The Media Tourist

Tom Cruise returns to his leading role in the action-packed, stunt-tacular seventh installment of his blockbuster big-screen franchise

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning—Part One
Starring Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Hayley Atwell & Esai Morales
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
PG-13

In theaters Wednesday, July 12, 2023

What does a runaway train, renegade AI, a four-sided, two-piece doodad and a doomed Russian sub have in common? They’re all part of Tom Cruise’s latest “impossible” mission.

The seventh installment of the blockbuster franchise that began more than 25 years ago finds Cruise’s iconic character, Impossible Missions Force (IMF) agent Ethan Hunt, scrambling all over the place in a race for a four-sided key that could trigger a digital geopolitical doomsday in the wrong hands.

Everybody’s trying to get their paws on that mysterious gizmo, which can unlock access to an all-knowing, all-seeing, super-processing artificial intelligence known as The Entity, “a truth-eating digital parasite” with the dark power of total domination. And everyone, it seems, is also trying to stop Ethan, which certainly adds an additional level of difficultly to his job.

“The world is gonna be coming after you,” Ethan is warned, and it sure does.

It’s a big mission for a big movie on a grand scale—golly-whopping spectacle, breathless action and a threat that’s even bigger, and so much badder, than Big Brother.

The gang’s all here, for Mission: Impossible movie fans who’ve grown up watching the IMF continue the globetrotting spy shenanigans first introduced in the 1960s TV series. Cruise, the consummate movie star, is as dapper and unflappably cool as ever, rallying his loyal team (Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg), confronting a couple of formidable old foes (Esai Morales and Vanessa Kirby) and reuniting with a former ally (Rebecca Ferguson).

New characters include Hayley Atwell (well-known to Marvel movie fans) as a cagey thief with a criminal past, and Pom Klementieff (from Guardians of the Galaxy) plays a French assassin and lets her lethal skills do the talking. We’ll likely see them again in Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part 2, which is already in the can and due for release next summer.  

Director Christopher McQuarrie also returns to the franchise; he’s directed Cruise in several projects, include two previous Mission movies. He certainly knows how to move things along, make it an exciting, exhilarating ride and pepper the menu with some levity and laughs.  

The movie hinges on issues of privacy, deception, manipulation and misinformation in this modern era of digital overload. And it’s also about empathy; Ethan Hunt cares about those closest to him, and even about people he doesn’t know. The Entity, like all tech by design, is amoral and cares about nothing and no one, only about whatever its objective is programmed to be. (You think your laptop or smartphone, or Siri and social media, really care about you? Uh, no. So just imagine if they became your master and overlord.) Ethan and the Entity represent a battle between good and evil on a global stage, with the fate of the planet hanging in the balance.

But the plot is just so much blather and blah-blah, after all, when it comes to Tom Cruise and his Impossible missions—everyone wants to see the stunts, and Dead Reckoning certainly delivers. There’s a wild multi-vehicle chase through the narrow streets of Rome, with Cruise and Atwell handcuffed together (!) in a tiny Fiat, pursued by a monstrous Humvee, Italian cops and America CIA agents. Cruise zooms cross-country on a motorcycle, then shoots himself off a high cliff, out-Bonding James Bond in a jaw-dropping aerial sequence. And an extended bit through the Swiss Alps on that runaway train, well, it’s a nail-biting, death-defying, cliff-hanging choo-choo blast, a topsy-turvy, over-the-top obstacle course of everything but the kitchen sink, including pots, pans, parachutes, a flaming oven and a grand piano.

Everything is made even more exciting by knowing that Cruise performs almost all his own stunts. Wowza—it’s hard to imagine any other star ever even considering the elaborate, bonkers things that he’s made the lifeblood of his movies.

And, of course, there’s high-tech face-swapping, a bit of bruising street-fight physicality, plus a dash of sword fighting, knife slashing and even some sleight of hand magic.

Last year, Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick became the must-see movie of the summer, signaling that Hollywood was ready to welcome COVID-weary audiences back into theaters. Will he re-do that summer blockbuster magic with Dead Reckoning? Can his movie once again revive a sagging box office, rejuvenate franchise fatigue (sorry, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Little Mermaid and Fast X) and remind viewers—who’ve gotten just a little bit too comfortable with at-home streaming—why they should love the big screen?

It’s a bit early to know for sure, but I’m ready to predict: Mission: Accomplished!

