No Longer a Part One

Two years ago I watched Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part 1 (which I guess is now going to be known as Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning) in theaters opening weekend. I was legitimately excited for it, not just because a couple of the stunts in the film looked pretty awesome, but because, over time, I’d become quite a big Mission: ImpossibleIntroduced in 1966, the original Mission: Impossible featured a team of agents (with varying skills) heading out into the field to solve puzzle-box like cases on a weekly basis. This simple concept spawned a long-running series, a second series in the 1980s, and a hugely successful movie franchise starring Tom Cruise that continues today. fan. Not from the TV shows so much, at least not from what I saw of the 1966 series anyway, but the movies. While the first two films (Mission: Impossible and Mission: Impossible II) aren’t that great, the films from Mission: Impossible III on just got better and better. That culminated with Mission: Impossible: Fallout, the sixth film in the franchise and, arguably, an all-time franchise peak. That meant, going into the seventh film, I was hyped. These films were so good, and I really hoped that the seventh film would carry on that great momentum.

It didn’t. I was legitimately disappointed by Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part 1 for a number of reasons. It has an AI storyline that feels like it was not only stolen from Person of Interest but then written by boomers (which, considering Tom Cruise is 62 and has an active hand in all his productions, doesn’t feel that far off). Its marquee stunt, the motorcycle jump onto a moving train, actually doesn’t feel that exciting on screen. But, worst of all, it just goes on, and on, and doesn’t really feel like it gets anyway, in large part because it was designed as a two-part film, and it ends on a massive cliffhanger.

Still, I know from experience that sometimes when I get really hyped for a film I can also, then, get easily disappointed if it doesn’t meet my exceptionally high standards. I had that happen back in the day with Mystery Men, the goofy, superhero comedy that wasn’t at all like the trailers made it out to be. Across the years, though, I’ve watched that film again and again to the point where it’s one of my go-to favorites now. There have been other films like that as well, movies that I hated the first time I saw them but then got better when I gave them a second chance, so I decided, hey, why not do the same for this seventh Mission: Impossible film? If nothing else, it gives me a chance to reacquaint myself with the film before going to see the eighth one now that it’s finally playing in my podunk small town.

So last night I went through the film again just to see if my analysis of the film was still the same. On the happy side, I did like the film better the second time around. Knowing where the film is going, and understanding the plot from beginning to end, I didn’t hate the story as much as I did before. Plus, it also let me enjoy all the stunt sequences I knew were coming so I could get into them better. I still don’t think the film is that great, and certainly nowhere near the standards of Mission: Impossible: Fallout, but it is a watchable blockbuster for the series that, if the next film is good, might just actually hold up better upon consequent rewatches.

Let’s be clear: the main storyline of this film is still awful. It has the smack of J.J. Abrams “Mystery Box” storytelling, with the heroes sent out to find a gizmo, but to get that gizmo they have to get another gizmo, and to get that one they first have to get a different gizmo. It’s that repeated, “to go here first go here” beats over and over again that reminded me, in a bad way, of Star Wars, Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker. “Rey, we have to go get this knife, so we can get a holocron, so we can find a planet, so we can stop the Emperor.” It’s bad storytelling.

The issue with this kind of thing is that, for the plot to keep going, the heroes essentially have to get the MacGuffin at each stop. If they don’t, the story ends and there’s no finishing the plot. This sucks all the excitement and intrigue out of the film because, obviously, each little gizmo is going to get collected, there’s just no other way for the film to work. Worse, it feels like the plot knows this, so it starts at the end of the film with our hero, Ethan Hunt, holding the completed key to get to the evil AI (in the next film) and then it writes backwards say, “to get the full key he has to get each piece, so this is how he got the second, and to get that he had to get the first, and then this is how he learned all about it.”

