I Just Saw

So I saw Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One and it was… bad? I don’t consider myself a contrarian. I normally have views that fall somewhere in line with the general critical feeling. I might be more or less moved by a particular film than others were, but normally if one receives what can be described as “critical acclaim” – like this one did with its 96% on Rotten Tomatoes – I can see why it was liked so much.

With this one, I don’t know. All it made me think after a certain point was “Boy, do you remember when spy films had plots? About spying? There’d be espionage and subterfuge and tense scenes where this guy’s double-crossing that one, but maybe he has motives of his own…” This one didn’t have any of that. Maybe it’s the effect of almost two decades of mid-tier superhero films saturating the market, plus the pernicious influence of China encouraging Hollywood to make their movies as easily translatable across cultures as possible so that they can sell them over there, but it seems that now anything that’s remotely “action” has to be as flatly plotted as you can make it. The story is irrelevant, you just need a template into which you can hammer tropes like plugs in a child’s workbench.

Mission Impossible: Bed Beckoning Fart One doesn’t have a stupid plot. It has no plot. It is the first 163-minute fiction film I’ve seen with no story. The critics I’ve seen praising it seem to count that as a virtue in some weird reversal of critical standards, but I was just baffled. I get it, I like pulp fiction. Love it, in fact. But this is not pulp fiction. There is no pulp and no fiction.

In that sense, the film that it reminds me most of is Sex and the City 2 (2010), a 146-minute movie where four unlikeable women drink cocktails, talk about nothing, and are vaguely racist about Arabs for the entire runtime. And then one of them gets fudged on the hood of a jeep. (Idea for Fishin’ With-new-tackle: Need Sectioning Part Two?)

I guess I can see what critics are talking about visually. It’s a good-looking film, self-consciously so, throwing in lots of canted angles and verbally choreographed dialogue scenes where several different people relate information to each other as if to convey that any of the relentless exposition means anything. It doesn’t. It’s a bit like if someone shot some old grannies moaning about cabbage and then overlaid it with music and camera shots to create a feeling of narrative suspense.

Relying on IMDb to help me with the “plot”, it’s roughly this: secret agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his IMF (Impossible Missions Force) team, including hackers Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames), are tasked with tracking down “the Entity”, an artificial intelligence that’s become sentient and started getting up in everyone’s business.

They enlist the help of Grace (Hayley Atwell), a thief who gets ahold of the “cruciform key” that unlocks the Entity, although no one’s quite sure what it unlocks, and that’s part of the problem, and a guy called Gabriel (Esai Morales) wants the Entity for some reason and seems to worship it like a god and has some weird connection with Ethan’s past, and he’s assisted by a sexy samurai called Paris (Pom Klementieff) who seems to have been characterised based on chauvinist tropes about bad girls that do the right thing when a hunky dude shows them love, and also there’s an arms dealer called the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), and oh look there’s Cary Elwes as a senator or head of spy stuff or I don’t know what, and…

The entire film was like this for me, just watching people yammer at each other about who they are and what they should do between stunts. This is supposedly a film about a rogue AI but it does less than zero with the implications of that concept. What if this magic intelligence could sway political systems by fabricating evidence for and against politicians? Drive conspiracy theories on social media? Blackmail regular citizens by spying on them through their smartphones? The film is bizarrely uninterested in any of this, treating the Entity like just another MacGuffin whose threat you’re supposed to infer, I guess.

Again, I’m trying to see why this has a 96% rating… Residual goodwill for Tom Cruise? I’ve never been a huge fan of his. He’s fine, but as a personality in the media landscape, he’s always struck me as vaguely sinister and not all that likeable. Still, Top Gun: Maverick was a good movie. The stunts that he pulls in Bitchin’ Unstoppable: Head I’m-gettin’ Shart Bum are impressive. But if that’s all there is I’d rather have seen a showreel.

The film isn’t even well-edited. Setups and payoffs seem to be missing so you can’t really tell how characters got from A to B sometimes. A scene on a train, for instance, where one character saves two others from falling into a canyon by reaching down through a vertically suspended carriage. Cut to all three characters standing at the exit of a still horizontal carriage to which the other was coupled. How did they get there? Who knows?

Or another scene where Cruise is handcuffed to a Mini in a subway tunnel, and only just escapes with the train rushing past as he lies between it and the platform. How did he escape? Search me. Maybe I missed something.

My mate put it best when he said that Spy Kids 3: Game Over (2003) had more of a plot. I know, I know, Tom Cruise does his own stunts. Maybe he should have also written his own script this time around.