Since Hunt can’t really deal with the Entity directly, the movie concocts a handful of human henchpeople to do its bidding (and punching, driving, etc.). As usual, he’s got face masks in his arsenal, while the Entity has a nifty trick for pretending to be various people - a reminder that you can never trust your eyes or ears in an “M:I” movie. Told that one of these women must die, Hunt does his darnedest to save them both. For the moment, the Entity seems to be playing chess, not Risk, as “Dead Reckoning” has yet to show what renegade AI is capable of. In theory, that’s how you beat a virtual brain: You give it an impossible problem to solve (à la the tic-tac-toe game in “War Games”). So, when the Entity forces Hunt to choose which of his amigas to save, Ilsa or Grace, the guy all but short-circuits. Heck, she could even be Impossible Mission Force material. Even though we’ve just met Grace - who’s a pickpocket for hire, and not much of a team player - Hunt has decided she’s worth protecting. That’s just a flat-out lousy tactical philosophy, but it’s the kind of stubborn thinking that Cruise embodies so well: a blunt instrument traveling at extremely high velocity, guided by instinct and that inner ethical barometer. As Hunt tells a gifted recruit known only as Grace (Hayley Atwell), “Your life will always matter more than my own.” And what is Hunt’s weak spot? Loyalty to his friends. The idea here is that the Entity’s mile-a-minute computation skills have concluded that the only thing that stands in its way is Hunt. “Dead Reckoning” also brings back sharpshooter Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and arms dealer the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), lining up a neat little ensemble of friends and associates that the AI can target and/or manipulate. While Cruise’s Hunt is busy being the movie’s action figure, he’s supported by tech agents Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), who give him pointers via headset. But watching nerds writing code in a boring computer lab (or whatever that scenario will ultimately entail) isn’t nearly so cinematic, so let’s be thankful that McQuarrie and company have such vivid imaginations. How many times have we seen Cruise dangling over some high-altitude chasm, or watched grown men duke it out atop a speeding train? If and when human heroes are finally called upon to rein in artificial intelligence, it doesn’t seem especially probable that the showdown will involve anything so spectacular as speeding a motorcycle off a sharp Norwegian cliff. Clarke was dealing in speculative fiction, “Dead Reckoning” now seems incredibly timely.īetween the sub and the supercomputer, it feels as if McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen had the foresight to pull plot points from tomorrow’s news, which helps cover the fact that the action sequences are essentially just slick retreads of familiar stunts. It’s a serviceable solution to a tricky quandary: How to anthropomorphize something so abstract as rogue AI? In the decades since “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the general public has developed real concerns about such technology. Not red like HAL-9000, but more of an ominous blue orb staring out from a flow of “Matrix”-style digital code. In the moments just before the ship explodes (mere days after the Titan met a similar fate), the camera zeroes in on an unattended computer monitor, where something resembling a giant digital eyeball appears on the screen. The villain this time around isn’t a person but an all-powerful artificial-intelligence whatsit known as the Entity, which fools a super-advanced Russian submarine into destroying itself in the film’s clever pre-credits sequence. This is Hunt’s seventh blockbuster outing, with a last franchise-capper set to release next summer, and while it can’t eclipse what came before (“Fallout” was the series high), director Christopher McQuarrie delivers a formidable concept and several hall-of-fame set-pieces while somehow managing to tie the storylines back into these movies’ core mythology. “Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One” finds Cruise, now in his 60s, still running from one side of a very big, very wide screen to the other as if his life - and the lives of all 8 billion people on the planet - depended on it. Compare that with Indiana Jones, who’s failed to connect with a younger generation, or the “Fast and Furious” movies, which aren’t running out of gas so much as guzzling the laughing sort. That’s the deal with America’s most dutiful Boy Scout, Tom Cruise, who’s carried the billion-dollar “Mission: Impossible” franchise across 27 years without losing steam. But for the time being, he remains the one man on Earth willing to attempt the impossible without questioning the motives of those who require his services. Sooner or later, Ethan Hunt will face a mission he really ought not to accept.
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