If you removed all the daredevil stunts Tom Cruise does in “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One,” you’d have a nifty little 90-minute film.
With them, it clocks in at nearly two hours and 45 minutes, a long sit for anyone. When you consider the story isn’t really done (Part Two is coming), that’s overkill.
Luckily, there’s an interesting story that swirls Artificial Intelligence, rogue agents and Russian sailors into one.
For Cruise, it’s an opportunity to play James Bond and Indiana Jones.
Getting marching orders from a cassette player, no less, his Ethan Hunt is charged with finding a key that could enable the Entity (as the A.I. don is called) to level the world as we know it.
In more locales than a Cunard cruise ship, Hunt reassembles his team (which includes Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames) to help seek and destroy. Naturally, he has a bevy of women to help or hurt. Paris (Pom Klementieff), one of the latter, chases him around the streets and alleys of Rome in a Hummer. Complicating matters? He’s handcuffed to a potential partner (Hayley Atwell), who has to share driving duties.
Also in the mix: Rebecca Ferguson and Vanessa Kirby, two love interests who figured into earlier “Missions.” They get a chance to square off with the baddies and (in one instance) try their hand at Hunt’s handiwork – masks. It’s a nifty throwback to the television series but there are also several character actors who look like they jump from one CBS procedural to another.
The real calling card – and that’s where this gets dicey – is Cruise’s ability to run, jump and parachute throughout his quest for the keys and the answer. He does marvelous work but when he’s fighting atop a train, we get the feeling this isn’t something original, it’s just a stunt that Hollywood can do well (thank you, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”).
Director Christopher McQuarrie knows how to maximize Cruise’s appearance. He just shouldn’t go back to the same wells all the time.
While “Dead Reckoning” manages to tap into a futuristic problem (shades of Hollywood’s writers and actors strikes), it doesn’t pinpoint a single villain. Like too many recent films, it doesn’t want to alienate potential audiences. So it plops the bad guys in a nebulous world where billionaires thrive and the rest of us are left to deal with the property they destroy.
That keeps the story unfocused and prompts the stunt show.
“Dead Reckoning” entertains – no doubt about it – but it didn’t need to reach so far so often just to keep the clock ticking.
