Does Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One break the longstanding curse? We live in an age of split ends and half-stories. Whenever an epic, blockbuster franchise toys with the idea of finality, studios are often extremely reluctant to say goodbye. Stretching out their conclusions with multiple parts, each more unsatisfying and unrewarding than the next.
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In the early 2010s, no novel adaptation was safe from an accursed bisection, with tentpole franchises like Twilight, Hunger Games, Divergent, and the trend-setting Harry Potter commencing their much-anticipated ends with a plodding, thinly stretched, and ultimately inconsequential “Part 1”— rife with hollow cliffhangers, anti-climatic peaks, and painfully prolonged troughs and establishing themselves as little more than unfulfilling teasers for better stories to come.
The box-office success that comes with a divided ending has rendered Hollywood split-crazy, and this effect has never been felt more than it has in 2023. Which features the latest installment in the Fast & Furious franchise: the middling, uninspired Fast X (the first entry in a two-part finale, now an alleged trilogy), the dazzling but cliffhanger-ridden Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and part two of the Dune saga later in the year.
Part ones are deeply reliant on their follow-ups. While films like Across the Spider-Verse and 2021’s Dune: Part One are stunning, magnificently crafted fantasy adventures, they also profoundly sting us with their lack of finality. Manifesting as incomplete masterworks that will undeniably be judged on the laurels of their successors.
While the sheer scope of a Dune or Spider-Verse unequivocally requires multiple parts to realize meaningfully, they also severely struggle to cement a single entry that completely works on its own. No matter how epic the vision, how unbridled the creativity, or how dazzling the spectacle, part ones are regularly kept at an arms-length from true greatness. As if suspended in time, waiting to self-actualize until a sequel rears its head in a year or two. They’re relegated to being a promise to continue a visionary story instead of being one and woefully cursed by the “part one” label.
This greedy insistence on cutting franchise movies in half now graces the Mission Impossible franchise, which has never needed the “part one” brand to generate interest in the next installment. Yet, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is the rare entry to not only break the part one curse but conquer it. It survives as an exhilarating cinematic work on its own, rejecting its role as the beginning of the end, with each of its whopping 156 minutes unearthing new, unadulterated highs for the storied franchise—which now sits on its seventh chapter.
Dead Reckoning is an action experience that prioritizes its own narrative arcs and set pieces rather than what they will eventually lead up to in its sequel. Director Christopher McQuarrie and company inject the film with a feast of rising and falling action to cement it as freestanding work. Much in the vein of each chapter of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Moreover, the film magnificently forgoes the modern tendency to spastically shift from one action sequence to another (à la The Fast & Furious). It manifests not as an unyielding, exasperating stream of spectacle left to be fulfilled in a follow-up but as an entry that luxuriates in the epic and elaborate escalation of each specific set piece.
At its core, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One contains only 4 main action sequences, yet each of them is rarely ever in the service of the other. They’re given their own room to breathe and cultivate their own arcs and personalities. Unfolding like short films, fulfilling separate three-act structures linked only by character and stakes. A Russian doll of an action film that gets more precarious and intricate, as each layer is explosively revealed.
It’s no surprise that the main sequences last well over thirty minutes, reveling in a level of snowballing tension that would have even Alfred Hitchcock trembling. Pure cinema that wonderfully exploits every element of the medium, marrying both sonic and visual depth to cement new standards on which action cinema will be judged.
From an ever-confounding airport con in Abu Dhabi to a seemingly never-ending, car-swapping chase in Rome, to a dark, cerebral clash in Venice to a gasp-eliciting train sequence in the Austrian Alps, Dead Reckoning Part One isn’t so much interested in what connects them all, as it is in allowing each of them to foster their own vibrant identities and purposeful character arcs.
They all bustle with their own eclectic visual language and design, with the classicism of Rome’s architecture giving way to the neon underbelly of Venice and then to the pristine, sweeping vistas of the Alps. The set pieces are at once both varied and complementary, driven by a desire to satisfy their individual narrative beats as well as the film’s overarching ones.
In taking on this structure, McQuarrie and co-screenwriter Erik Jendresen, cement a part one that doesn’t depend on the outcomes of part two, with each character growing, completing, or commencing their arcs within each inventively realized high-wire act. Though some conclude more sorrowfully than others, each of them comes to a wonderfully cathartic finish despite some awkward attempts at weighty dialogue.
Whether it be the embattled Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), the loveable Benji (Simon Pegg), The coolheaded Luther (Ving Rhames), or even newcomers like the thieving Grace (Hayley Atwell) and the coldly omnipotent Gabriel (Esai Morales), The characters round out their arcs in each breathtaking sequence, beginning another one with the next sprawling set piece. Even if it means the start of one character’s path marks the end for another.
At the center of all of it rests Tom Cruise’s dashing and legendary IMF operative, Ethan Hunt. After a solemn, expository prologue that cements an all-consuming AI as the chief antagonist (a not-so-subtle allegory for the streaming algorithm’s attack on the theatrical experience), Hunt’s mission (should he choose to accept it) immerses him in the dichotomy between duty and vengeance.
With each unfathomably realized sequence building up to a choice that prioritizes one or the other—for better or worse. Shaping Hunt’s development as both a grizzled agent and a grieving friend. By the time the film’s final, heart-stopping escape wraps up, Hunt is a changed man whose endgame arc is not only established but meaningfully sated. Though there’s still an archnemesis to foil at the end of part one’s stunning, cliff-hanger absent conclusion, Dead Reckoning Part Two feels primed to explore new territory, the path for which has already been so cathartically forged here— one palpable cliff-dive at a time.
Next summer’s death-defying journey will not only be a thrilling finale but a complementary piece to an arc that already feels so complete. Though Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One fully acknowledges its existence as an incomplete movie, it unearths itself as anything but. So much so that if Part Two were unceremoniously canceled tomorrow, Dead Reckoning would still be just as satisfying as the most complete and chronicled of sagas.
It’s only fitting that Tom Cruise is the man who broke the curse, and here’s hoping that this installment won’t steal the next one’s well-established thunder.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is playing now nationwide.
