[Ad - Sponsored by Move Palette] Tom Cruise is taking himself to new heights in his seventh outing as Ethan Hunt - like off a cliff! Does Film Brain think you should accept this mission, and live up to the series' standards?
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00:00 This video is sponsored by Movie Palette.
00:02 Hello and welcome to Projector, and on this episode Tom Cruise accepts another
00:06 impossible mission in Dead Reckoning Part 1.
00:26 After a Russian stealth submarine is sunk, two halves of a cruise-form key go missing,
00:31 with every major power in the world looking for them as they lead to a sentient AI known
00:36 as the Entity that they each hope to control. Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt and his team,
00:41 including Cyan Peg's Benji Dunn, Ving Rhames' Luther and Rebecca Ferguson's Ilsa Faust,
00:46 are pursuing the keys, hoping it can lead to destroying the Entity, but their mission is
00:50 disrupted by pickpocket Grace, played by Hayley Atwell. Ethan soon realises the Entity will do
00:56 anything to protect itself, using a ruthless enemy from Ethan's pre-IMF past, Gabriel "Poe"
01:02 Ese Morales, to work on its behalf, who Ethan must protect Grace from and prevent from obtaining the
01:08 two halves. Well, one summer on after largely being creative with saving cinema itself with
01:14 Top Gun Maverick, Tom Cruise is back with the seventh entry in the Mission Impossible film
01:18 franchise, of course spun off from the television series. And I do have to admit that I have a bit
01:23 of a personal affinity for the Mission Impossible film series in that it was one of the things that
01:28 got me into cinema when I was a kid. I remember when I was about five years old, there was a tape
01:33 of summer 1996 movie trailers, and of course the very first one on the tape was for Mission
01:39 Impossible. And I remember really wanting to see that movie, and I did several months later when
01:44 it came out on VHS and I could rent it out from the library. And for its beginnings, it was almost
01:50 like each director brought something different to each film in that Brian De Palma made one,
01:55 John Woo made one, and J.J. Abrams made one, and they were all very different from each other.
02:01 And some of the seeds of what we know the Mission Impossible film franchise now were
02:04 sown in Abrams' movie, but really the formula didn't solidify until Ghost Protocol. And that
02:11 can largely be credited to the inclusion of Christopher McQuarrie as a co-writer.
02:16 McQuarrie and Cruise are very tight-knit, they're very creatively in sync. McQuarrie
02:21 starts out as merely being a writer on movies like The Usual Suspects, and then he became
02:26 Cruise's regular rewrite man, someone that would be brought in to effectively iron out any issues
02:31 with the script and tailor them for Cruise. And he's still in that position, but by the time of
02:37 Rogue Nation, he'd also moved into the director's chair as well. And certainly between that and
02:43 Fallout, McQuarrie is an accomplished action director. Mission Impossible Fallout in particular
02:50 is one of the most adrenaline-pumping action movies of the last decade. That is a genuine
02:56 white-knuckle movie, and certainly felt like the culmination of everything the franchise
03:01 has been doing up until that point. So now we have Dead Reckoning, which is a two-part story.
03:07 This is basically a summer of part ones in terms of blockbusters. The bar now for Tom Cruise is so
03:14 high between Fallout and Top Gun Maverick, the question becomes whether or not him and McQuarrie
03:20 can actually outdo themselves, whether they can really put audiences on the edge of their seat.
03:27 And it almost feels like it's starting to become an impossible mission all by itself,
03:33 but they damn sure give it a try. This latest Mission Impossible movie feels especially
03:38 timely and relevant because it taps into a lot of fears that we have about AI. AI is something
03:42 that is very much emerging at this present moment, and people are worried about it. They're concerned
03:48 that it might be misused or abused in some way. And certainly I don't believe it's anywhere near
03:53 as powerful as the entity in this movie. But there is a rich vein of digital paranoia running
04:00 all throughout Dead Reckoning, which of course makes sense in the espionage world,
04:04 where it's all about data and intelligence and surveillance and guarding that. And of course,
04:10 if you've got something that harvests that data constantly, that becomes a hugely powerful threat.
