In a summer movie season that has seen the unlikely pairing of Oppenheimer and Barbie dominate the box office, two surefire franchises have found it a bit more difficult than anticipated to generate sales. While Oppenheimer and Barbie have both faired well with critics and audiences, Christopher McQuarrie’s (The Way of the Gun, Jack Reacher) Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One has scored just as well, but whose box office revenue may have been slighted due to the Oppenheimer/Barbie dual release date two weeks after. It may have made the Mission Impossible franchise’s seventh movie out of sight, out of mind a little too quickly. Dead Reckoning Part One is a film that should be seen in the theater, which many will agree with. Saying that it is better than Oppenheimer and Barbie is an unpopular opinion but one that I believe to be true. The novelty of Oppenheimer and Barbie is undoubtedly an allure over the seventh installment of a franchise and is something I do understand and appreciate. However, as a whole, I found Dead Reckoning Part One to be far more entertaining and better executed.
Continue reading Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
There is a moment between the previews and the opening credits of Top Gun: Maverick where Tom Cruise appears as himself, seated in a director’s chair, and welcomes the audience to the film. This is not the first time a film’s lead actor has welcomed an audience and thanked them for coming since the Coronavirus Pandemic began in March 2020. John Krasinski famously did this in the spring of 2021 before the much-delayed 
Mission Impossible: Fallout could be a template for creating action movies. This is everything you want in a pure action movie, offering the same suspense, mystery, and comedic tones you expect from this top-of-the-line franchise. Tom Cruise (Born on the Fourth of July, A Few Good Men) reprises his most recognizable character (Top Gun came out over 30 years ago. Maverick is great, Ethan Hunt is the identifiable Cruise character, at least for anyone younger than 35). I’ve spent a good part of the last two decades knocking Tom Cruise for his choice of roles, wishing he would return to the types of roles that earned him three Academy Award nominations between 1990-2000. And honestly, at the time, I thought he was phoning it in for box office dollars. I understand an action flick here and there.
As my friend Tom would say, directing a Mission Impossible movie is like a doorknob. Everyone gets a turn. This is so true, but not really in a good way. While this franchise undoubtedly improves with each new installment, this wasn’t always the case. My biggest problem with the first four movies of the franchise was how different they were from one another. I have never watched a sequel that was so inherently different in directing, storytelling, cinematography, sound, and everything else from the original than Mission Impossible 2 was from Mission Impossible. John Woo’s Hong Kong-style martial arts action flick was so far completely different from the Brian DePalma intelligent, well-crafted, big-budget adaptation of the brilliant spy television series that ran for seven years in the late 1960s that it felt like the two movies weren’t even related. I don’t necessarily oppose changing a director (though I don’t love it), but I oppose changing styles. Plenty of franchises have had different directors that have made that work (most notably the James Bond franchise, which is similar to Mission Impossible), but many more haven’t.