Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) Movie Review

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) Hindi Movie Storyline

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023): Ethan Hunt and his IMF team embark on their most dangerous mission yet: To track down a terrifying new weapon that threatens all of humanity before it falls into the wrong hands. With control of the future and the fate of the world at stake, and dark forces from Ethan’s past closing in, a deadly race around the globe begins. Confronted by a mysterious, all-powerful enemy, Ethan is forced to consider that nothing can matter more than his mission – not even the lives of those he cares about most.

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) Overview

Genre: Action, Adventure, Mystery & thriller

Original Language: English

Director: Christopher McQuarrie

Producer: Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie, Leifur B. Dagfinnsson

Writer: Christopher McQuarrie, Erik Jendresen

Release Date (Theaters): Jul 12, 2023  Wide

Release Date (Streaming): Oct 10, 2023

Box Office (Gross USA): $172.0M

Runtime: 2h 43m

Distributor: Paramount Pictures

Production Co: Paramount Pictures, Skydance Media, Tom Cruise

Sound Mix: Dolby Digital, Dolby Atmos

Aspect Ratio: Digital 2.39:1

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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) Movie Review

In ‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’ Harrison Ford may have appeared in CGI form as his younger self, but the film was really a showcase for an ageing intrepid archaeologist who has one more crack of the whip (literally) in his dotage. The opposite is the case in ‘Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One’ in which a 60-plus Tom Cruise is never allowed to be seen as anything other than 40-something due to de-aging technology, and this level of artifice works well for a series that prides itself on mistaken identities, doppelgangers and the literal wearing of masks.

It’s a white knuckle ride with Cruise parachuting off a cliff and onto a steam train hurtling through the Austrian Alps, and the film is prescient for the way it draws on contemporary anxieties around AI, here, ‘Terminator’-style, giving us artificial intelligence so advanced that it can develop its own sentient existence and emulate and subvert the path of humans. We still have characters donning rubber masks — so analog in comparison — but there are multiple levels at which we are shown advanced technologies being harnessed to infiltrate intelligence networks.

It has its own self-contained arc but the film is the first installment in a two-parter and at two and three-quarter hours we are still in the dark about what is to be done with the elusive two keys that Cruise spends the film tracking down so that they can be brought together to wrest back human control from the artificial intelligence known simply as ‘The Entity’. Like the Antikythera in ‘Dial of Destiny’, the keys are separated but need to be brought together to work their magic, and the film gives us many extended set pieces en route to its destination. The final hour alone is an exhilarating sequence aboard the Orient Express which milks every movie or action cliché to maximum effect.

The film, like The Elusive Keys, also unites this film with the first in the series from 1996 in terms of the way it shows Cruise reflecting on his life working for the Impossible Mission Force (the ‘other’ IMF) and the motivations he had for being recruited in the first place. Some good scenes deconstruct the life of a spy, here giving us Cruise living in the shadows without being able to enjoy regular relationships and mourning the death of those who enter his world but who pay the inevitable price. He has empathy but lives in a world of fleeting and transactional connections.

There is an audacity here that suggests Cruise is, like the train he boards from the most unlikely of angles, not yet running out of steam, and as blockbuster entertainment goes ‘Dead Reckoning Part One’ is a masterful blend of suspense, deception, and ingenuity. Frankly, this is the franchise Hitchcock would have made, with evident nods here to Grace Kelly in ‘To Catch A Thief’ and the train-bound exertions of ‘North By Northwest’.