Can Mission: Impossible’s cockiness endure in our tender age? God, I hope so.
“There is no ‘community of nations,’” Irving Kristol wrote 39 years ago this month. Give him a story credit on the new Mission: Impossible flick. A stunt-tacular of epic proportions, a beautifully paced action mashup, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is also a somber exercise in realpolitik, with all the melancholy that entails. If the old man were still around to watch it, he’d be nodding grimly.
MI7 opens in Arctic waters, where a Russian submarine is testing an experimental stealth technology. Though disaster soon scuttles the warship, its wreckage includes two halves of an interlocking key, a cleft MacGuffin that the film’s dramatis personae will go to any lengths to reunite. What the key unlocks, precisely, is a mystery, known vaguely to the audience and not at all to several important characters.
Like many first-parters, Cruise’s latest lacks proper resolution and ends with startling abruptness. Yet the movie is otherwise as sprightly as a spring hare, with hardly an ounce of flab on its 163-minute frame. Though trying to explain MI7’s plot is a fool’s errand, the film does hit certain comprehensible beats. Joined, as in past entries, by sidekicks Luther and Benji , Ethan is tasked with tracking down both pieces of the mysterious key.
And MI7 moves. The reader will have heard, perhaps, about the film’s most heralded stunt, in which Ethan drives a motorcycle off a cliff, then turns the resulting fall into a base jump. Astonishingly, other scenes are even more impressive, among them a car-by-car train derailment that is as nail-bitingly tense as the famous skyscraper climb in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol. To be sure, a few of the new film’s setpieces feel conceptually derivative.
Graham Hillard is a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer and editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
Australia Latest News, Australia Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
‘Mission: Impossible 7’s Train Sequence Was Originally 90 Minutes LongTom Cruise, Hayley Atwell and Vanessa Kirby star in Christopher McQuarrie's sequel.
Read more »
‘Mission Impossible 7’ Action Scenes Shot on a $3K Chinese Cinema CameraWhile the new Mission Impossible movie was mostly shot on IMAX cameras, several action scenes were captured using a Z CAM E2-F6. This compact 6K camera out of China is not only performant, but costs just $3,000.
Read more »
Hayley Atwell is Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning's Secret WeaponAfter watching Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One for the second time, one thought struck me: Hayley Atwell is a superstar.
Read more »
'Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part 1' Races Towards a Massive Worldwide Box Office'Mission: Impossible 7' Races Towards a Massive Worldwide Box Office
Read more »
'Dead Reckoning Part 1' Treated Us to Mission: Impossible's Funniest MomentWhat Is the Mission: Impossible Franchise's Funniest Moment?
Read more »
10 Reasons A Female James Bond Would Work For Bond 26Seven men have played James Bond so far but is it high time for Ian Fleming's spy franchise to have a female lead instead?
Read more »