Movie Review : Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One
Wipe Out is a game show that first aired in 2008, which featured everyday people flying through the air and falling into shallow waters for a chance to win 50,000$. It can't be that hard to complete with adequate preparation, but the quirk is that you can't prepare for it since the obstacle course is unique. People who watch Wipe Out judge its participants and other people judge people who watch Wipe Out, but believe it's fine to watch a movie like Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One.
What if I told you these two things have become eerily similar?
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One is the seventh movie in the series since Brian De Palma brought it back to life in 1995 and features our boy Ethan Hunt (the fastest runner in Hollywood Tom Cruise) chasing keys that control the AI equivalent of AIDS, a supreme weapon that can hack into anything digital to create chaos. That thing has went rogue like a teenager who got into Limp Bizkit too early and somehow, Ethan is the only person on Earth interested in stopping this atrocity.
Not giving a fuck on this magnitude is both a good and a bad thing
This movie is drunk. There's no other way around it. Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise have gotten shitfaced on Armagnac together and wrote together an insane series of intricate stunt involving Cruise and two beautiful, up-and-coming actresses: Rebecca Ferguson and Hayley Attwell. Remember the video game series Just Cause where no one ever tried to finish the storyline because it was way more fun to walk around and create as much mayhem as you can? Dead Reckoning is like that.
There's a whole sequence in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One (which is three hours long, by the way) where Ethan Hunt chases the freakin’ Orient Express on motorcycle through the European mountains only to climb a mountain, parachute down and land through the fucking side of a wagon with a blow that would've killed anyone else, but that looked badass. I mean what fucking key? What fucking rogue AI thing? Tom Cruise just landed through the side of a train car!
Who cares, right?
I get it. It's a spectacle. It’s meant to jack your nervous system and make you feel and it gets the job done. But it gets the job done the exact same way Wipe Out does. The endgame doesn't really matter, it's the ups and downs of the process that are fun. You can judge the characters even harder than game show contestants because they don’t even exist. I don’t think that I ever seen a movie where the screenplay served as a roadmap to a series of stunts that managed to be this fun to watch.
What about the damn AI? Is this actually a good movie?
Fuck, I don't know? Its heart is in the right place. It's meant to be an exploration of how capitalist greed drives innovations we've lost control of and it's a real thing happening right now. Technological triumphalism is getting more and more enforced upon everyday people and it seems like Ethan Hunt is aware of that and also believes that it should be stopped. But Hunt is a busy guy and his convoluted means of stopping this powerful, wayward AI are way more entertaining than efficient.
There's this whole discourse about moral responsibility that is also fun, where Ethan challenges the rule of his IMF handler Kittridge (Henry Czerny) by choosing to do the right thing over the patriotic thing and teaching to Hayley Attwell’s character (who's a generational pickpocket) the virtues of integrity. It doesn't really matter in the greater scope of things because the AI isn’t stopped at the end of the movie and you will have to pay to see the sequel in theatres next July to close this chapter of the story.
Entertainment wins again.
*
I had a good time watching Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One, but it was a good time in the way eating my patented habanero McChicken, large fry and large iced tea trio at McDonald's is a good time. I know I will pay the price for it at some point, but I’ll be damned if it isn't the tastiest thing as it's going down. Mission Impossible has become Wipe Out for the people who think watching Wipe Out is stupid and its both a good and a bad thing. Not sure it can go one forever, though.
