Hollywood is in a tailspin even Maverick would struggle to pull out of but, somehow, Tom Cruise is resurgent and keeping action filmmaking afloat, even amidst the debris of CGI and corporate woke blandness that is depleting Western culture to junk status. The landscape is in fact so bleak I am reviewing movies at the rate of about one per year.
The plot of Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One is, naturally, another variation on the agent-must-stop-villain/weapon formula done best by the Bond series in its earliest (Sean Connery thru Roger Moore) phases; but, Ethan Hunt is less of a loner than Bond, and fully participates in team building with characters played by more charismatic actors, including Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg, while Rebecca Ferguson—attractive, but not so glamorous as to threaten Cruise’s ability to dominate the screen—is the token action woman. It rips off specific scene ideas from From Russia with Love (1963) and even The Godfather (1976), and has dialogue barely better than that of a typical TV movie, and lacking the warmth—but, nevertheless, keeps up an unrelenting pace, and in the action movie stakes outperforms the competing Fast and Furious series, coming second only to the other recent Cruise vehicle, Top Gun: Maverick (2022).
Cruise has less charisma than original TV series cast members Peter Graves’s or Greg Morris’s cufflinks, but has, amongst leading actors, unmatched ability to run and rapel, and ride, drive or fly anything with a motor—in an age where this sort of effect is most usually created on a computer—as well as hair of unsurpassed versatility. The only thing he can’t do with his body is walk tall, being 5′ 7″—but he fully looks the part in action sequences, and wisely steers clear of attempting Sean Connery-style seductions. The last movie I knowingly saw by director Christopher McQuarrie was Way of the Gun (2000), which was confusing and boring, and starred Ryan Phillippe, who is a mixture of the two qualities in human form.
FATAL VISIONS 