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.

Tom Cruise (Top Gun: Maverick, War of the Worlds) is back as Ethan Hunt, a senior field agent for The Impossible Mission Force (IMF) with his comrades Luther (Ving Rhames – Dawn of the Dead, Pulp Fiction) and Benji (Simon Pegg – Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead). The film’s plot is relatively simple, though its improbability is a bit more far-fetched (though that’s what we would suspect in a Mission IMPOSSIBLE film). A two-part cross-like key that unlocks a threatening computer device (referred to as The Entity) and its source code has gone missing after Sevastopol, a next-generation Russian submarine that the key was being transported on somewhere in the Arctic Sea,  inadvertently torpedoes itself, killing everyone onboard and scattering the two parts of the key across the world.

Not knowing precisely what The Entity does at the film’s onset and only receiving the truth and details of what he needs to know to retrieve the two parts of the key, Ethan is briefed by IMF director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny – The A-Team, The Exorcism of Emily Rose), learning the catastrophic potential of a functional key. Kittridge’s intelligence leads him to believe that British MI6 skilled assassin, secret agent, and former IMF member Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson – Life, The Greatest Showman) is in possession of the first half of the key (holding it for safekeeping) and that there is a $50 million bounty on her head. The White Widow (Vanessa Kirby – The World to Come, Pieces of a Woman) has the second half of the key. Several influential players are willing to do anything to get possession of both halves of the key, whether for a multi-billion dollar payday or to have an all-encompassing power to control or destroy Earth. The mission is to stop that from happening.

Dead Reckoning Part 1 is a fantastic game of cat and mouse as Ethan and his team travel the globe, attempting to track down the two key halves. What makes this film unique is the enemy. While sometimes confusing, the AI adapts to the situation and prohibits Ethan and his team from doing their thing. McQuarrie also does an adept job of integrating new characters into the franchise, such as Grace (Hayley Atwell – Blinded by the Light, Christopher Robin), a skilled pickpocketer for hire whose moral compass is put to the test the more she learns about her own mission that she initially agreed to and Gabriel (Esai Morales – La Bamba, Freejack), the film’s ruthless, main antagonist, who will stop at nothing to gain ownership to the key and access to its infinite possibilities.

A fair criticism of the movie is if there is a need for a two-part film to have each of the two halves approaching three hours in length. Couldn’t a three-hour action movie tell the whole story? What happens when Dead Reckoning Part 2 is released a year from now? Will the people who didn’t see Part 1 be interested in seeing Part 2? Won’t you lose the audience who watched Part 1 but didn’t enjoy it? Those are fair questions and considerations. While franchises occasionally break up a longer story into two parts, more times than not, it is the culminating movie in a franchise and not one in a series that will seemingly continue for many more years.

I was frustrated when I learned that a film that passed my preferred 125-minute maximum runtime was only the story’s first half. However, Dead Reckoning Part 1 has a beginning, middle, and end that tell a complete story. Without surrendering any details, there is a satisfactory conclusion that excites you for what is to come rather than leaving you with a frustrating cliffhanger. Also, while this film’s runtime is 163 minutes, it whizzes by. It is an exciting, edge-of-your-seat action film tucked in neatly with elements of intelligently placed humor, which would be expected in this franchise, especially since 2011’s Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol. This is much more a suspense/thriller type of movie than an action/adventure, but there are plenty of both. You will not find yourself looking at your watch, wondering when the film will end.

Plot 8/10
Character Development 8.5/10
Character Chemistry 8.5/10
Acting 9/10
Screenplay 9/10
Directing  9.5/10
Cinematography 10/10
Sound 10/10
Hook and Reel 10/10
Universal Relevance 10/10
92.5%

Movies You Might Like If You Liked This Movie

• Mission Impossible: Fallout
• Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation
• Jack Reacher
• Top Gun: Maverick
• Edge of Tomorrow