04:18 You see in the background of the events of this movie, each of the individual surveillance agencies
04:22 are having to effectively go analogue, switch off away from their servers and computers,
04:29 and go back to old-fashioned methods that they've largely abandoned, just because they're so worried
04:36 about everything slipping into the entity's control. It's effectively a new Cold War,
04:42 where the artillery and threat isn't missiles, it's data. And so everyone's scrambling around
04:48 to try and find the two halves of this key, because they hope it leads to the source of the entity,
04:53 so they can seek to control it. Because he who has command of the data controls the world. The
04:59 thing is though, what they seem to have missed is that the moment they became self-aware,
05:04 it was impossible to control the entity once again. So while everyone else is racing around,
05:10 you've got Ethan and his team also hunting down the keys, but because they want to destroy
05:15 the entity, because Ethan realises this is more power than one state or one person can really
05:23 hold, and so long as the entity exists, it is a threat. Some of the tensest and scariest scenes
05:29 with the entity are actually the ones that feel strangely plausible in their own way. While few
05:35 of us will get in a scenario where we have to defuse a nuclear bomb in an airport like Benji
05:39 does, a lot of us will probably relate to the fact that the bomb keeps asking Benji exceptionally
05:45 personal questions about himself and his identity, trying to build a profile around him. I'm sure
05:52 many of us have done that online at one point or another with a bit less stakes about it,
05:57 and Benji has no choice but to comply, otherwise it might go off. But of course, the real queasy,
06:05 unsettling part about that entire scene is the fact that, really, it already knows the answers.
06:12 It doesn't need his input, it knows them already. And technology has always been a big part of
06:18 Mission Impossible. Ever since the Bond films, gadgets have been a requisite of the spy genre,
06:23 and we used to look upon those as being aspirational, as things that we'd like to have
06:27 in the future. Now that we have a lot of it, we're starting to become increasingly unsettled by it,
06:34 and in Dead Reckoning, over the course of it, the IMF team discover that their technological tools
06:40 become broken, unreliable, or corrupted over the course of the narrative, either by the entity,
06:47 or just simply not being reliable in a bind. And so you have moments where characters are
06:52 tracking one another, and then suddenly the map will change, and they can't determine whether or
06:57 not that's true, or someone might be talking to someone over a radio, and then suddenly their
07:02 voice gets replaced by their own, but they're not actually speaking those words, because they're
07:08 being impersonated. Again, that is a deeply chilling moment in this movie, because that could
07:15 actually happen. AI voice impersonation is one of those things that we are actually concerned about
07:21 at this point in time. Even the series trademark of masks can't be trusted. The machine that makes
07:27 them breaks down, and it can't be fixed. It's finished, done, kaput, and they have to rewrite
07:32 their entire plan on the fly. The IMF team have to ensue their digital conveniences and rely more on
07:40 their analogue skills, especially their own wit and ingenuity, and that raises the stakes and the
07:48 tension even further. And in the midst of all this, you've got Ethan, who is almost always presented
07:52 as a nearly infallible moral bellwether. He's not someone that chooses a side. He picks his course of
07:58 what's right and pursues it to the bitter end. And while it means that Ethan has never been a
08:04 particularly complicated character, because he's always the good guy and the hero in every situation,
08:10 Hunt does act that way because he acts out of protecting those around him, and putting himself
08:16 in harm's way if necessary to do that. He's not going to put other lives on the line if he can't
08:23 put his own before them. And that means that Ethan is the biggest threat to an entity which has no
08:31 conscience in that same way. The entity doesn't work in that kind of emotional sense like Ethan
08:38 does. But having said all that, the AI entity might actually be one of the weaker elements of
08:43 Dead Reckoning, in that something that is so enormous and shapeless is very hard to root
08:48 against as an antagonist. We do get some visual representations of it as a kind of circular
08:54 screensaver, but it's not really very tangible as a villain on screen. Understandably, the filmmakers
09:01 have brought in a secondary main antagonist in the form of Gabriel, who is meant to be linked to
09:07 Ethan's past. He's meant to be a crucial reason why he joined the IMF in the first place and
09:13 accepted those missions. That's obviously something that they're going to come back to
09:17 in the second part of this story, but we get little tidbits of it here. The problem is,
09:23 it's not really enough to give Gabriel more of an identity as a character. And I do think that
09:29 the Mission Impossible series has actually had some pretty good villains over the course of its
