dovetailing halves of a key being the talismans to the larger puzzle. The possible anachronism is obviated by the fact that the goal that will stop the evil and save the world can be held in a couple of pockets: a Macguffin that fits in the palm of the hand, in astutely measured frames. (Now cue that runaway locomotive.)

The large cast is well-chosen, and several, beyond Cruise, stand out for their hair, bristling characterization that announces their entry into a train car, such as CIA chief Henry Czerny’s silvered forelock or the notable quiff of an American agent played by Shea Whigham, who summarizes Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, hair ever-perfected, as  “a mind-reading, shape-shifting agent of chaos.” True, yes, but there’s also Pom Klementieff’s bratty assassin, all pigtails, skirts and malice, tossing her hair while piloting reconnaissance tanks through the streets of Rome.

Underlying themes and geopolitics are established in a few graceful gobs of gab at the top of the picture: water’s limited, air’s destroyed, the world’s on fire: “No one should be in charge of the Entity! And I will destroy it!”

Characters burst with terse verbiage from the start: this story is set in a burning world about to lose the formless Entity, a godless, stateless, amoral blob that has yet to conceive, let alone circumscribe its own dimensions.

The best setpiece—as opposed to the biggest, loudest, longest that is the battle for a runaway train that caps this installment—is set in the Abu Dhabi International Airport, and a pursuit by surveillance and device and by eye makes physical and visual the threat of information, unmoored, a shape-shifting cat-and-virtual-mouse chase.

Rebecca Ferguson and Christopher McQuarrie on the set of “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.”

An early Richard Lester short was called “The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film,” and McQuarrie’s estimable work as a storyteller, of making patterns and careening them about at satisfying velocity, bears the marks of Lester’s work, cosmopolitan yet unassuming, confident but not overtly proud of itself. (“Juggernaut” is just one of Lester’s journeyman jaunts.)

Call it “The Tom Running Jumping Yet Seldom Standing Still Film.” That title will also fit Part Two, scheduled for release in June 2024, if the Entity isn’t sentient and the end of the world doesn’t come before then. With Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Esai Morales and Vanessa Kirby.