"Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part I": review

Esai Morales as Gabriel (L); Pom Klementieff as Paris (R)—both stunned by the appearance of Barbenheimer

[WARNING: some spoilers.]

Oh, where even to begin with 2023's "Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part I"? It's an espionage action-thriller that would have done better in the theaters had it not been up against the combined might of the juggernaut known as Barbenheimer: the one-two punch of the movies "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer." As things stand, though, Christopher McQuarrie's latest entry in the spy franchise performed disappointingly, possibly not even making a profit. The movie's reported cost was $297 million, which means it would have had to make close to a billion dollars just to break even. Instead, the movie earned about $568 million, which sounds like a lot but is actually a pittance given the film's budget. "Dead Reckoning" is Part I of a two-part story, though; we can only hope that Part II is better placed on the release calendar for maximum profit. I watched the movie twice when it came out on Apple TV—once before my latest trans-Korea walk, and once after coming back. Perhaps that answers the basic question of whether a movie is good enough to be rewatchable, but for me, the truth of the matter is more complicated because the movie is a frustrating mix of good and bad.

"Dead Reckoning" stars Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Mariela Garriga (seen only in flashbacks), Cary Elwes, and Henry Czerny (returning from the first film as Kittridge). It continues the theme of shape-shifting, elusive enemies found in just about all of the previous movies, but this time, the enemy is an AI known only as the Entity.

As the movie begins, a Russian submarine called the Sevastopol has been using a military AI to engage with enemy fleets across the world, proving the AI is capable of turning the sub into an invisible killing machine. What the sub's operators do not know, but are about to discover, is that the AI seems to have an agenda of its own. It causes the sub's crew to think an enemy is about to attack it, and when the Sevastopol launches a live torpedo, the target image disappears, and the launched torpedo—now controlled by the AI and impossible to deactivate—swings around and destroys the Sevastopol. A two-part cruciform key that had been used to access the AI's source code is lost in the explosion and mysteriously recovered; the key's halves are separated, and we fast-forward a few months to find Ethan Hunt (Cruise) in pursuit of agent and lover Ilsa Faust (Ferguson), who may be in possession of half of the key. Ethan isn't clear, at first, as to what the key accesses, but he infiltrates an Intelligence Community meeting that includes his old handler Eugene Kittridge (Czerny) and learns about the Entity. Knowing that various world powers want control of the Entity—a control that the key purportedly provides—Ethan vows to kill the AI so that no one can control it, and so that it can no longer be a threat to the world. He tracks the other half of the key to Abu Dhabi International Airport, UAE, but his plans are spoiled by the arrival of Grace (Atwell), a slick professional thief also targeting the half-key. Despite the help of friends and teammates Benji Dunn (Pegg) and Luther Stickell (Rhames), Ethan loses Grace. He also catches a glimpse of an old enemy he'd thought long dead: Gabriel (Morales), a man who had killed someone close to Ethan before Ethan became an Impossible Mission Force (IMF) agent. As the plot unfolds, Ethan learns that Gabriel has become something like an enfleshed representative of the Entity, an artificial superintelligence that possesses a sort of middle knowledge based on its ability to run innumerable calculations per millisecond that allow it to "foresee" every possible and probable outcome. The Entity's ultimate motives remain unclear, but Gabriel seems to have put all of his faith into it and is its willing servant, prophet, and enforcer. Further complicating matters is the White Widow, Alanna Mitsopolis (Kirby), who has aligned herself with Gabriel to assure that the two halves of the key end up in the hands of a particular buyer. Gabriel doesn't make things easy for Ethan, either: when Ethan, Gabriel, Grace, the White Widow, and Paris all meet at a party in Venice, Gabriel tells Ethan something the Entity figured out: that either Grace or Ilsa would die that very night. One of them does (seemingly) die, causing Ethan's thoughts to turn to revenge, but Luther reminds Ethan that he can't kill Gabriel: the Entity is probably counting on either Ethan's or Gabriel's death to further its plans, and leaving Gabriel alive represents a third option that the Entity likely sees as improbable.

I wanted to like this Tom Cruise movie more than I did, especially after the smash hit that was "Top Gun: Maverick." There's plenty of action; the pacing is smooth and even; the alternating rhythm of action and quiet gives the viewer time to breathe. The car chase in Rome has some head-turning moments, as does the massive Orient Express sequence that marks the end of Part I. Despite all of this, there were aspects of the movie that I found annoying—even vexing.

