I wonder, sometimes, if I ask a little too much from art. Granted, “thinking too much about art” is what I’ve done for fun since I was about 14 and what I’ve strived to do professionally since I was about 18, so on some level I can’t help it. But I do wonder if my inability to let a movie or a song just be a movie or a song makes me a bit of a killjoy. And I definitely worry if the opinions I’ve given friends and family about movies that I thought were just okay have inadvertently turned them off from watching something that they would have enjoyed. 

This is the dilemma I find myself in with Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the seventh entry in what has evolved from a mid-tier action franchise to what’s now regarded as one of the last bastions of practical Hollywood filmmaking. There’s no denying that Dead Reckoning Part One is an incredible action film, featuring stunts and chases whose in-camera nature gives them a rare sense of physicality and tangibility. But I also can’t help but think, on some level, that’s all this movie is – a sizzle reel of action setpieces, with some plodding expositional scenes in between. It’s a movie I think almost anyone would enjoy, and one they should go see – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t also a little empty.

It doesn’t help that the plot of the film itself is fairly convoluted. The shortest version goes something like this: a sentient algorithm called the Entity tricks a Russian submarine into firing a torpedo at itself, sinking the craft and killing everyone on board. The Entity is controlled in part by a cruciform key (the words “cruciform” and “key” will be uttered in this movie an unfathomable number of times) that the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) wants Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) to retrieve, so that the United States government can use it for their own purposes. After getting half of the key, Hunt decides that the Entity is too dangerous for anyone to use, putting him at odds with the U.S. government, an international arms dealer, and agents of the Entity itself. As is his wont, he goes rogue and assembles a ragtag team of espionage professionals to obtain the key with the goal of eventually destroying the Entity.

The metaphor is hard to miss: the practical-effects-heavy Mission: Impossible films have been celebrated in recent years as a kind of counterbalance to CGI-dependent superhero blockbusters, and Cruise himself has emerged as one of the foremost champions of the theatrical experience. Making a shadowy algorithm – like the kind used by streamers to recommend content – the film’s villain lets Cruise embody the same kind of John Henry-esque role he had in Top Gun: Maverick, where he played a fighter pilot at odds with an Air Force embracing drone warfare. The timing of the film’s release also gives it a sort of grim relevance: both the Writers and Screen Actors guilds are currently on strike, at least in part because the studio bosses have proposed labor deals that could allow them to use artificial intelligence and structurally affect the level of employment or type of work of each unions’ members.

Dead Reckoning Part One makes a spirited case for a number of threatened film techniques, such as live stunts and on-location shooting, through its thrill-a-minute action scenes alone. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, a movie I mostly enjoyed, also featured a globe trotting quest and plenty of well choreographed action scenes, but the environments they took place in never felt like more than digitally-enhanced sets, and the visuals felt rubbery and sterile – I never felt like I was in New York or Tangiers, let alone ancient Syracuse. The visuals in Dead Reckoning Part One feel like an advanced virtual reality rig by comparison. Whether it’s an Abu Dhabi airport, a cramped Venice alleyway, or the cobblestoned streets of Rome, the settings feel refreshingly authentic, and the resulting action is jolting and invigorating. Every crunched bone and crashed car hits you in your chest, and you can practically feel the old stone of the Venice bridges and the gritty sand of the Arabian Desert. 

Meanwhile, the cast itself is a testament to the value of real, live actors, free of any deep faking or de-aging. We can believe that Hunt is so taken in by Grace, the crafty pickpocket who unwittingly finds herself in the middle of the hunt for the key, because we’re also taken in by Hayley Atwell’s performance, because she looks like a real, breathing woman who just so happens to be disorientingly beautiful, not a smoothed over AI approximation of one. The same goes for Pom Klementieff, who gleefully dives headfirst into the role of Entity henchwoman Paris. She’s a coldblooded killer who also wears her emotions on her sleeve, sometimes via a crazed look in her eye when she’s hot on Hunt’s tail, and later by a pained, desperate look when she comes to grips with how the Entity and Gabriel (Esai Morales), it’s primary agent, views her as nothing more than an expendable part. 

