Saw this one with Friend who openly admitted that he had stopped watching this franchise about fifteen years ago and wasn’t actually excited about seeing Tam Cruz in this movie at all. My personal take is that Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation, and Fallout, all movies that I sought out in my twenties, are some of the most perfectly entertaining spy movies I’ve ever seen. I remember absolutely nothing about any of them except that Vanessa Kirby was fabulous in one of them and was my major impetus for coming back, but apparently Jessica Ferguson was also kicking about and I should remember how awesome she was maybe? The point is, I am fully aware coming into this that I am going to enjoy myself and you cannot stop me.
What I forgot or forget perennially when seeing these Missions Impossible is that much of the fun of the movies is watching Tam Cruz look anxious letting other people do things or doing things himself but on a really foreshortened time crunch. His nervous energy is so perfect, the way he has no poker face in moments of high stress, when we are so often presented with cool cucumber spies who walk away from the explosion without looking back. The humorous innovations on the car chase in Dead Reckoning demonstrate how the franchise, even after nearly $4 billion USD and seven movies, has not let its ego get in the way of itself.
Every one of the female leads has an amazing moment: Vanessa Kirby takes a step back from the femme fatale role to play herself in a kind of meta way which is really fun to see. Jessica Ferguson is spending the year hopping from tentpole franchise film to tentpole franchise film, but her samurai fight on the bridge is actually pretty fucking awesome, as is her Dune fight scene at the beginning. Hayley Atwell is a full-fledged action star, which should come as no surprise for anyone whose dreams came true for live-action Captain America’s gender bend in the Multiverse of Madness, but she has some weird moments of prestidigitation in this movie. I don’t think it’s her fault? I think there’s actually a weirdly large amount of magic trick performance happening in this movie, but maybe it’s a send-up to the fact that they used to do it less ostentatiously in the earlier movies? Pom Klementieff begged Tam Cruz to kick her in the stomach (she cannot be the only person who has begged him to do that in or outside of a movie, surely), which is the only thing I could think about whenever she was on screen. That and the fact that all of her outfits are instantly gay icon status of the year.
Friend said that certain funny moments in this movie reminded him of a fan favorite from last year, Bullet Train, I think mostly because there were so many moments on a train, but also I think there’s a seed of insight there too, about the strength of the ensemble cast, the ways in which fighting can be infused with humor, and the joy of having wacky bad guys. (Spoilers:) I generally distance myself from my more bullish Friend’s opinion that this is the “best depiction of a villainous rogue AI” on screen, because I think it’s kind of a dumb premise in general? It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me why the keys from this Russian submarine that stealths itself using AI? Maybe? should turn up at all, how they got separated? Or why it became so impossibly powerful but took so long to do so? How the keys are even related? Why they could possibly do anything to stop an AI which could hide itself anywhere else? Why there’s such an insistence of air-gapping or analoging everything but still showing us high tech screens so that we can… feel like we’re still using technology like magic? It’s that issue of omniscience versus omnipotence that we always run into, which is–just briefly–if the AI is powerful enough to set up elaborate traps for everyone on Hunt’s team, why can’t it just shoot him in the head with a bullet from one of those police guns or blind him with his own glasses or whatever. The AI seems so competent in some ways and so messy in others, like a narcissistic ex.
Like any movie with “Part 1” in the title, this movie does a lot of “getting the gang back together” and doesn’t actually end on much of a cliffhanger. If anything, it feels like a very passable happy ending which is strange, because the villain and plot are so convoluted it seems like it’d be very easy to just sort of throw up some smoke and say things look pretty bad or kill someone important off at the very last moment and leave things kind of sad til next year, but that doesn’t detract from my enjoyment generally for this film. I much prefer this gang to previous gangs, I think, and even though I still don’t understand why he has to chloroform so many people, I do feel like it’s visually a treat.