09:34 run, particularly lately when you had Henry Cavill and Sean Harris in Fallout and Rogue Nation,
09:40 respectively. Whereas here, I think that S.A. Morales, certainly he's got a lot of charm and
09:45 charisma on screen, and they've given him that little signature trademark of having the two
09:50 knives. But it just feels like he's there largely for something for Ethan to physically fight
09:55 against. There is something interesting about the idea that he's the AI's chosen actor, and probably
10:02 done so because of his links to Ethan. But Gabriel also has a kind of zealotry fervor about him,
10:10 that he completely believes in this AI. There's that moment where he's actually in a chamber,
10:17 having been physically connected to the Entity, and it almost feels like he has kind of like a
10:22 religious experience. I wish there was a bit more of that, because honestly, as it stands,
10:28 Gabriel feels quite underdeveloped as a character, largely just an amalgamation of generic
10:34 villainous tropes a lot of the time. And I don't think it helps that he's connected to the AINC,
10:40 because it makes it feel like that he's simply a puppet, that he's simply a tool, which yes,
10:46 he is, but does actually diminish his threat as a villain overall. And I don't think this is
10:52 really an issue with Morales' performance. He's trying. The problem is that he isn't given all
10:58 that much with the script to work with. If there is a villain that does actually steal the show,
11:03 it's Pom Clementeith's Paris, despite the fact that the character is virtually silent throughout
11:08 the entire movie. But Clementeith infuses the role with this very oddball energy that makes
11:14 the character intriguing, especially in the quieter moments where you get those subtle gestures and
11:20 eccentricities that she adds into the part. But then you've got other moments like the car chase
11:25 in Rome where she's smashing around through things willy-nilly with that truck, and she looks like
11:30 she's having the time of her life, screaming and yelling at the top of her lungs. So you get these
11:35 real kind of extremes and layers to this performance. But then you've got an arc to
11:40 this character as well. It does seem like the character has a little bit of a journey throughout
11:46 the movie, which is nice to see. Clementeith really elevates a role that could have been
11:50 forgettable in most people's hands and actually makes it a quite striking element, despite the
11:56 fact that she doesn't have a whole lot of screen time. And as far as everything else, it's the
12:00 Mission Impossible show you've come to expect. Cruise and McQuarrie have almost got things down
12:05 to a fine art. All the elements are here and are just the right quantities and at the right moments.
12:10 Everything feels perfectly balanced. And for a two and a half hour movie, it absolutely breezes
12:16 by. It doesn't feel anywhere near as long as it actually is. And I was going to say that the
12:21 Mission Impossible franchise feels a bit minimalist by this point, but I don't think that's really the
12:26 right word. I think it's more efficient and economical, especially in terms of its narrative
12:32 and plotting, in that there is just the right amount of it to hang all the film together,
12:38 but not enough that it gets in the way of the action. Because the plot in Mission Impossible
12:43 movies largely exists to tie together extended set pieces, and it does that well. But McQuarrie
12:51 also has a good intuition of knowing when you need the dialogue to actually tell the audience
12:56 something, and when really you just rely on a look. You rely on the visual language of cinema.
13:04 There are scenes that don't have any dialogue and are very quick on screen, but convey enough
13:09 information for the audience to get a sense of the characters' relationships. That's good
13:15 economical storytelling. And the team dynamic feels stable and works really well. You've got
13:20 Simon Pegg as Benji, the tech expert/field agent that often serves as an audience surrogate.
13:27 There's a bit of an everyman quality to Pegg's performance, but also he's really risen to the
13:33 challenge as the part has got expanded with each passing movie. And Pegg, I think, is actually one
13:39 of the franchise's great assets. But also you've got Ving Rhames as Luther, the other tech expert
13:45 who's a bit more old school, which actually comes in handy over the course of this adventure. But
13:50 Rhames has been serving in this franchise as long as Cruise has. And because of that,
13:55 him being a mainstay means that there's a bit of resonance to his scenes with Cruise, particularly
14:01 that big moment where he talks about "what's your objective?" and reminds Ethan of what his
14:07 principles should be in that moment. He almost serves as Ethan's conscience. But the addition
14:12 of Hayley Atwell as Grace is a very welcome one. Atwell has always struck me as one of those
14:18 performers that's been a little bit underappreciated. She's never gotten her proper due
14:22 up until now. And that's not to say that she hasn't been liked in the past. People loved her as Agent
14:28 Carter in the MCU, and she was great in the first Avenger and in the spin-off television series.
