Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
First, the bad. I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie this over-edited. Editing is essential in action cinema, but some fight scenes were rendered nigh-illegible (e.g., the alleyway fight with Pom Klementieff’s assassin and another goon). The dialog-heavy scenes were worse, though. One scene in particular, an info dump about the movie’s BBEG (an AI known simple as “The Entity”), was reduced to a barrage of exposition by the editing that kept cutting on every single sentence. And I hate to say this, because the Mission: Impossible movies are some of our finest modern action movies, but the action was surprisingly tedious at times, much like the recent Indiana Jones movie. I’m thinking specifically of the car chase in Rome, though to its credit, it had some humorous beats that were sorely lacking in Indy’s film. And finally, the movie did my favorite character dirty (though this being a Mission: Impossible film, I hope they’ll be back). All that said, I still enjoyed Dead Reckoning Part One thanks to Tom Cruise’s total commitment to one-upping himself. (Sidenote: The dude’s 61 years old!) The film’s centerpiece, in which Cruise drives a motorcycle off a cliff, gave me some vertigo (a good thing) and the AI-centric plot felt very apropos given current headlines. But I liked the preceding films, 2015’s Rogue Nation and 2018’s Fallout, a lot more.