Photo: Christian Black/Paramount Pictures
Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part Oneis another colossal but expertly engineered vehicle, like 2022’sTop Gun: Maverick,that knows exactly how to deliver the maximum Tom Cruise experience. Two hours and 36 minutes long,Reckoningspends too much time on expository blather, but you can just tune that all out as you watch Cruise being put through his paces (and his paces are faster and better than yours) in two phenomenal action scenes.
One is a breathless, battering car chase through the streets of Rome (partly in a tiny yellow Fiat). The other, even better, involves a train barreling out of control while Cruise, holding onto a motorcycle for dear life, plunges down toward the rogue choo-choo from a high, high cliff. If you have vertigo, it’s a potential barf-bag moment.
Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
In the course ofDead Reckoning,number 7 in theM:Ifranchise, Cruise’s agent Ethan Hunt suffers some genuine sorrow — he all but clutches his heart after one key twist — and even loses his cool, but mostly he sizes up every situation with that same wily, cocky Tom Cruise look, as if he could outplay and outfox doomsday itself. Which, actually, is Ethan’s assignment here: His new enemy is a near-omniscient AI program — nameless, faceless and (one hopes) odorless — that basically wants to hack the entire world. It’s so colossal a threat,Dead Reckoningwill spill over into a second installment in June 2024.
Christian Black/Paramount Pictures
As summer action blockbusters go, for that matter,Reckoningis certainly the more impressive of the two movies: Harrison Ford’s return was like a gift from an old friend making a surprise visit out of the dusty past — if his gift had gotten a bit banged up from all that time in the saddle bag and the wrapping paper was torn, so be it. Cruise is more like some new form of man rocketing in from the future, combining a primal will to survive with a gleaming indestructibility. He’s like the evolutionary union of Bear Grylls and Buzz Lightyear.
In the long run, neither of these films deserves to be as well-remembered (or taken as seriously) as the year’s third ginormous action fantasy,John Wick: Chapter 4,a dreamlike quest for both redemption and death in which Keanu Reeves, his dank black hair framing his face like a broken-winged raven, serves as the tale’s woeful knight. It’s the martial-arts equivalent ofThe Lord of the Rings.
At the moment, though, Tom Cruise is running in a straight line down the middle of a long air-terminal rooftop, pumping his arms like a windup toy. No one will catch him. Only an idiot would try.
In theaters July 12, rated PG-13
source: people.com
