While some critics say it ranks below past installments, ”Dead Reckoning“ has been praised as another thrill ride from the IMF
Paramount Pictures
A week away from the release of Paramount’s “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” critics have praised the new film as yet another triumph for its leading man, Tom Cruise, and one of if not the best film of the summer.
While some critics noted that the film doesn’t quite reach the heights of its 2018 predecessor “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” or Cruise’s 2022 Best Picture Oscar nominated “Top Gun: Maverick,” reviews agree it has plenty of the wild and tense set pieces that “Mission” fans have come to expect, including a comedic car chase through the streets of Rome, a nail-biting train chase and a much-marketed shot of Cruise riding a motorcycle off a cliff.
“It is Cruise himself that unlocks this extraordinary and, in the end, surprisingly poignant franchise start to finish, the key to it all even when he’s not dangling from a Dubai skyscraper or attaching himself to an in-flight Airbus,” Tomris Laffry wrote for TheWrap. “Lest we forget, he is one hell of a dramatic actor with the sharpest of blue-eyed stares, carrying the weight of a rootless character through several savagely emotional moments, one of them, genuinely heartbreaking.”
Unlike past “Mission” films, “Dead Reckoning” has been divided into two parts, with the second part coming out in June 2024. While some critics praised the plot’s timely focus on the threats of artificial intelligence, others felt that Ethan Hunt’s personal stakes in this partly finished story aren’t as compelling as in past movies like “Fallout,” and that the plot often feels like a vehicle to transport Cruise to another exciting sequence.
“Cruise’s devotion to practical action and his insistence on doing most of his own stunts, many of them quite dangerous, are already the stuff of legend, or at least a bunch of press releases, and it’s not giving too much away to say that the plot […] is virtually unfollowable after about the first third,” wrote Time’s Stephanie Zacharek. “The story exists only as flimsy interstitial tissue between the Tom-centric stunts, but maybe that’s enough. Ostensibly greater movies have given us less.”
Read more reviews of “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” below:
Charlotte O’Sullivan, London Evening Standard
“That [Cruise], now 61, allegedly does his own stunts, (and sets himself harder tasks the older he gets), is all part of what makes the franchise tick. The moment Ethan throws himself into the void to reach that train is dreamily shocking, partly because the camera angles capture the vastness of that void (these are shots made for Imax screens), partly because it’s so quiet I heard my own gasp.”
Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
“The quality of the action here is, for the most part, more fluid and satisfying than jaw-dropping; there’s nothing here to rival De Palma’s snazziest set pieces, or Ethan’s vertiginous climb up the walls of the Burj Khalifa in ‘Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol,’ or his men’s room demolition derby in ‘Fallout.’ But McQuarrie’s typically fastidious writing (undertaken this time with Erik Jendresen) makes up for whatever his direction may lack in sheer verve. And he does pull off one major cinematic coup: a triumphantly visceral, spatially disorienting, pull-out-the-stops ripsnorter of a climax that seems designed to ensure that no one dares set a movie aboard the Orient Express ever again, for fear of inviting unfavorable comparisons.”
Matt Oakes, Silver Screen Riot
“Though ‘Dead Reckoning’ is a fun ride, it’s hard to shake off comparisons to its predecessor, ‘Fallout,’ which for this critic was a near-perfect embodiment of the action genre and Ethan Hunt’s power as the action genre’s most memorable cultural mainstay. Word on the street is that the next installment is the final one, but they’ve tried to put Hunt in the ground before and were unable to. Let’s hope that if he does get one more ride, it manages to both complete – and top – this first part.”
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
“Tom Cruise’s compact body floats free of the motorbike as it drops to earth from between his diamond-hard thighs, having launched him with a throaty roar off an unfeasibly high cliff-edge; he sails through the sky, pulls the ripcord on a nifty little parachute, and swoops down towards … the speeding Orient Express, fully intent on the traditional carriage-top punch-up. We gasped in the audience. Someone behind me went: ‘Oh shi-i-i …’ Carly Simon should have come in with a new song: Fair Enough, Somebody Does It Better.”
Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com
“‘Dead Reckoning Part One’ prioritizes movement—trains, cars, Ethan’s legs. It’s an action film that’s about speed and urgency, something that has been so lost in the era of CGI’s diminished stakes. Runaway trains will always have more inherent visceral power than waves of animated bad guys, and McQuarrie knows how to use it sparingly to make an action film that both feels modern and old-fashioned at the same time. These films don’t over-rely on CGI, ensuring we know that it’s really Mr. Cruise jumping off that motorcycle. When punches connect, bodies fly, and cars crash into each other—we feel it instead of just passively observing it.”
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