The Sincerity and Absurdity of Hollywood’s Best Action Franchise

In Top Gun: Maverick, the big Tom Cruise blockbuster of 2022, the enemy was purposefully obscure—a villainous but unspecified nation ready to be outdone by our hero’s guts and derring-do without alienating any overseas theatergoers. That film was designed as a cinematic high five, a much-needed dose of big-screen optimism for viewers returning to theaters as the pandemic receded. Now, a little more than a year later, comes Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One, the latest edition of Cruise’s other big franchise. Once again, he’s squaring off with a faceless villain, but rather than staging a new cold war, the film has shifted its focus toward a more modern apocalypse, lending a shocking jolt of relevance to a series that should be gasping for ideas nearly 30 years into its run.

In the Mission: Impossible films, Cruise plays Ethan Hunt, a secret agent of uncommon athleticism and galaxy-size overconfidence who never saw a brewing nuclear crisis he couldn’t fight off with a combination of funny masks and Cirque du Soleil–level stunt work. Though the series, based on the 1960s TV show, has been ongoing since 1996, it somehow reached new heights with 2018’s Fallout, defying the age-related gravity that eventually brings even the biggest names back down to Earth. (See: Indiana Jones.) As the 61-year-old Cruise’s career races on with no sign of slowing down, each new movie feels like a manifesto on the importance of his continued existence. Dead Reckoning Part One is yet another, pitting Ethan against an all-powerful artificial intelligence that has no personality, no soul, and, most important, absolutely no star power. This is the future that old Hollywood fears, one in which computers make every decision. The running, jumping, deeply analog Ethan is the perfect man to stop it—right?

Pretty much. Dead Reckoning Part One is another swaggering delight in the series, with director Christopher McQuarrie yet again finding some actual narrative grist in the continued adventures of the world’s silliest superspy. In having Ethan do battle with a ruthless AI dubbed “The Entity,” which wants to control the world’s governments, the film holds him up as an exemplar of humanity—a bold gambit, perhaps, given that Cruise is one of our strangest celebrities, but one the Mission: Impossible movies have been nudging forward for quite a while now. Someone like James Bond might be the best at what he does, but he’s still an extension of the state, and ultimately a ruthless person as a result. Hunt is technically part of America’s intelligence apparatus, but he rejects any notion of “the greater good,” instead stretching reality however he can to save everyone around him and the world at the same time.

Surrounding Ethan is his usual gaggle of pals: the tech guys Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), and the multitalented British spy Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson). The big additions to the mix are two more femmes fatales, an expert pickpocket named Grace (Hayley Atwell) and an assassin named Paris (Pom Klementieff). And though our villain is nothing more than a glowing sphere that lives in the cloud, it does have a human emissary of sorts, the seething terrorist Gabriel (Esai Morales, sporting a perfectly cropped salt-and-pepper beard). All of them are hunting for a set of special keys that will do … something to the Entity; as is usual for Mission: Impossible, the details are pretty unimportant.

[Read: What Mission: Impossible understands about Tom Cruise]

Still, fans of McQuarrie’s high-energy approach in the series’ prior two films might be surprised at the extent to which this entry remembers the other side of spycraft. There’s a lot of double-crossing and murky alliance-making, evoking the twisty espionage of Brian De Palma’s first Mission: Impossible, way back in 1996; to underline it, the nervy character actor Henry Czerny returns as Eugene Kittridge, now the CIA chief, who hasn’t appeared since that 1996 installment. He’s there largely to highlight the ongoing absurdity of Hunt’s “Impossible Mission Force,” the quasi-governmental agency that somehow exists alongside America’s regular intelligence apparatus and recruits agents who are better at close-up magic than they are at hand-to-hand combat.

Though the computerized Entity is the main villain, Kittridge represents an element that’s just as important in these movies: the stuffed shirt who sputters impotently as Ethan and his friends defy all logic on their way to saving the day. Dead Reckoning Part One still has plenty of wild stunts—like Ethan riding a motorcycle off a mountain, and doing martial arts atop the Orient Express—but there’s more than a hint of melancholy in between all the action, and a hint of worry that maybe the good times can’t last forever in the face of all this bureaucratic, algorithmic thought. Given that this is a Part One, the film’s conclusion is inevitably less satisfying than a proper third act, but this is a worthy entry in America’s best ongoing franchise, one where sincerity and absurdity walk hand in hand with vital, triumphant conviction.