MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - DEAD RECKONING PART ONE (2023)

In a big set piece (from a film that’s nothing but big set action pieces), comic relief player Simon Pegg races to defuse a nuclear bomb hidden on a conveyor belt in the luggage area of an international airport terminal.  Working the puzzle-lock open in the nick of time, he opens the thing to reveal . . . an empty cylinder.  Yikes!  I mean . . . Phew!  The sequence, part of a fugal action climax to the first act, emblematic of this self-indulgent tease of a film (all sound & fury, signifying nothing . . .. not even entertainment) that asks us to wade thru nearly three hours of chaff as down payment to PART TWO a couple of years hence.  Truth is, in spite of continuing commercial success (though far less this time), the M:I series has been in decline since star/producer Tom Cruise switched from the inventive lighter touch of director Brad Bird (series best #4*) and went with Christopher McQuarrie’s violent/jokey OTT action stylings.  The move fully catching up with him now.  The film less plot than plot points: a lost Russian stealth submarine; a fanciful interlocking double-key to an AI doomsday machine that will integrate a worldwide super computer system; renegade spies (and one sexy pickpocket); shouldn’t be a game stopper, but constant ‘Top This’ thrill seeking palls in a character vacuum.  Cruise, as usual, showing no chemistry, not even with himself.  Perhaps because of the way his face looks different in almost every scene.  (Flushed or bloated or weirdly smooth or weary or neckless.)  It makes you think he’s about to pull it off, like one of the film’s latex masks, at any moment.  Maybe underneath there’s another empty cylinder.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Bird’s GHOST PROTOCOL the M:I film Cruise & Co. were always shooting for.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/07/mission-impossible-ghost-protocol.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  A big vehicular race in Rome, especially on The Spanish Steps, so devoid of crowds, you wonder if they’ve introduced a time travel element and gone back to 1953.   ALSO: While the Stealth Sub may be advanced State-of-the-Art 2023, damned if it doesn’t still make those comforting Sonar PINGs we’ve heard since sound came to film in the 1920s.  Okay by me, some things can’t be improved upon.