However, the script can’t seem to keep pace with these entertaining performances, especially when compared to Top Gun: Maverick, Cruise’s other legacy sequel about the heartlessness of automation. In addition to its thrilling flight sequences, Top Gun: Maverick also featured real human drama – few scenes from 2022 touched me more than Maverick’s meeting with Val Kilmer’s Iceman, who suffers from the same throat cancer that has sidelined Kilmer for the past decade or so. It not only helped hammer home the inherent fragility of humanity, and how that fragility informed Maverick’s overprotective approach to Rooster, the son of his ex-wingman Goose, but also served as kind of a meta-commentary on the way Hollywood treats its aging stars. Kilmer appears without a digitally restored voice or face – a stark contrast to the way a healthy Mark Hamill was replaced by a computer-generated facsimile in The Mandalorian earlier that year. That major studios like Warner Bros., who recently revived George Reeves, Christopher Reeve, and Adam West via subpar digital technology in The Flash, have seemed to ignore its message, only makes it more cutting. 

Unfortunately, we don’t get a similar scene in Dead Reckoning Part One, or at least not one that’s as effective. The film tries to make us care about Ethan Hunt’s connection to both his adversaries and his allies – it’s revealed, through some clumsy expository dialogue, that Gabriel framed Ethan for a murder he did not commit, which causes Luther (Ving Rhames, who’s appeared in all seven Mission: Impossible films) to wonder if Hunt can control his thirst for revenge so as not to compromise the mission. We also get a scene in which Gabriel threatens to take away something Ethan “cares about,” which the film implies is either Grace or Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), a disavowed MI6 agent from Rogue Nation and Fallout who it’s implied may have had some kind of relationship with Ethan. But these threats and motives never stick, because most of the characters in this film are drawn so thinly that they have little personality beyond their proficiency at espionage. 

Cruise’s performance is primarily a physical one – he dashes through airports and jumps off of cliffs with aplomb, but he lacks the devilish charms or obsessive determination he displayed in Maverick. Ferguson’s Faust is a similarly blank slate, and, save for some comedic chemistry displayed during the Rome car chase, the affinity between Atwell’s Grace and Hunt is contrived. The same goes for Benji’s (Simon Pegg) admission to the Entity that the thing he cares most about in his life are “my friends” – ostensibly Luther and Ethan, but once again, we see them exchange little more than mission plans and exposition. Outside of their complementary skill sets, we have little idea why they share an affinity for each other, because the script never lets them truly connect.

I am entirely open to the idea that not every film has to explore the complexities of human relationships and that some movies can just be “fun.” But the problem with Dead Reckoning Part One is that few of the actors seem like they’re having fun themselves. Atwell, as I’ve already mentioned, seems to enjoy deploying a kind of slinky deviousness that she was never allowed to indulge while portraying Peggy Carter in the MCU films; Klementieff goes full throttle insane; and Vanessa Kirby chews up the scenery as the White Widow, an international arms dealer. But the rest of the principle cast – Cruise, Rhames, Pegg, Morales, and Henry Czerny, reprising his role as the steely former IMF head Eugene Kitteridge – are all relatively stone-faced, and any jokes they do try to deliver land with a firm thud. It doesn’t help that much of their dialogue is dedicated to figuring out ways to either please or outsmart a computer program, and keeping up with those endless riddles is really only so compelling when you know another mind-blowing action scene is minutes away.
This was a bit of a problem in the original Mission: Impossible as well, a film that also featured memorable setpieces but whose human drama felt secondary. But even that film featured an unbearable sexual tension between Cruise and Emmanuelle Béart that threatened to burst at any minute. In that film, Ethan Hunt felt like a man on the edge, engaging in a, well, impossible mission because his life literally depended on it. In Dead Reacking Part One he and most of his supporting cast feel perfectly inhuman – like the interchangeable assets the intelligence community wants to treat them as. Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie effectively make the meta case that the human element is still valuable to blockbuster filmmaking – I just wish the characters they used to make that case felt like real humans themselves.