The world is aflutter with Barbie and Oppenheimer right now, and I very much look forward to watching them soon. But I love the Mission Impossible films, and I think it deserves some attention too.
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning is the first part of a duology that will most likely end the MI series, at least with Tom Cruise as the lead. While Part 1 felt like a complete film to me, it sets such high stakes that you know pretty early on that they need more than one film to tell the story. In that way, despite the intensity of the movie, each scene seems to get the time it deserves rather than leaving big chunks of it on the editing room floor.
Speaking of the stakes, the film uses one of my favorite–but rarely used–tropes: Multiple parties are chasing after some puzzle pieces, but they don’t know what the puzzle is (or where it is). The audience knows the answer, but the characters don’t.
This film also uses the MI trope of having characters wear the faces of other characters, which I always enjoy watching because it’s an actor pretending to be someone else pretending to be someone else.
There are almost too many incredible, memorable scenes to mention, and I don’t want to get too spoilery. But if you’re on the fence about seeing the movie and want a taste of what you’re missing, here’s a small sample:
- There’s an amazing chase scene featuring vehicles that could not be more different. The scene is just as intense as it is funny.
- There’s a bare-fisted fight in a tiny alley that reminded me of Oldboy.
- There’s the heavily marketed stunt involving Tom Cruise for real riding a motorcycle off a cliff and then base diving to the bottom. It’s incredible, and it’s at most 3 or 4 cuts. It’s so good yet so fast that I wish they showed it several times.
- There’s train-falling-off-a-cliff scene in which two characters are climbing vertical train cars, each its own distinct environment, barely making it into the next car before it too starts to slowly fall off the cliff. Unlike the motorcycle scene, this scene goes on and on, but in a highly entertaining way.
As you can tell, I highly recommend this movie. I think it’s worth watching in the theater, and I look forward to doing the same for Barbie and Oppenheimer. Let me know your favorite part if you watch it!
I thought the motorcycle jump would be the big finale from how they promoted that scene so heavily–but I liked the train/cliff scene much more! The scenery around the world was spectacular too.
I went to watch the movie because you your (this) recommendation. Especially because I wanted to watch the action scenes on the big screen. I knew I had to pretty much completely ignore the story in this movie, which for me is always hard (believable story in an Mi movie is kinda like a theme in a Euro game… mostly feels pasted on) but I did enjoy the movie a lot. I think the first third of the movie was better than the last two thirds. The highlight was the car chase, it was SO well made, enjoyed that a ton. The train scene was entertaining but nothing new as far as action train scenes go in action movies. The setting of Austrian alps was perfect because we just visited that area, so I liked that a lot. Overall I’ll def watch part two, it was fun, I just wished the action scenes were more unique.
I agree about the car chase, but for the train scene, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie with train cars dangling off a cliff while people try to climb up them. Is there another movie like that?
I remember one of the Jurassic Parks have a similar scene (but I can’t pinpoint which one) and the other I am thinking is one of the Uncharted video games.