Lead actor and producer Tom Cruise can be described as the mastermind. He’s been on board since the beginning. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One is “A Tom Cruise Production” as read at the beginning. So it’s all the more gratifying that this film doesn’t look like a pure vanity project. Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is certainly the center of attention again. And of course, as part of the film’s marketing, Cruise again sprints eagerly as if not a day had passed since 1996’s Mission: Impossible. The fact that the superstar, born in 1962, again performs most of his daring stunts himself, such as a mountain cliff jump with a motorcycle, is of course emphasized at every opportunity.
But fortunately this film is much more than a Tom Cruise show – and much more than just audiovisual overwhelming, which leaves no moments for real excitement in the hectic alternation of chases, fights, explosions and effects. The screenplay, which McQuarrie wrote together with Erik Jendresen, relies on various international locations like many other big-budget movies, but does not rush from set-piece to set-piece without using the special features of the locations dramaturgically. Instead, every setting is savored with relish – including a submarine under a blanket of ice, a hideout in the Arabian Desert, an Abu Dhabi airport, a midnight gala in a Venetian palace, and finally a train.
Furthermore, Dead Reckoning 1 avoids dressing in leaden nostalgic garb, but at the same time manages to be reminiscent of its roots, the television series Kobra, Sie sie (1966-1973), for example when latex masks are slipped on and removed again with aplomb , in order to cleverly trick the environment – or when the popular musical theme is harmoniously integrated into the score.
Hunt, who is once again introduced as a shadow, a spirit outside society, this time has to go in search of a cruciform key that consists of two parts. To do this, he first has to find an old acquaintance, MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (charismatic: Rebecca Ferguson), who has a bounty on her head. With the help of the proven hacker duo Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), he must then persuade the thief Grace (Hayley Atwell) to cooperate. In Venice he meets the dealer Alanna aka White Widow (Vanessa Kirby) again, who wants to do business with Grace as well as with the sinister Gabriel (Esai Morales). The latter, in turn, played a fatal role in Hunt’s past.
There is no question that the coveted key is a MacGuffin, i.e. a more or less random object that drives the story forward. Nobody (yet) knows what he can unlock. What is interesting, however, is the renegade AI that is connected to it and becomes the actual adversary: the so-called “entity” is apparently targeting the global intelligence services to create chaos and a world of lies. Although her exact motive at the end of Dead Reckoning 1 remains unclear, McQuarrie does not deliver a film that lacks originality and ends at the nastiest point according to the soap opera principle.
Rather, this film is the current gold standard of suspense entertainment. When a nuclear bomb has to be defused by solving various puzzles, or a bright yellow mini car is racing through the streets (and up the stairs) of Venice, the mix of action, suspense and humor is perfect. Hand-to-hand fights in a narrow, cordoned-off alley, on a lonely bridge or on the roof of a moving train are staged with virtuosity.
And with all this, the characters manage to give the events a soul. “Who or what is most important to you?” is thrown into the room as a question. For Benji, it’s his friends. We see people who are close “in their own way”, as Luther put it in a nutshell. From the tender intimacy between Hunt and Ilsa to the screwball sparks between the protagonist and the newcomer Grace – it’s not just a spectacle that’s fired up here, but big, fun genre cinema with all the necessary ingredients.
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