14:33 But that never seemed to translate into leading lady status like you would expect it to. And here,
14:39 finally being elevated to that, she works beautifully with Cruise. There's a real
14:45 playfulness to their dynamic. And that is the anchor throughout the entirety of the film. In
14:50 fact, Atwell steals great chunks of Dead Reckoning. There's a lot of scenes that
14:56 hinge entirely on Atwell alone, especially in the third act. And Grace adds a bit of volatility to
15:02 the proceedings because she's an outsider. She's someone that's kind of stumbled into this world,
15:07 and she doesn't quite realize what she's gotten herself into. She's out of her depth. But she's
15:13 someone that's had to always rely upon herself. She was an orphan, and she became a criminal as
15:18 a way of supporting herself. And so over the course of the movie, she has to learn to trust
15:24 Ethan and his team and actually work with them as opposed to against them. But in the first half of
15:29 the movie, she's an especially slippery character where she's always looking for some kind of quick
15:35 escape or some way of getting out of a situation. Atwell and Cruise have this great push and pull
15:42 between them. It almost feels a bit kind of Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn in that kind of way. And
15:49 Atwell is charming, unlikable, as you would expect from someone that knows how to use those to their
15:55 advantage, but also manages to make the character someone that you can actually empathize with. I
16:01 think that Atwell is one of the big strengths of this movie. But the presence of Grace comes at a
16:07 disadvantage to Rebecca Ferguson's Ilsa Faus, and I don't think the filmmakers ever really knew what
16:13 to do with this character. They brought her back, and Ferguson is great in the role as per usual,
16:19 and she does get some moments to shine, but it never feels like the character is properly
16:23 connected with this story. It always feels like she's a bit superfluous to the proceedings. I
16:29 think that's because Grace and Ilsa do have a lot of shared attributes with each other in that
16:35 they're both kind of wily characters, and they're both kind of thief-like. They're a little bit too
16:40 similar to each other, and so that means that Ilsa doesn't feel like she has a place in this
16:46 particular outing. And I think the filmmakers were aware of this because they kind of hint that her
16:51 and Ethan have this kind of romantic chemistry. I don't think I really buy that. I don't think that
16:58 was really there in the last two movies. I think that's trying to give a little bit of purpose
17:04 to that character, but it doesn't really work. And honestly, I think it might have been a better
17:10 idea if they took Ilsa out of this story altogether and just kept her for part two,
17:16 but unfortunately that's not what they do, and really I felt a little bit dissatisfied with how
17:22 they use Ferguson in this movie. But the big central attraction is Tom Cruise himself, one of
17:28 the last of the old school movie stars. I'm sure the fact this has a digital versus animal plotline
17:34 similar to Top Gun Maverick has caused many people to compare it to Cruise fighting to keep cinema
17:38 going alive in an era of streaming, but also doing physical stunts instead of relying on digi doubles
17:45 to do the action for him. But simply put, Cruise has responded to an era of spectacle by turning
17:52 himself into the spectacle. You go to a Tom Cruise movie to see whatever death-defying stunt he's
17:58 going to do next. He is literally putting himself on the line for our entertainment, and because we
18:05 as audience members know that, that adds a sense of jeopardy to all the action set pieces. It makes
18:11 the hairs on the back of your neck stand up knowing that Cruise is actually doing a lot of this stuff
18:17 legitimately for real. And in Dead Reckoning, we have the stunt that is in all the marketing
18:23 materials where Cruise rides that bike off a cliff and parachutes down, and that was one of
18:29 the very first things they shot just in case Cruise did actually kill himself doing that.
