Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, reviewed

Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One.

Married reviewers Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie watch the seventh episode in the long-running Tom Cruise vehicle.

SHE SAW

I find 163 minutes to be an audacious length for a movie, especially an action movie. The length of Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One alone made me have some uncharitable thoughts about Tom Cruise: late onset midlife crisis? He’s on a crusade to Make Movies Great Again and seems to think the great movies of our time were 90s blow-stuff-up action blockbusters. He and I are just not going to see eye to eye on that. While I respect his commitment to the genre, someone needs to rein him in because I’m never getting those extra 63 self-indulgent minutes of my life back.

I recognise almost every critic disagrees with me. The film has been universally lauded as an incredible accomplishment in filmmaking. An accomplishment? Yes. Incredible? I have some notes.

The film opens on board a Russian submarine where all the actors are speaking English with Russian accents. Some of these minor players have more dialogue in that opening scene alone than the four female characters in the film have combined. I’d love to see a dialogue breakdown. One main female character doesn’t utter a word until the final scene. Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust, a character who appears in the previous two MI films and plays a significant role in this one, only has one real dialogue scene throughout the whole film. Hayley Atwell, Cruise’s new leading lady, has said publicly that she was shooting MI7 for over three months without speaking a word of dialogue. Atwell says learning how to let her physical presence do the talking was a “masterclass in pure cinematic experience” but the men in the movie seem to have plenty of actual words to say; no one seems to be suggesting they rely on sultry expressions to tell their story.

I can’t deny the Mission Impossible theme song is iconic, and truly exciting. When it started, I was amped, the theatre was packed and I was ready for a super cinema experience, complete with audience participation. Sadly, I didn’t get it. I’ll put that down to Kiwi audiences’ crippling introversion because there were plenty of opportunities - a desert sandstorm shoot out, a car chase in handcuffs, a train roof fight scene - for some hooting and hollering from the 99 per cent of the audience who were statistically likely to be enjoying it. For me, those scenes were so gratuitously long, it felt like no one was willing to stand up to Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie and say “Hey guys, this is good but you could cut about 8 minutes from that scene.”

There could be a pretty fun action film in MI7, albeit with woefully underdeveloped female characters, if only McQuarrie and Cruise checked their egos, took some basic screenwriting advice and killed their darlings.

HE SAW

Tom Cruise’s sprinting in this movie is an inspiration for runners everywhere. Despite being old, he runs with not just great speed, but also phenomenal form. His is the platonic ideal of running. I watched in awe as he sprinted his way through the many, many minutes of this interminable movie: through and over airports, along city streets, through narrow alleys and along and over trains.

During one important sequence, in which he’s trying to stop a friend being killed, he sprints for far longer than is biologically possible, never once losing pace, nor form, nor sartorial quality. His running style is bolt upright and surprisingly powerful, reminiscent of 1990s 200m and 400m world record holder Michael Johnson, who was nicknamed Superman.

I bring up the sprinting not just because Tom Cruise is now in his 60s but because his running is the highlight of this movie and if that makes the rest of the movie sound dull, that’s because it is.

It doesn’t have any entertaining dialogue, doesn’t contain any interesting innovations, doesn’t raise any interesting questions, doesn’t make you think, and doesn’t try to do anything other than cynically squeeze every possible dollar from its extravagant production/marketing budget, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a lot of long-winded fight/chase scenes.

The movie’s narrative is designed to create in the viewer a cycle of tension/release, but the only time I felt genuinely worried was during the climactic fight scene on top of a train when, in high winds and under considerable physical strain, it appeared Cruise’s beautiful face might be about to fall off.

It’s reductionist to suggest that movies like Mission Impossible are responsible for the dire state of the world, but the $290 million it cost to make this film alone could have funded a lot of high-quality research into helping other old people run fast, with at least a few mill left over to fund research into the psychological impacts of Scientology.

Mission Impossible 7 is part of an inflationary arms race, just the latest in a long line of movies requiring ever more money for bigger and better fight scenes, chases, crashes and explosions, and not much else. A frequent comment about movies like this is that they need to be seen on the big screen. That’s not a bad argument, but an even better one is that they don’t need to be seen at all.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is in cinemas now.