—Neil Pond

Harrison Ford returns for one final ‘Raiders’ romp, with an extra dose of movie magic

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Starring Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Mads Mikkelsen
Directed by James Mangold
PG-13

In theaters Friday, June 30, 2023

More than 40 years ago, we sat on the edge of our seats watching Indiana Jones outrun a big rolling boulder, the bravura opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark that became an iconic representation for a new, blockbuster action-adventure movie template.

There aren’t any giant, bowling-ball booby traps in Dial of Destiny, the fifth film in the Indiana Jones canon, but Indy is still running—all over the globe, still hunting for historical treasure, still afraid of snakes, still dodging bullets and still fighting Nazis.

This time, it’s the late 1960s, some 20 years after the events of Raiders. Neil Armstrong has just walked on the moon, America has won the space race, and there’s a scramble to locate the missing half of a doodad called the Antikythera, a dial-like “computing” device found in wreckage of an ancient sunken ship off the coast of Greece. What’s so special about it? Well, during World War II, Nazisbelieved it could forecast rips in the fabric of time, openings that would allow someone to change the way history unfolds. A dial of destiny, indeed, if only they can find the missing part…

And changing the course of history probably isn’t a good idea, especially when Nazis are involved.

Harrison Ford, just about to turn 81, makes what is intended to be his final appearance as the college professor turned rip-roaring archeologist swashbuckler. He’s helped along in the rip-roar department by some high-tech movie magic that convincingly de-ages his character with “deep-fake” cinematic wizardry, for flashback scenes in which he looks, well, like he looked in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Forget Botox—movie magic is the way to go.

Phoebe Walker-Bridge, of Fleabag TV fame, adds some new spice and sass as Helena Shaw, the now-grown daughter of Indy’s late friend and colleague (Toby Jones).  Mads Mikkelsen proves once again he can be a dandy bad guy; I’m still smarting from remembering what a ballbuster he was with Daniel Craig in Casino Royale more than 15 years ago. Antonio Banderas has a brief role as a Greek undersea diver, one of Indy’s old friends, about as crusty as the barnacles on his boat. There are a couple of other returning characters—major and minor, and one is a real doozie—and a lot of movie callbacks to things that happened in previous adventures.

It’s a full-fledged new Indy adventure, for sure, but also a look-back tribute—a closing-chapter monument to Indiana Jones, and Harrison Ford, as one of moviedom’s most recognizable screen heroes, taking on bad guys in a dusty fedora, with a trusty bullwhip.

This is the first Indy flick not directed by Steven Spielberg or produced by George Lucas. Instead, the reins have been handed over to James Mangold, who has certainly proven he knows he’s doing, with a directorial resume that includes 3:10 to Yuma, Identity, Ford v. Ferrari, Walk the Line and a pair of Wolverine X-Men films. It’s hard to follow Spielberg (duh!), but Mangold keeps the pace moving briskly and with stylish confidence, though often at a frantic pace with nearly nonstop, all-over-the-place action that becomes a chaotic wash of blurry, noisy CGI.

Indy fights on top of a train speeding through the Swiss Alps, gallops at full speed on a hijacked police horse into a New York City subway tunnel, tangles with a nest of icky eels at the bottom of the Aegean Sea, jumps out of airplane, and races through the narrow streets of Morocco on a ramshackle tuk-tuk. Things rarely sit still, and as soon as they do, they’re off and running again.

The movie picks up even more momentum toward the end, when it almost jumps the shark in a loopy battlefield sequence that veers into the realm of nearly comedic impossibility. (At one point, I wondered if Bill and Ted’s time-traveling pay-phone booth might have landed just offscreen, with Abe Lincoln, Billy the Kid and Socrates aboard.) But no matter what the movie throws at him, and at its audience, Ford is gung-ho and all-in, even if Indy admits the years, and the mileage, have taken their toll.

As the Indiana Jones films do, the Dial of Destiny gives “real history” a rowdy, rollicking, what-if spin. Here, it’s a former Nazi scientist who’s been helping America launch its space program (yes, that really happened) and an artifact that truly does exist (and is on display today in museum in Athens). But what if that Nazi wasn’t so former, and what if his intention was to use that hunk of antiquity to go back and have another crack at Dur Fuhrer’s plans to conquer the world?

And what if…well, what if we didn’t have Indiana Jones movies around anymore?

At one point, Indy tells some noisy hippie neighbors to turn down their loud music. The song they’re blaring is The Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour,” and it feels like a musical nod to the movie magic that brings Harrison Ford back for one final, blowout romp, letting us relive his younger years, recall his Indiana Jones exploits, reconnect him with a rush of his past adventures, and ultimately bid him a fond, sentimental farewell with a warmly nostalgic salute.

—Neil Pond