Some of the casting choices nearly took me out of the film: in the scene with Kittridge and the Intelligence Community, two or three of the actors were people I recognized from "Game of Thrones," and that was distracting. Another actor in that same scene had played a prominent admiral in "Top Gun: Maverick," so seeing him again playing opposite Tom Cruise almost took me right out of the movie. I also didn't like how the dialogue was often written to have characters finishing each other's sentences. This is not a realistic depiction of how people in groups normally talk: real group talk tends to be a bit more chaotic and interruptive. This weird conversational dynamic happens at two or three crucial points throughout the film, like a hive mind talking to itself, and I found myself shifting around uncomfortably in my seat as a result. There were also a few too many occasions in which Grace—played by the fetching Hayley Atwell—would escape from Ethan and stare meaningfully at him while a door closed. The movie's major chase/action sequences, albeit impressive, all felt as if they went on too long; the buildup to Ethan's arrival on the Orient Express (he crashes through a window after parachuting down to the train) felt like the laborious buildup to the punchline of a well-worn joke: you already know how it's going to end, but you have to slog through the long prelude first to get there. The parachute scene begins with a motorcycle jump that was heavily advertised and re-shown ad nauseam on YouTube and elsewhere. When you finally see it in context in the movie, it has little impact on your psyche. The "wow" factor is gone because you've seen the cliff jump a hundred times already, and you know all the trivia about how Cruise did the stunt himself, and how the filmmakers used CGI to cover the fact that the jump actually took place by means of a prefabricated ramp. It's a moment that should have been awesomely magical but was undone by over-aggressive marketing.

The movie, which deals with themes like trust and friendship, seems to want to say something about choice and freedom versus predestination, and as I've noted multiple times in the past about other stories, it associates good with choice, freedom, possibilities, and openness; and evil with plans, fate, strictures, and foreknowledge. We've seen this in the Star Wars films: Vader and the Emperor use expressions like If that is your destiny and I have foreseen it to describe their fatalistic interpretation of the Force while Yoda calmly tells us that "Always in motion is the future." In the Matrix movies, Agent Smith sees everything in terms of inevitability while Neo affirms that he persists because he chooses to. In "The Dark Knight," the Joker, despite calling himself an agent of chaos, has the supernatural ability to concoct complicated, Rube Goldberg-like schemes that always somehow come together through a combination of uncanny timing and a series of seeming coincidences, but his plan to have Gotham's citizens kill each other is foiled when the citizens themselves exercise their power of choice and refuse to play the Joker's game. In The Lord of the Rings, Sauron creates plans and strategies to dominate the world, but he is undone by the actions of the "humblest" of creatures—the hobbits (we can arguably include Gollum here since he started life as a hobbit himself)—quietly chaotic, under-the-radar beings that Sauron probably had little regard for and whose free agency he probably thought of as beneath his attention. In The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Lord Foul the Despiser, a devil-figure in an alternate universe, creates plans within plans while the hero, Thomas Covenant, understands that victory comes through the free exercise of choice.

But "Dead Reckoning" is unsure of how exactly to treat its AI villain. Because the Entity is an amorphous agent, it's up to the human cast members to offer exposition. Luther seems to come closest to understanding that the AI is ruthlessly logical. Whenever he talks about the Entity, he talks in terms of possibility trees and explores various probable alternatives. Everyone else, meanwhile, tries to humanize or even deify the artificial intelligence in some way. Ethan claims, at one point, that the Entity is "afraid" of what its enemies know and can do. He even calls the Entity a "god" in front of Gabriel, who does seem to act as if he were some sort of high priest of this machine consciousness. Benji, when confronted with what turns out to be a fake bomb, claims the Entity "knows" things about him, like his surname.

So the movie leans heavily in the direction of personifying the Entity—of treating it more as a who than as a what. The very notion of "killing" it implies that the thing has life. As a result, I think people watching the movie can relax because this isn't meant to be an accurate or realistic portrayal of AI at all. For a thing to act in its own defense or aggrandizement, for example, it has to possess an actual spark of real life. Biological life on Earth has the impulse to survive and/or reproduce, but there's no reason to believe that an AI would suddenly acquire a "desire" or "urge" to protect, expand, or enhance itself. No: what "Dead Reckoning" does is give us a cartoonish version of AI that can't—and isn't meant to—be taken seriously.

There's also a risk, story-wise, in making AI the enemy: if it has no shape, form, or center, how do you expect to kill it? The movie "Avengers: Age of Ultron" also failed to give an adequate answer to this question. In that movie, the antagonist Ultron began as an AI that essentially inhabited global computer networks and gained power as it grew. While Ultron eventually created a specific robotic body for itself (which allowed us viewers to focus on something), it still could have distributed itself around the world such that killing the robot body would have done nothing to Ultron's "essence." In "Dead Reckoning," one character specifically claims that the Entity has "no center," but I suspect that, in Part II, we're going to discover that the thing does have a center, in the form of either something physical or its source code. Prediction, then: Part II is going to end the way so many alien-invasion movies do: find the mothership (i.e., the center) and destroy it, thereby destroying all of its ramifying tendrils. As plot devices or tropes go, this is an overused, cliché idea, but I don't see the movie ending any other way... unless the screenwriters decide to go balls-out and end Part II on an inconclusive note, with the possibility that the Entity is out there and will reappear someday. Then again, you could counterargue that "find the center and kill it" is as ancient a trope as shooting an animal in the head. What are animals if not coordinated collections of cells?

