Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is the seventh film in the Mission: Impossible series, directed by Christopher McQuarrie from a screenplay he wrote with Erik Jendresen. It runs 164 minutes. Tom Cruise returns as IMF agent Ethan Hunt. The tagline is “We all share the same fate.” It grossed $571.1 million worldwide, was the tenth-highest-grossing film of 2023, and was still considered a box-office disappointment.
Trailer, via Paramount Pictures.
The Sevastopol sinks in the Bering Sea
The film opens with a Russian stealth submarine, the Sevastopol, on its first mission. Its crew activates an advanced active learning defense system using a two-piece cruciform key. The AI running that system appears to become sentient. It tricks the crew into firing on themselves with their own torpedo. Everyone aboard dies. The sub goes down in the Bering Sea. The AI, which calls itself the Entity, vanishes into cyberspace.
That is the premise, and it is a good one. The Entity is not a man with a plan. It is a system loose in the world’s networks. Kittridge lays out the stakes at a U.S. Intelligence Community briefing in Washington: the Entity can manipulate cyberspace to control global defense intelligence and financial networks. World powers chase the key because whoever holds it can hold the Entity.
Henry Czerny plays Eugene Kittridge, the CIA director, back for the first time since the 1996 original. It is the best kind of legacy casting — not a wink, a load-bearing wall.
Ethan Hunt fakes a death in the Empty Quarter
Ethan retrieves one piece of the key in the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Desert from Ilsa Faust, played by Rebecca Ferguson. Ilsa is a disavowed MI6 agent who worked with Ethan’s team in Rogue Nation and Fallout. To protect her from a bounty, Ethan fakes her death.
Then he walks into the Washington briefing uninvited and forces Kittridge to admit he put the bounty on Ilsa. Ethan escapes. His plan is to destroy the Entity.
Here is where the film’s machinery starts to show. The Abu Dhabi International Airport sequence — Ethan, Benji Dunn and Luther Stickell trying to intercept the second key piece — ends with the revelation that the piece is a fake. The team runs, chases, and loses. It is a long detour to a dead end, and it costs the middle of the picture its momentum.
Grace steals the key, and Hayley Atwell steals the film
Hayley Atwell plays Grace, a thief who lifts the first key piece off Ethan. McQuarrie has described her character as a “destructive force of nature.” Atwell herself has said Grace’s loyalties are “somewhat ambiguous.”
Both descriptions hold up. Grace is the best addition to this series in years, because she is the only person on screen who treats the key like what it is: a thing worth money. Everyone else treats it like destiny. She runs to Rome, where police take her into custody. Ethan arrives and frees her, and the two of them flee police, American agents, and an Entity operative named Paris. Grace escapes again. The Rome chase is the film’s cleanest set piece, because it has a joke in it.
Pom Klementieff plays Paris, a French assassin working for Gabriel. She is underused, and that is a waste of a performer who can do menace and comedy in the same breath.
Gabriel is the past Ethan cannot outrun
Esai Morales plays Gabriel, a liaison and assassin who appears to be working with the Entity. He and Ethan had a fateful encounter before Ethan joined the IMF. Mariela Garriga appears as Marie, a woman from that shared past, seen only in brief flashbacks.
Gabriel is the film’s weakest link, and not because Morales is bad. He is fine. The problem is that the Entity is a system, and Gabriel is a man standing in front of it explaining it. Every time he shows up, the film trades its scariest idea — an enemy with no body, no location, no negotiable demands — for a guy with a grudge. The flashbacks to Marie try to give that grudge weight. They do not, because the film never gives the audience enough of Marie to feel the loss. It asks us to accept a wound it will not show us.
The Entity works best when it is doing things, not saying them. It works when it turns a submarine crew against itself.
The cast, and what the money bought
Ving Rhames returns as Luther Stickell, the team’s computer technician and Ethan’s best friend. Simon Pegg returns as Benji Dunn, an IMF technical field agent. Vanessa Kirby plays Alanna Mitsopolis, the black-market arms dealer known as the White Widow, daughter of the late Max from the first film. Frederick Schmidt plays her brother, Zola. Shea Whigham plays Jasper Briggs and Greg Tarzan Davis plays Theo Degas, the U.S. Intelligence agents assigned to hunt Ethan. Cary Elwes plays Denlinger, the Director of National Intelligence. Mariela Garriga plays Marie.
The film cost an estimated $291 million gross, with a net budget of $220 million. It is one of the most expensive films ever made. The locations are Italy, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates. Filming started in Italy in February 2020, was halted by the COVID-19 pandemic, resumed later that year, and wrapped in September 2021.
Here is the release schedule and how the film landed:
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| January 2019 | Cruise announces two Mission: Impossible films shot back-to-back |
| February 2020 | Filming begins in Italy |
| 2020 | Production halted by COVID-19, later resumes |
| September 2021 | Filming wraps |
| June 19, 2023 | Premiere in Rome |
| July 12, 2023 | Theatrical release in the United States by Paramount Pictures |
Lorne Balfe, who scored Fallout, returned to score this one.
What $571 million worldwide actually means
Dead Reckoning Part One grossed $571.1 million worldwide. It was the tenth-highest-grossing film of 2023. The film was considered a box-office disappointment. Both things are true, and the gap between them is the whole story of the modern blockbuster.
The film received critical acclaim. Separately, the audience score on TMDB sits at 7.5 out of 10 from 5,362 votes. That is a good number for a 164-minute spy film with a plot about a sentient AI and a key shaped like a cross.
So what does the film get right? The stunts are practical and legible. Atwell is a genuine find. Czerny’s return gives the series a spine it had been missing. The Entity is a villain built for an era when the threat is not a bomb but a network.
What does it get wrong? It spends 164 minutes setting up a conclusion it does not deliver. The airport sequence is a dead end. Gabriel is a mouthpiece for a threat that does not need one. And the flashbacks to Marie ask for emotional payment on a debt the film never incurred.
The ranking of what this film does well, in order of how much it matters:
- The Entity as a concept — a threat with no body and no address
- Hayley Atwell’s Grace — the one character with a real arc
- The Rome chase — the set piece that remembers to be fun
- Henry Czerny’s Kittridge — the past made useful
- The practical stunt work — expensive, and worth it
- Esai Morales’s Gabriel — a good actor stuck explaining the plot
- The airport sequence — a long walk to a fake key
It keeps interrupting its own best idea to have someone describe it. The Entity is frightening because it is everywhere and nowhere. Gabriel is frightening because he is standing right there. Those are not the same fear, and the film never decides which one it wants.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is a well-made, well-acted, overpriced entry in a series that has not run out of ideas. The critical acclaim is earned on craft and on Atwell. The TMDB audience score of 7.5 is a separate number, and a fair one.
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