18:34 But certainly, it's an absolutely jaw-dropping moment to see that actually happen before your
18:40 eyes. And also, there is the fact that Cruise, as we sometimes forget, is actually a very good
18:46 actor. You especially see it in the scenes that he has with Henry Cerny as Kittredge. Kittredge
18:52 finally brought back in this installment. I've been waiting for this character to come back
18:57 because those confrontations between the two in the original Brian De Palma Mission Impossible
19:01 were absolute dynamite, and they're great in this movie. It's a fantastic reunion. But certainly,
19:09 the addition of Kittredge also makes me think that there are deliberate callbacks to the original
19:15 Mission Impossible, especially in that final act with the train set piece. That's very similar to
19:21 the finale of that movie, but certainly, that's on steroids by comparison in that, yes, you get
19:28 a fight on top of the train, but now it's a knife battle, and that's not even the final action set
19:34 piece in the film. In fact, that whole last act of the movie is pretty much entirely set on the train,
19:40 and it has so many complex elements and variables to it. You've also got Vanessa Kirby as the White
19:45 Widow, who is the daughter of Max from the original 1996 film played by Vanessa Redgrave,
19:51 and Kirby fits into those shoes beautifully. She was great in that small role in Fallout.
19:57 Here, she actually has expanded upon even further, and she's quite pivotal to the last act of this
20:03 movie set on the train, much like how Max was in the original 1996 film. So, you've got that
20:09 callback there as well. The set pieces are so well directed and handled, managing to sustain their
20:15 tension and excitement across 15 to 20 minutes at a time. You've got that car chase in Rome,
20:22 where they're running around in the Fiat 500, and Grace and Ethan are handcuffed to each other,
20:27 and that is especially fun. And I feel like the franchise knows when to have a sense of humour
20:33 about itself. There's a little bit of a sly wit in that the characters know that Ethan is always
20:39 going off-road at some point or another, or there's that moment where the Fiat 500 rolls down the
20:45 steps, and the characters somehow swap places with each other. That's kind of cartoonish and a bit
20:51 Wile E. Coyote in the absolute right ways. It does feel a little bit derivative of Fast X, which also
20:59 had a big car chase sequence around Rome, but if you take it in isolation, it's still brilliantly
21:06 done. And then you've got the set piece in Venice, all the chase with multiple characters running
21:11 around the various narrow streets that get increasingly claustrophobic. And then you've
21:16 got that fight scene in that extremely narrow alley with Ethan. The actors barely have room
21:23 to move, and yet it's so kind of lithe and flexible, and certainly feels really, really hemmed
21:30 in. And then you've got the big finale with the train, and especially that last beat where they're
21:36 just trying to outrun the train carriages as they collapse off the bridge. And that is just several
21:43 excellent stunt scenes, just back to back to back with each other. And yes, there are a couple of
21:48 weird spots of editing where it does feel like they deliberately made the escapes even tighter
21:55 in post-production by kind of cutting away early. And so you've got these kind of jump cuts as Ethan
22:01 escapes that sometimes feel a little bit jarring, but certainly add to the adrenaline levels.
22:08 Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One is a brilliant action movie, as you've come to expect
22:13 from the Mission Impossible franchise by now. Is it my personal favourite out of the entire series?
22:18 I would actually say no. I still think that Fallout has this movie beat, especially in terms of sheer
22:25 crazy bonkers stunts. And I did have some issues with the writing here, but even so, that shouldn't
22:31 diminish from what has actually been accomplished here. The movie is still chock-a-block with
22:35 absolutely top-notch action from start to finish that is genuinely exhilarating. And I also
22:41 appreciated that this is the first half in a two-part saga, but it feels like a movie that
22:47 functions onto itself. It has a proper three-act structure, and it has an ending that, while not
22:54 totally conclusive, it does still have threads left hanging for that second film. It does have
23:00 some degree of resolution. It does have closure at the very end of it that makes it feel satisfying.
23:06 And honestly, they probably could have gone away with calling this a solo sequel, because there are
23:12 many franchises that have sequels that are clearly designed to set up into other installments. It
23:17 kind of feels a little bit like that. Cruise and Macquarie are still a brilliant and formidable
23:23 filmmaking duo, and certainly this is something that you really need to see on the big screen and
23:29 get that proper adrenaline rush out of it. And I look forward to seeing how they manage to somehow
23:36 outdo themselves in the second half. You've probably seen this swish thing in the background
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