I’m very fond of the recent Mission Impossible films. From Ghost Protocol onwards, they seem to have cracked a perfect action movie formula, with gossamer-thin narrative providing just enough drive to string the action set-pieces together. Tom Cruise plays super spy Ethan Hunt with enough earnest intensity to convince you that whatever MacGuffin he’s hunting is Vitally Important, and enough flashes of goofy comedy to keep him sympathetic.
Dead Reckoning, continues the tradition, throwing Tom Cruise and his likeable crew of sidekicks into an adventure involving a sentient AI bent on world domination, which results in (among other things) a terrific car chase through the streets of Rome and an extended climax on the runaway Orient Express. Hayley Atwell joins the cast as a glamorous international thief, Simon Pegg reprises his role as the nervy but dependable Benjie, and Ving Rhames just sits around being Ving Rhames, which is fine by me. (Though if you know him only for being rumbly and avuncular in these films you should check out Scorsese’s Bringing Out The Dead - he’s amazing.) Rebecca Ferguson also returns as the enigmatic Isla Faust (and gets a tad short-changed by the script, I fear).
But - slightly worryingly - this time the plot seems to be striving for something a bit deeper than the previous instalments. There’s a lot of exposition - a LOT of exposition - but basically what it all boils down to is a sort of cyberpunk Lord of the Rings: everyone is after an all-powerful key which will grant access the rogue AI, but whichever side gets it will use it to try and control the thing: only Ethan Hunt is determined to destroy it. But lurking behind that there’s a hint of some kind of theological subtext - the key is literally a gold crucifix, and Hunt has several speeches where he asks people to give up all they have and follow him - in the most powerful of these, he’s framed against a window which makes the shape of a large cross behind his head.
It’s all weighty stuff, and I’m still not sure exactly what it was driving at. But who cares? I always knew what Tom Cruise was driving at as he steered his souped-up Fiat 500 down Roman alleyways or his motorbike off the top of mountains, because Chris McQuarrie stages action sequences with an eye for geography that puts most modern action directors to shame. There’s plenty of humour in those scenes too - the car chase in particular features some fine screwball comedy moments, while there’s something of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd about the train stuff. And in the quieter moments there are still a lot of great shots - I liked the one where Hayley Atwell’s face is seen reflected in the glass top of a policeman’s desk while he lays out all her fake passports on it.
And those are the bits that stick in my memory, while the plot is already fading, as the plots of all the other Missions Impossible have faded. I can’t for the life of me remember now in which of those films Ethan Hunt had to free climb up the Burj Khalifa, or burgle an underwater vault while holding his breath, or why those things seemed so nail-bitingly important in context. Pretty soon I won’t recall which one featured the Alpine motorbike jump, or Pom Klementieff gleefully demolishing fleets of Italian police cars in her APC. But I don’t mean that in a bad way at all. Forgettability is a positive thing in a certain type of lightweight film, because it makes them endlessly re-watchable.
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