Christopher McQuarrie stages three of the best action sequences the series has produced and wraps them in an hour of people explaining an algorithm to each other. Worth your evening for the Rome chase alone; bring patience for the briefings.
Christopher McQuarrie has now directed three of these, after Rogue Nation and Fallout, and the series has reached the point where it talks about itself more than it needs to. Dead Reckoning Part One sends Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) after the two halves of a key that controls an artificial intelligence called the Entity, which has got into every network on earth and started predicting what people will do. Every government wants it. So does Gabriel (Esai Morales), a man from Hunt’s past who serves the machine. The film contains three of the best action sequences the series has produced and about an hour of people in rooms explaining the plot to one another. It is good, it is long, and it is not the series at its best.
The sequences first, because they are why anyone buys a ticket. In Rome, Hunt and Grace (Hayley Atwell), who has got hold of half the key, flee the police, and Fraser Taggart shoots it in flat daylight so every wing mirror and kerb is visible while Eddie Hamilton cuts so the geography never slips. We laughed out loud, which we had not expected from this series; the joke is that Cruise’s face never changes while the car does things a car should not. Then there is the motorcycle ride off a cliff, which the trailers have already shown and which still made us hold our breath, because Taggart holds the shot long enough for the bike to fall away and the man to keep going. The train in the last act we will not describe, except to say that it is the one stretch where the film stops explaining and simply moves.
Lorne Balfe’s score is drums, brass and the old theme stretched until it groans; it drives the action and leaves nothing behind. Gary Freeman’s production design is at its best in Rome, where the streets look like streets and not a set, and elsewhere settles for the grey rooms in which intelligence agencies have always been filmed. Jill Taylor dresses Vanessa Kirby’s White Widow in white, as ever, and Atwell in clothes that look borrowed, which is right.
Atwell is the reason to see it. Grace is out of her depth, knows it, and lies anyway, and Atwell plays her as a woman doing arithmetic behind her eyes in every scene. She and Cruise are funnier together than he has been with anyone since Rebecca Ferguson arrived two films ago. Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust is back and given less to do than she deserves. Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg do what they do. Henry Czerny returns as Kittridge, the man who called Hunt a traitor in the first film in 1996, and he is dry and slightly bored, which suits him. Shea Whigham and Greg Tarzan Davis spend the film one step behind Hunt, and Whigham finds a decent grudge to play.
The trouble is the villain. The Entity has no face, so Gabriel stands in for it, and Morales is given little but slow walks and lines about fate. Pom Klementieff, as his enforcer Paris, gets more done with a look than Morales manages with a speech. Worse are the explanations. McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen’s script stops, roughly every twenty minutes, for a room of officials or spies to say again what the key is and what the Entity wants. The first briefing is fine. By the third we were bored, and by the fourth we were working out how much of the 164 minutes remained, and resenting the film for making us.
Against the series’ own standards it sits below Fallout, which had a villain with a face and a plot that closed, and about level with Rogue Nation. Most critics have been warmer, and we see why: taken as set pieces alone, this is as good as the series has been. We could not take it as set pieces alone. It ends where a Part One must, with the story unfinished, and does not pretend otherwise.
See it on the largest screen you can find, with the sound up. When a man at a table begins to explain what the Entity wants, that is the moment to fetch a drink. He will still be explaining when you come back.
