"Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One"

    ☆☆☆☆½ 

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to explain the plot of Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One, a title as un-punctuatable as the movie is inexplicable. I wasn't 30 minutes into this latest Mission: Impossible movie before I gave up trying to follow along, and I'm not sure my experience was diminished in any way.

I've seen all of the other Mission: Impossible movies, and of them and their globe-hopping, labyrinthine plots, here are the things I remember: Tom Cruise hanging on to a train inside a Chunnel tunnel; Tom Cruise hanging from wires; Tom Cruise hanging from the side of the Burj Khalifa; Tom Cruise in a motorcycle chase through Paris; Tom Cruise hanging from the side of an airplane.

I don't much remember why, and most importantly, I don't really care. The Mission: Impossible films seem to transcend plot, which is not to say they don't have any. Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One (there's got to be some punctuation in there other than that colon?) has a whole lot of plot, and even more characters. In one of the film's pivotal scenes, about six of the characters all meet up and discuss who's going to do what to whom, and when, and although it's all fantastically well acted, you can imagine the performers crying out, "What did I just say?" as soon as the camera shut off.

But it doesn't matter, and whenever the plot seems to overwhelming (which is frequently), there's only one thing to keep in mind: There's something everyone wants. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, naturally) and his tiny team from the Impossible Mission Force are looking for it. So is everyone else. And if the wrong people find it, something really, really bad will happen.

This time around, that something relates to artificial intelligence, and watching the film suddenly made me wonder if all the latest hand-wringing about ChatGPT and other AI systems hasn't all been a very elaborate marketing scheme for this film.

There are so many unanswered questions—none of which I can actually write here for fear of spoilers—and so many characters with murky motivations that you might be excused for thinking I'm putting this one on par with the equally murky and convoluted Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. But I'm not, because Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One has all of the things Indy doesn't:

This movie is impeccably well made, terrifically suspenseful, and moves with unbelievable swiftness: Its running time of 2 hours, 45 minutes may well be bloated, yet there's never any time this movie lets up. On top of that, one of the best car chase scenes in many years, this one involving Rome's Spanish Steps, is also the source of entirely unexpected humor—I laughed a lot at Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One, and also gasped and even squirmed in my seat a time or two, and really, what more can you ask from a movie? Well, except a coherent plot.

But the best thing about this movie is that even if you're thoroughly baffled by what's happening on screen, you won't have time or the inclination to notice. 

Oh, but if you are, and you've seen the film, here's a terrific, spoiler-filled exploration of what you might have missed—because, let's be honest, you almost certainly did miss at least some of it. And, let's also be honest, it doesn't much matter. In 20 years, you're going to remember Tom Cruise on that motorcycle, or Tom Cruise on that train, or Tom Cruise in Venice, and that's what you came for, anyway.

Viewed July 22, 2023 — AMC Universal

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