(courtesy IMP Awards)
Blockbusters, at least the big, loud, sprawling modern variant that take up gigantic screen but leave little lasting impression in their wake, aren’t supposed to have any emotional impact on you.
They are supposed to come in , wow you with spectacle writ large, impress with breakneck segues from frenetic action scene to an equally manic one, and finish off their story with the kind of justice-served ending we all supposedly crave; oh, and leave a huge box office pile of cash in their wake.
They aren’t, at least again not the modern kind, supposed to make any kind of emotional impact on you, and yet that’s pretty much what Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One does, or at the very least, and you have give Tom Cruise who plays lead protagonist Ethan Hunt, and director Christopher McQuarrie (who co-wrote the screenplay with Erik Jendresen) points for attempting, tries to do.
The long-running franchise which kicked off with in 1996 with Mission: Impossible, which itself was inspired by the 1966-73 TV series created by Bruce Geller, has always done its best to be both action epic and emotionally intimate, with family the narrative core around which much of the storyline was wrapped.
Here were a group of people, who because international espionage is a deadly and messy game, had a reasonably frequent change in personnel – save for our lead character Hunt who is damn near immortal – who were bound tightly together, partly by circumstance but mostly by the fact that they were people on the wrong side of the law who had been offered a chance by the now-quaintly named (but Sixties-hip) Impossible Missions Force (IMF).
An impelling push for their togetherness as a team, apart from defeating whoever they were asked to take down, a mission rather quaintly that they could choose to accept or not before their instructions self instructed (no doubt doing wonders for long-term information retention), was that the US-backed IMF would disavow any knowledge of them if they were captured or killed.
So, they pretty much only had each other, and while that’s also formed the beating heart core of the storylines, it’s amped to a considerable degree in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, almost to the point where the action takes a backseat to long involved conservations and vital if slightly overdone expositional moments.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing if you value who these characters are and what they stand for and mean to each other; after all, while seeing Ethan leaping off cliffs or racing to keep climbing up a crumbling line of train carriages into a ravenous gorge is enthralling, you’re largely there because he and his team really mean a lot to each other.
The good part is that key characters from the previous films and back their wittily conservational and eminently capable thing.
Both Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) are back, having enter the franchise in the first and third entries in the franchise respectively, and it’s their presence, and the return of Ilse Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), the MI6 agent on the outer, that gives this absolute firecracker of a film much of its driving heart and soul.
They anchor some fairly fantastical stunts and outrageously good action scenes which include a car chase through Rome which defies belief stunt-wise but which resonates with the humanity of people on the run, which in this case includes Hunt and new proto-team member Grace (Hayley Atwell) who get the job done but look accessibly sh*t scared to be doing it too.
It’s that element that really adds to the enjoyment of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.
With Grace, a thief who gets inadvertently caught up in a plot well beyond her pay grade – the fate of the world is well and truly in the balance too and in a vert digitally terrifying, of-the-moment way – and Hunt chained together (long story but fun), this is one car chase that honestly could have done the job of utterly enthralling us on driving stunts alone.
But into this wrecking ball blitz of driving thrills and spills, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One throws in some truly affecting human moments, no mean feat when the movie is moving along at a pace so brisk blinking may mean missing some truly impressive vehicular shenanigans.
It does this again and again in such a satisfyingly substantive way that Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One feels at every stage like a fully-formed blockbuster that deliver all the emotions and humanity you need to make the jaw-dropping action scenes feel like they mean something.
A lot of what matters to people, even the bad guy Gabriel (Esai Morales), is funnelled into the full speed ahead narrative, accomplished by giving the narrative time to breathe and for the characters to stop, collect themselves and react as real people would in situations that push the extra well and truly into the ordinary.
There’s a real trick to making an over-the-top blockbuster, and let’s face it, a reasonable part of what makes this franchise so damn good to watch is its escapism-laced pushing of the reality envelope, feel lived-in and human-sized so we can stand some chance of emotionally relating to it, but Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One accomplishes that and then some and rarely puts a foot wrong as it does so.
It’s that tight and superbly well-realised merging of escapist action and the emotionally grounded that makes the film such a treat to watch, and as you’re hurtling off that cliff face with Hunt on his motorbike or rattling down stone steps in Rome, you’re not thrilled to the nth degree but feeling something too and that is what a good blockbuster, no, a great one, should be like.
You should get your action-loving buttons well and truly pushed and feel like Hunt and his team are making the real world dance to their team-oriented tune, even if they seem to barely survive their attempts to do that, but you need to be invested in what’s happening to them for the action to truly mean anything, andMission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One ticks all those boxes, delivering up one of the finest actions in a while. and certainly a worthy successor to 2018’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout which, itself, rewrote the record books and made us realise again just how good action films can be.