I'm also unclear as to what the key does, aside from maybe providing access to the Entity's source code. The movie's opening scene, in which the Sevastopol gets destroyed, seems to show that possessing the key offers no guarantee of control of the AI. So of what use is the key, really? The movie heavily implies the key is the way to the Entity's source code, but it could be that the key has a completely different purpose and function.

Luckily, this amorphous AI is given distinctness and focus in the form of Gabriel, played with cold menace by Esai Morales, who seems to be having a lot of fun in this role. Morales may in fact be the movie's saving grace: he's a sort of anti-Morpheus, a cool, collected prophet and true believer who seems to have placed all of his faith in this cybernetic intellect that he may indeed see as a god. In the climactic scene on top of the Orient Express, when Gabriel and Ethan are fighting, Gabriel keeps looking at his watch until the correct moment, then he lets himself fall off the train and right onto the padded floor of a waiting flatbed truck. This move implies that everything up to that moment had been perfectly coordinated: the speed of the onrushing train, the positions of Ethan and Gabriel as they fought—everything. So Gabriel has reason to believe in his side, the side of predestination, strictures, and foreknowledge. But Ethan outfoxes Gabriel on one score: he manages to pickpocket the cruciform key from Gabriel before the bad guy lets himself fall off the train.

Gabriel aside, we can add a sloppy notion of AI to the long list of this movie's sins. As with many cinematic attempts at science fiction, "Dead Reckoning" makes a hard swerve left into religion. The movie is arguably more for people like me—people with a religious-studies background—than for people looking for a hard sci-fi depiction of machine intelligence. By that standard, it's entirely appropriate for Ethan to call the Entity a god and to ascribe emotions like fear to it. But if the thing truly can emote, then by implication, we should also see moments of anger, triumph, and grim delight as the AI's plans come to fruition.

That said, the movie's human cast is a plus. Tom Cruise, that old battleship, keeps doing his own stunts (he's 61 as I write this), and his acting remains passionate and earnest, but he still needs to work on his exceedingly poor French. Simon Pegg's Benji isn't as front-and-center as he's been in other movies, but Pegg plays Benji with the frazzled comic energy we've come to expect. Ving Rhames, meanwhile, remains a solid, serious presence, and as I mentioned earlier, his Luther is the only one who seems to understand the Entity on its own terms: as a cold, ruthless machine. We are blessed with a bevy of lovely ladies this time around: Vanessa Kirby (who still reminds me of Lady Gaga in profile) is stunningly blonde and flinty; dark-eyed brunette Hayley Atwell has that hard-to-deny come-hither look and smile; Rebecca Ferguson—who has been my crush since "Rogue Nation"—is once again a knockout as Ilsa Faust even if her character suffers what I think is a thoroughly undeserved plot twist (that I sincerely hope will be undone in Part II... but I'm not optimistic). Pom Klementieff's character Paris doesn't say much; she's a French assassin who loves her work a little too much and proves to be a wild card by the end. While it was cool to see Cary "As You Wish" Elwes as Denlinger, the National Intelligence director, I thought he played the part with too much of a comic smirk on his face; this made it hard to take him seriously. But the award for Favorite Actor has to go to Esai Morales as Gabriel: deadly quiet, focused, and committed, a willing servant of an evil, alien mind. Morales often plays characters who have a serene, grounded feel to them, but I don't think I've ever seen him apply his skill set to a character who is quite this ominous. Part of me wants to see Gabriel succeed in the next movie; part of me wants to see his stoicism disappear as he's fed feet-first into a wood chipper.

I can imagine a lot of critics liking this movie, but if I were a 1-to-10 type of rater, I'd give the movie a solid 5 because the flaws and the virtues seem to be present in equal measure. I can say with confidence that this is my least favorite of the Mission Impossible films I've seen (I've never watched the first one all the way through). Laborious action sequences, a sloppy portrayal of AI, questionable casting choices (I forgot to mention the comic black-and-white pair of CIA agents who ineffectually chase after Ethan; in particular, Shea Whigham as Jasper Briggs looks as if he's in the wrong film)—the movie's got problems. At the same time, the main cast members all hit their marks well, with special props to Esai Morales for his chilling performance as an evil John the Baptist. So ultimately, I can't say that I recommend the movie; it didn't hit me the right way. But you're welcome to see it and to form your own conclusions. Your mileage, after all, may vary. And while I have no idea whether you'll watch the film or not, I'm sure the Entity already knows how you'll decide.