Two points strike me as relevant to Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One which aren’t overtly part of the 2023 film.
In November 2022 ChatGPT was released to the public. Soon came stories of people who believed, against evidence and common sense, that the chatbot was sentient. About 110 years before Dead Reckoning was released an actress named Pearl White was a popular movie star. In her serials, notably The Perils of Pauline, various scheming villains tried to get their hands on some object or another—a box of jewels, a message, whatever the plot required them to want. White referred to these otherwise uninteresting items as “weenies.”
Years later, British screenwriter Angus MacPhail coined the term MacGuffin for the same concept. MacPhail’s frequent collaborator Alfred Hitchcock defined a MacGuffin (or weenie) as an object in a story that the audience doesn’t care about but which the characters do.
Which brings us back to Dead Reckoning. The seventh Mission: Impossible movie, it’s a film about a newly-sentient artificial intelligence in which the characters scramble to get their hands on a MacGuffin that’ll give them control over the rogue AI. Like a chapter of The Perils of Pauline, it’s part of a larger story. But it’s a serial on its own.
Dead Reckoning opens with a Russian submarine being sunk by a malevolent onboard computer, which is controlled by a two-part key. American agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) recovers one part of the key from mysterious MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), crashes a conference of American intelligence officials to get exposition on the threat, then heads off to get the other part of the key and destroy the AI.
Chased by the CIA, Hunt recruits fellow agents Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), and, after failing to get the second half of the key in Abu Dhabi, ends up with a thief named Grace (Hayley Atwell) as part of his crew as well. Hunt also has to deal with an evildoer named Gabriel (Esai Morales), with whom he has a past, and who’s developed a mystical and murderous adoration for the AI, now called the Entity.
After an extended chase in Rome, Hunt ends up at a high-class party thrown by an arms dealer (Vanessa Kirby) and encounters Gabriel. Fights break out, plans are hatched, a woman’s killed so Hunt can have tragedy to overcome, and it all comes to an extended climax aboard the Orient Express.
Writer-director Chris McQuarrie develops and strings out the set-pieces in expert fashion, letting action build and shape character. But here, as in the last movie, there’s too much of a good thing. The film’s just shy of two hours and 45 minutes, which is a lot of time to watch Tom Cruise run around blowing things up.
Cruise at 61 is in remarkable condition and sells the action well. Roger Moore was 58 and too old for the part when he made his last Bond movie, but Cruise handles much more physical work here and pulls it off. Cruise doesn’t establish Hunt as a convincing human character, but that’s not the point of this sort of film. Hunt’s become a step grander, more legendary, with each Mission: Impossible movie; here he’s described seriously as “a mind-reading shape-shifting incarnation of chaos.”
Dead Reckoning has the effect of a collection of connected shorts, like watching a Flash Gordon serial all at one go. And like a one-shot viewing of an entire serial, it’s too long and messy in its overall plot. It also has some vague ideas about artificial intelligence. Never mind that the Entity’s said to have “vanished into the cloud,” whatever that means. The AI’s said to control the truth, but after the first scene we don’t see much of that. It mostly lurks in the background as Hunt and Gabriel fight.
There’s no attempt to communicate with the Entity—this is Mission: Impossible, not a Star Trek movie. It may be a new form of life, but it’s also an apolitical villain that can be defined as utterly hostile to humanity. Why an AI would bother being hostile to humanity isn’t clear. The Entity’s a justification for Cruise to look worried and do cool stunts.
It’s interesting to note that in 2023 the technothriller form is elastic enough that a true artificial general intelligence fits into the genre. Compare, for example, the reviews to the 1978 film The Boys From Brazil; reviewers at the time thought cloning was too implausible for an espionage film, moving it into the realm of science fiction. I’d guess 2023 was likely further away from AGI than Boys From Brazil was from at least animal cloning (a sheep was cloned from embryo cells as early as 1984, while the more famous Dolly, cloned from adult cells, came along in 1996). But audiences, recently made familiar with ChatGPT, bought a sinister AI as a bad guy.
If, then, Dead Reckoning has the episodic plot of an old-fashioned serial, along with a far more modern paranoia about artificial intelligence, is that enough? It isn’t, but add some strong action-movie craft and it makes for a competent if overlong spectacle. Like a middle episode of a serial, there isn’t much of an ending, but at least it says Part One in the title. You can’t say you weren’t warned.