Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One (2023, Christopher McQuarrie) (Patreon)

59/100

Earns its ungainly title. The thing is, I liked that this franchise reset every time, taking on the attributes of a new world-class director and largely ignoring all previous events; Luther and eventually Benji provided more than enough continuity. Monaghan's cameo at the end of Ghost Protocol didn't bother me, as a wife was admittedly harder to elide. Since McQuarrie took over, though, M:I has gone full-bore serialized, and I just fundamentally don't give a damn about "Ooh, they brought Kittridge back" or "Let's give the White Widow more of a showcase this time" or "Is Ilsa jealous of this new chick?" or whatever. The recent runtime bloat—from 131 minutes to 147 to now 163 for a story that's only half complete!—should theoretically allow for more relaxed exposition, yet Dead Reckuno features some of the most maddening Huey, Dewie and Louie dialogue in recent memory, with information divvied up and distributed among everyone in a given room, each actor stepping painfully hard on the previous one's line. (An early intelligence meeting is so intolerable, despite plentiful visual indications that treachery is afoot, that I was tempted to flee the theater.) Also, while I'm always happy to see Esai Morales, his role as the human avatar of an evil sentient A.I. system is really quite silly, never more so than when the program announces that a woman Ethan cares about will die and Gabriel just sorta ambles out to a bridge and waits to see which one he'll be killing. So the idea that this ranks among the best M:I films seems to me downright laughable. (Never wrote up Fallout, which was released during my brief pre-Patreon hiatus, but it got exactly the same rating, for similar reasons. Though I'd likely have emphasized there my waning excitement re: holy shit Tom Cruise actually did that insane thing—the HALO jump may be amazing, but extratextual knowledge aside, it doesn't really look amazing on camera.) 

Pity, because I can readily imagine loving an earlier incarnation of this entry (by which I mean: back when it would've been helmed by a different director, run a sane length, and not been fucking "part one") with Atwell's civilian pickpocket more firmly at its center. She's playing much the same role that Thandie Newton did in II, but has flintier chemistry with Cruise (perhaps owing to his having aged out of smoldering) and benefits from the character having no spycraft skills whatsoever, so that she's realistically freaking out much of the time. I feel certain that I've seen "two people handcuffed in a spatially inconvenient way for driving" somewhere before (it's not in The 39 Steps, is it?), but that's still a surprisingly hilarious setpiece, like Sandra Bullock's Speed anxiety crossed with Buster Keaton as James Bond. And the latter of course occurred to me because nearly everything on the train has a silent-era-gag feel, from Cruise's motorcycle cliff jump's explosive punchline to the genuinely spectacular climax in which Ethan and Grace basically do a vertical rendition of Snowpiercer, climbing one car after another as each one successively gets pulled into the chasm by gravity. (Best pure M:I thrill ride since Burj Khalifa, for my money.) There's easily 100 minutes of terrific stuff here, enough to support an entire movie (with some villain tweaking). But those other 63 minutes, ugh. 

For the record: 

Still a very strong batting average, even if I don't consider any of them truly first-rate.

(I made it an image because Patreon fucking will not fix the issue in which the emails insert a space after every carriage return, even if you dictate otherwise. So 

every

list

looks

like

this.)