Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning review : Cine Observer

Film: Mission:Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
Director:Christopher McQuarrie
Cast: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff and others
Writers: Christopher McQuarrie & Erik Jendresen
Producers: Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie
Duration:164 minutes
Rating: 3.5 stars

Director Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible -Dead Reckoning manages to live up to its high expectations.

The film, which is the seventh instalment in the Mission: Impossible series, has Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team taking on a faceless enemy more potent than any human — Artificial Intelligence (AI).

It all begins with a sinister development that is shrouded in mystery.

Deep in the ocean, a Russian nuclear submarine that prides itself in having the latest stealth technology is alarmed at having been spotted by an enemy sub. It senses the enemy submarine firing torpedoes at it and responds in kind only to suddenly find both the enemy sub and its torpedos disappear like a mirage. However, it is sunk by the very same torpedos that it fired at the enemy!

Soon, we get to know that an advanced AI programme called ‘The Entity’, with the capacity to trigger global wars, has gone rogue. The only way to control or destroy The Entity is through a key that has two halves.

Needless to say, there is a mad race among all the top countries to find the two halves of the key as this will enable them to control the Entity and thereby acquire supremacy over others.

The IMF tasks Ethan Hunt with finding the key, not to control the programme but to destroy it.

One half of the key is held by an MI6 agent called Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson), someone whom Ethan Hunt considers close and has looked out for. The other is with a highly tricky character called Grace (Atwell), a woman who is highly thankless and exceptionally skillfull when it comes to stealing /pickpocketing.

How Hunt overcomes this challenge with his team is what Mission : Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One is all about.

Tom Cruise is just awesome in the film. This is one person who does not seem to age, no matter what.

The man is as dedicated as ever, performing all the highly dangerous stunts all by himself. Be it jumping from a cliff on a bike or scrambling from one plummeting coach to another, Cruise is just as nimble and sensational as ever.

Rebecca Ferguson as Ilsa wins your heart and you find yourself rooting for her.

Writers Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen need to be congratulated for coming up with a story that is timely and highly relatable.

The idea to have a plot with AI as the antagonist is simply brilliant and strikes a chord.

The film releases at a time when AI chatbots like ChatGPT are literally throwing millions of people out of jobs around the world and several top experts expressing concern that AI could signal the end of humanity.

Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One, like all the other parts of the franchise, is just exceptional and worth watching.