Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

⭐ 6.5/10

(Originally written by Tim)

I'll start with the good. There is a fun car chase that involves handcuffs that was delightful, and I loved part of the final action scenes involving a train that felt straight out of unchartered. The effects look pretty good, and I appreciate the practicality and staging. Filming in real life locations is, not surprisingly, really good. Venice and Rome are beautiful places, who knew.

That being said, I didn't think this movie was very good. The plot is so so silly. I get it, no one watches these for the plot. But the AI stuff is so lame and half-baked, feels like someone imagined a room full of 1000 people using typewriters and built the plot around that. Just use a computer that isn't connected to the internet! Not to be a tech-guy, but the amount of buzzwords they throw around that amount to nothing feels so cheap. I loved the bank transfer that involved a loading bar saying "Decrypting blockchain" below it.

The dialog is all so corny and terrible. Again, not the point of the movie, but it makes the stakes feel cheesy, and when a character dies I felt nothing. Felt like it had nothing new to bring to the table, and was just a retread of all the movies before it. The villain is a prophet for an AI that can see the future?

The coolest part of the movie is the classic Tom stunt. Too bad I had seen it 100 times in the lead up to the movie. Why they spoiled that is beyond me, since it should have been really awesome but I felt tuned out.

I thought Hayley Atwell was the best part, and she does a good job as a civilian with some talent but also scared and unprepared in many situations. The slight of hand magician stuff made me laugh, but other than that I felt like this movie took itself so seriously. Tom Cruise is clearly great, and the Ethan Hunt character is interesting, but this whole movie felt like a bloated first half of a reboot.

I think I would rewatch Forgetting Sarah Marshall before rewatching this, so I am at peace with this score. I kept thinking about Top Gun during this movie, since that felt like a better version of the whole legacy sequel thing. That movie had lame dialogue and thin plot, but I cared about those characters and the mission made sense! Tom is kind of the same person in both, and it felt to me like this was trying to evoke the same emotion Top Gun managed to. Maybe I need airplanes to be moved and not trains or subs.