Like most Tom Cruise thrillers, “Dead Reckoning” is full of death-defying, hair-rising and honestly, pretty comical moments for the hero. Beginning with an explanation of “the most fearsome killing machine in the world ever devised by man and impossible to find,” it falls to Ethan Hunt (Cruise) to save the world from this new evil as he encounters one impossible challenge after another.
In a deep icy water beginning sequence, a Russian submarine spots an enemy sub that unleashes a torpedo. When the Russian sub reciprocates by sending torpedos to head it off, the enemy torpedo and sub disappear from their radar and their own torpedoes boomerang back into them.
Without pause, we are quickly taken to a Saudi desert close to the Yemen border where Cruise is evading mercenaries and trying to save a member of his IMF (Impossible Mission Focus) team.
Chock full of female power and IMF team cleverness, “Dead Reckoning” is a good escape film that keeps the audience’s attention. However, of course, I kept wondering about the logic and relationship to the plot of some of the dare-devil sequences. My favorite random insertion was the terrifying ride on the luxurious, fast-moving, out-of-control Orient Express.
For your exclusive 2023 information, the least expensive ticket on the five-night Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, embarking from Paris and ending in Istanbul, with exquisite four-course dinners, costs about $22,000 per person. So, seeing the wanton damage to this beautiful, historical facsimile is a bit painful and I imagine costly.
Another factor in the mesmerization Cruise brings to his Mission Impossible franchise is his notorious insistence on his own dare-devil stunts, like the one in this film where he races his motorcycle off a cliff and then deploys a parachute to end up landing on the roof of the hurtling Orient Express.
At the end of “Dead Reckoning,” the viewer is wondering just how much this non-stop sequence of special effects and salaries of the accompanying master film associates cost. The film’s budget of #291 million makes each minute cost $1.7 million. Savor that extravagance without worry. The early 567.5 million dollar box office returns got it covered.
“Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning” has been nominated for the Critics’ Choice Movie Award for Best Visual Effects. It’s a fun, distracting watch, with just the right dose of impossibility to tame its violent scenes and keep it from being too deep or insightful.
Credits
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Writers: Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen
Based on: Mission:Impossible by Bruce Geller
Producers: Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie
Starring: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Thames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, essay Morales, Pom Klementieff, Marela Garriga and Henry Cxemy
Cinematography: Fraser taggart
Editing: Eddie Hamilton
Music: Lorne Baife
Release: June 19, 2023 (Rome) and July 12, 2023 (US)
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