Mission: Impossible 7 Is As Good As We Knew It'd Be

Cruising Back Into The Danger Zone

Agent Ethan Hunt is ready to save the world in style, yet again. Prahlad Srihari reviews.

NO ONE has tackled midlife crisis head-on quite like Tom Cruise. The older he has gotten, the more fiendishly elaborate ways he has found to overcome the nagging fear of mortality. That’s what the Mission: Impossible series is: a delivery system for death-defying set pieces calibrated to the daredevil flair of a human VFX. White-knuckle action — as his calling card — has always taken centre stage. Shards of serpentine plotting fly by on either side of stunts that straddle the line between heroism and lunacy. Lest we forget, this is a man who fired an insurance company for denying him permission to hang off the Burj Khalifa. Perhaps it was Stanley Kubrick making him walk through a door 95 times for a shot in Eyes Wide Shut that broke him. Perhaps it was Scientology. Perhaps he was always broken. What seems to make him whole, however, is making movies for the big screen.

If the world becomes a playground for the invincible force of death in the Final Destination series, the world becomes a playground for Cruise to defy the very same in the Mission: Impossible series. Each peerlessly mounted set piece is at once a distillation and an elaboration of the franchise’s thesis: of a body strained against its limit. Each is a tiny miscalculation away from an obituary with a readymade headline: “He Died Doing What He Loved.” Each is a testament to Cruise’s commitment to delivering an electrifying theatrical experience and nothing less.

IN TOM WE TRUST

Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One Is Every Bit As Good As You Imagined

By Prahlad Srihari

In fine-tuning M:I’s MO of storytelling through set pieces, Cruise has found an ideal lab partner in Christopher McQuarrie, a director who knows how to maximise the visceral appeal of all the derring-do and keep the movie racing along with breathless efficiency. Both share a disciplined glee when it comes to character-driven action. Both place a premium on practical effects in a franchise that has become an oasis among the CGI-fests of Hollywood. As technology threatens to reshape the way movies are made more and more, the franchise’s choice for its Big Bad reaches its logical conclusion in the latest chapter, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. A rogue AI named The Entity goes all Skynet, invading every system in its world-conquering ambitions. It is a nightmarish extension of an algorithmic villain pulled straight from a placard at a WGA picket line. This faceless bogeyman is introduced in the pulse-setting opening minutes where it hoodwinks a Russian submarine into torpedoing itself.

Everything that comes after is in response to that pulse. The Entity, as we find out from CIA boss Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny), could have an analog chink in its digital armour: a key that gives its holder complete control. Upon learning one half of the key is being sold on the black market, intelligence agencies around the world race to retrieve it so as to harness the rogue AI’s power for themselves. In an effort to disrupt their plans, the Entity enlists a chaos agent in Gabriel (Esai Morales). Once again, it is up to IMF superspy Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his usual team — made up of disavowed MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and tech whizzes Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) — to intercept before the threat goes nuclear. Being Ethan, he won’t make it easy on himself by going rogue.

Returning as Ethan for the seventh time, Cruise sprints and spars his way from locale to locale to the franchise’s acrobatically exhilarating summit. But the set pieces are never in danger of blurring into one another. Each has its own identity. Some build on M:I’s own history; some on the history of stunt-driven action movies going all the way back to the 1920s. The finale aboard and atop an out-of-control train hurtling through the Austrian Alps towards a blown-up bridge evokes both the climax of Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible (1996) and the stunt comedy of Buster Keaton’s The General (1926).

In a delirious car chase through the busy streets of Rome, a tiny yellow Fiat clips corners, stumbles along the city’s Spanish steps, and barely avoids a catastrophic pileup, as Ethan drives with one hand, the other hand-cuffed to professional pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell). The sequence is high-wire in its intensity and hysterical in its knowing absurdity. Atwell makes for a delightsome screwball partner, complementing and contrasting Cruise’s physicality with her scene-stealing charms. Usually the agent of action, Cruise has grown to relish being the recipient of it as well. He has also grown more comfortable with letting his co-stars waltz away with the spotlight. M:I has offered a spectacular platform for Ferguson’s action bona fides in the last three entries, mesmerising the viewers to surrender to her effortless cool and legato combat style. This one does likewise for Pom Klementieff, who impresses as the assassin Paris across two brief but rollicking close-quarter brawls, first in a cramped Venice alleyway and second in a cramped train carriage.

As heavily promoted, the centrepiece is of course the motorcycle leap. The scene arrives a little close to the end, before the climactic train sequence, before the waiting leads to wondering. Cruise rides the two-wheeler right off the edge of a cliff, glides in the air for a brief while, and parachutes onto a moving train. The camera beckons the CGI-conditioned viewer to search for the trickery. Gravity, impulse, momentum, trajectory — all that you have ever learnt in Newtonian mechanics become spellbound in the purity of the Cruisean logic that underpins the M:I-verse. It is cinema at its purest. The scene resonates because it triggers the most immediate response in the viewers. Learning the logistics behind its staging does not make it any less heart-pounding.

Why Cruise must jump off a cliff on a motorcycle does not need to be justified for us to take pleasure in his grandstanding enterprise. But it is justified. Ethan must save a woman he promised he would, a woman he barely knows but doesn’t want to let down because she has grown up her whole life believing she can’t place her trust in anyone but herself. If we have learnt anything about Ethan over the years, it’s that he will do just about anything to save the people who have placed their trust in him. He is a man dutiful less to any agency or country, more to his friends who have stuck by him through every loss and victory. It’s this loyalty that the Entity weaponises against him by hiring Gabriel, a ghost from Ethan’s pre-IMF past who supposedly made him what he is. When all’s said and done, the Mission: Impossible movies are about a team of people coming together to overcome insurmountable odds and achieve something transcendent through the power of collaboration. Be it spycraft or filmmaking, all it takes is a few good men and women for a risky business to feel less like an impossible mission.

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