Early Reviews for Mission Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One Hail It As the “Best Mission Yet”.
A nine-minute featurette on the Paramount Pictures YouTube channel about Tom Cruise riding a motorcycle off a cliff was the best movie of 2022. It wasn't the biggest superhero movie or the Oscar favorite. The most famous Mission ploy: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 set the tone for the seventh installment in the Impossible series. Obviously, with a scene this big, it's worth wondering if the rest of the two-and-a-half-hour movie can keep up; thankfully, early reviews from the Dead Reckoning premiere in Rome are overwhelmingly positive.
Perri Nemiroff of Collider gave the film high marks, noting that it features "some of the most well-defined and exhilarating set pieces photographed in ways that truly make you feel like you’re in the middle of the action." Nemiroff's praise for the film was ecstatic. She also gave Hayley Atwell high marks, writing that Atwell gives one of "the most captivating performances/arcs, and just a hugely enjoyable character to watch," and that she appears to be becoming a fan favorite from early screenings.
As Peggy Carter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since 2011, Atwell is no stranger to major franchises; however, joining Mission Impossible is a completely different challenge. She revealed to ET Canada that for one stunt, she spent five months learning how to drift in a car. People film editor Nigel Smith praised the experience, saying, "it reinvigorated my love for the summer blockbuster."
“What ends up happening is that this character is consistently inconsistent, which makes me happy because I wanted to elevate her. I wanted her to be more than just an ice queen, an ingénue, or a femme fatale. Atwell elaborated, "I wanted her to be nuanced."
Scott Mantz, a film critic, praised it as "the best Mission yet" while stressing that "it's a complete movie that stands on its own" despite being the first installment in a two-part series. Dead Reckoning sets up an eerily relevant antagonist, as Joseph Deckelmeier of Screenrant noted. This reads like a cautionary tale given that the AI is the bad guy, "Deckelmeier wrote. The director, Christopher McQuarrie, did explain to Empire in November what the title meant, despite the fact that the precise details of the plot have been kept secret as was expected.
“Ethan's past is revealing a lot of things. A term used in navigation is "dead reckoning." McQuarrie stated, "It means you're choosing a course solely based on your last known position, which becomes quite the metaphor not only for Ethan but for several characters."
And don't worry if you think watching the motorcycle jump featurette will make Dead Reckoning less memorable; there is apparently a train scene in the movie that is just as thrilling. McQuarrie stated to Empire, "If we’d known the challenges, we’d never have done it," referring to the scene in which Cruise's Hunt fights someone on top of a moving train.
Mission Impossible : The filming of Dead Reckoning was supposed to begin in February 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic caused it to be delayed for several months. According to The Wrap, principal photography did not finish until April 2023. (Leaked audio from the set showed Cruise warning crew members who did not strictly follow COVID safety rules.) The first and second parts were shot simultaneously.)
Cruise, Atwell, returning co-stars like Ving Rhames and Vanessa Kirby, and Henry Czerny reprising his role as IMF director Eugene Kittridge for the first time since the original film's release in 1996 make up the cast of Dead Reckoning, which opens in the United States on July 12. The sequel to Dead Reckoning is scheduled for release on June 28, 2024. All we can hope for at this point is that Cruise jumps from a plane onto a moving train on a motorcycle.