Put another way, the film doesn’t feel organic. Naturally Ethan is always given his mission at the start of the film, with the usual, “if you choose to accept it,” speech (spoiler: he always does). He never just stumbles onto a mission because that’s not the formula of these films. But even by that logic, where we know going in what the first stop of his adventure will be, this storyline feels linear and prescribed. We’re on a moving train and can’t escape because the film has no way to get off the rails it’s locked onto.

Fittingly, the best action sequence of the film is the climax on a train, which is actually great. But it also kind of acts like a metaphor for the film because once we’re on that train we’re truly locked in. All the players are there, all the pieces of the puzzle are in place, and the inevitable ending we’ve been writing towards this whole time plays out without much in the way of surprises. The action is fantastic, don’t get me wrong. The train sequence is a showstopper. It doesn’t make up for lazy writing, though.

We’re locked onto that metaphorical train (before we get to the real one) because the story uses what feels like a very tired MacGuffin at the center of it all: that AI. The villain of the piece, Esai Morales's Gabriel, is in league with the evil AI that wants to rule the world. He gets all his orders from the AI and knows all the outcomes of what will happen (because the computer has run all the scenarios) such that he can just coast through the whole movie following his prescribed path. It’s like he’s already read the script and can follow the beats, scene to scene, with an indifferent air. Hell, Morales plays the character as such, which doesn’t exactly make him a compelling villain.

I think this is a problem with the way the show writes its story. Because the AI has complete control, and has an agent working for it, the story can have him move through the story with ease. Compare that to Person of Interest, where the heroes only ever got a social security number they had to track down, doing all the research and investigating themselves. They never knew what kind of case they were on, which meant that their search was as compelling as the result in the end. While that show played around with its formula and eventually introduced its own AI-guided human agents it never lost sight of the formula that worked.

Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part 1 doesn’t have a formula that works. It introduces its villain too quickly, makes it (and its agent) too powerful too early, and it sucks a lot of the fun out of the proceedings. And that sucks because I think there’s a core idea that actually does work here that the film doesn’t address anywhere as well as it should have: Gabriel is Ethan’s darker half and, like Ethan, he has a team of people working with him on his own (evil) impossible mission.

I liked this aspect of the film a lot. Gabriel was running around, doing the missions given to him, just like Ethan has always done. Both of them got their choice for the life they are currently leading after some crime they were committing (which isn’t detailed well in this seventh film) went bad. And Gabriel even has a team, or at least one other member working with him: Pom Klementieff’s Paris. He’s the opposite of Ethan, but done in such a way that he’s running the same kinds of missions. If the film had done this, whether with an AI gently shoving them in the right direction or not, then I think that could have been really interesting.

That or they needed to make him a frothing at the mouth true believer. He needed to be more charismatic, more invested, more insane than the character Morales plays here. We need to understand why he would choose to work with this AI, what its real goals are or why he feels like he can trust it. The film handwaves all this way saying, “AI bad, Gabriel works for it,” as if that’s enough explanation. It’s not, and it leaves the film feeling really underbaked.

With all that said, it is still a fun and slick action film. It’s entirely possible that many of these flaws can be course corrected in the follow up, Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning, and if that’s the case it’ll make this first half work better. But the fact is that we shouldn’t need a second film to correct the mistakes of the first one; those mistakes shouldn’t have been made to begin with. The film feels like it was drafted and then filmed with Christopher McQuarrie (writer and director) and Cruise saying, “we’ve made a few of these in a row and they’ve all been huge successes. We know what we’re doing.”

Maybe they did, but they didn’t get it right on this seventh film. They rushed it in, trusted their own judgement a little too much, and certainly got way too ambitious with a two-part mega film to cap their series (assuming this just released eighth film really is the last of the current series). If they had pared back their mega-film plan just a little, and focused on the parts of the film that worked, we could have had an excellent seventh film. Instead they tried too hard to top their excellent Mission: Impossible: Fallout, going with the idea that, “bigger is better and we know what we’re doing.” They overshot and under-delivered and now their eighth film has to correct the series… if that’s even possible now. I suppose we’ll see soon enough…