Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One: Tom Cruise takes on God Himself, and he might have finally met his match

And it finally seems like he’s met his match. Dead Reckoning Part One is a frustrating experience. Unlike Mission: Impossible — Fallout, an operatic action movie that seemed to be on an, ahem, mission to one-up itself with each passing set piece, Dead Reckoning Part One is surprisingly lean on the action. Instead, director Christopher McQuarrie draws heavily from the very first instalment of the franchise — Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible, released in 1996. Overt references aside, like that movie, Dead Reckoning is also impossible to follow. While subsequent instalments have taken a rather cavalier attitude towards plot, choosing to pivot to spectacle instead, Dead Reckoning Part One actually wants you to pay attention to its convoluted story.

Virtually every conversation scene — and there’s a lot of them — is dedicated to explaining how far the plot has progressed, laying out the immediate objectives at hand, and telling you where every character in this overpopulated epic is placed. Simon Pegg’s only job, it seems, is to deliver exposition designed to catch audiences up. It isn’t the most pleasant of experiences, despite McQuarrie’s obvious love for goofy ‘90s thrillers. But instead of inserting some frowning Russian man or a cold British spy as the villain once again, Cruise and McQuarrie have seemingly stumbled upon an adversary ripped straight from the headlines. The villain in Dead Reckoning Part One is an AI known simply as The Entity.

While The Entity itself looks like a Windows ‘98 screensaver, its manifestation on Earth is a dapper, middle-aged man named Gabriel, played by Esai Morales. The character is likely based on the Archangel Gabriel, who appears prominently in Abrahamic texts. Gabriel was God’s emissary, according to the New Testament, the Hebrew Bible and the Quran, tasked with communicating His ‘message’ to the people on Earth. Their fate, as he tells Ethan Hunt repeatedly, has been ‘written’. But as someone whose entire career and personality is based on a mission that he ‘chose’ to accept all those years ago, Ethan isn’t going to sit back and admit that the course of existence has been predestined.

In yet another talky scene midway through the movie, when most of the main characters have congregated inside a Venice club, Gabriel tells Ethan that the lives of Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and a new character named Grace (Hayley Atwell) are in danger, and that one of them will inevitably die that night. So it written, so it shall be done. Shot with almost comically exaggerated Dutch angles by McQuarrie and his cinematographer Fraser Taggart — an aesthetic choice that echoes De Palma’s first movie — this scene rips off the po-faced mask that the movie had been wearing, and reveals its inherent goofiness. Held back by a couple of goons, Ethan looks Gabriel dead in the eye, and calls him a ‘fanatic’. “If anything happens to either of them, there’s no place on Earth where you and your God will be safe from me. There’s no place that I won’t go to kill you. That,” he snarls, “is written.”

The MacGuffin, this time, is a key in the shape of a Christian cross. Ethan, Gabriel, and a host of other characters spend the entire movie trying to locate this cruciform key, and unlock the secrets that it protects. Think of this as a modern day version of Indiana Jones’ quest to find the Holy Grail in the Last Crusade. Keeping with the film’s theme of free will versus fate, combined with Cruise’s burgeoning saviour complex, it wouldn’t be entirely outside the realm of possibility for him to sacrifice his life in Dead Reckoning Part Two. Ethan is, after all, Jesus — a man who is willing to suffer punishment for humanity’s sins. He’s joined on his journey by apostles who’d do anything for him; he is often betrayed; and guess what, he even wanders the desert. In a way, Dead Reckoning Part One functions as a face-off between two mortals who think of themselves as messiah figures, serving duelling deities.

Despite the movie’s obvious flaws, it’s difficult to complain about drab exposition when you can see how committed Cruise is to job. For a man who is now old enough to qualify for Arvind Kejriwal’s Mukyamantri Tirath Yatra scheme, you’re even willing to ignore the massive ego that must’ve compelled him to demand $300 million from a Hollywood studio to fund what could be interpreted as a Scientology-fuelled diatribe against another organised religion. A less convoluted movie might have found the time to entertain the notion that the human beings who ‘created’ AI are the problem and not the other way around. But perhaps there’s hope yet; perhaps Dead Reckoning Part Two to fully engage with the philosophical ideas that McQuarrie and Cruise are so clearly fascinated with.