July 22, 2023

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1

Very exciting debut of my pickup truck as a format for going to the drive in! We listened to the movie on the radio through an old boom box, and I loved how the action sequences were distorted through the lo-fi speakers. As for the movie, Cruise once again delivers our money's worth - the motorcycle jump was the big stunt hyped in the press, but I especially loved the escape from the passenger train car dangling from the bridge. Are the stakes getting too high for Ethan Hunt? Somehow this one felt much more serious than the nuke that nearly destroyed San Francisco. A delighful night at the Hi-Way Drive-In, Coxsackie, NY.

Fresh Notes from My 2025 Rewatch:

  • One of my all-time action movie pet peeves is when a train or truck does not stop moving when a battle of any kind takes place aboard. This movie fixes that by having the engineer murdered and the engine disabled and locked off.
  • Seven movies of fake faces and finally: I love that Briggs checks everyone's faces to ensure they're real!
  • Pom Klementieff: great death scene. Reveals her secret, then murmurs '...bon chance...' very Frenchly as she dies. 😎 "Good luck", the same as the Entity's message on the fake nuke at the airport.
  • The train-off-the-bridge sequence is a master class. Cruise wants to deliver action sequences that innovate and I say thank you! My son said "it's like Titanic". Yeah, Titanic on steroids!
  • I personally felt the motorcycle off the cliff + parachute sequence was overhyped. I've seen similar stunts in James Bond movies long ago. And I appreciate the Tom Cruise wants to do all these stunts himself, but in these days of face swapping, it's kind of irrelevant.
  • I really enjoyed Benji's defusing the nuke with riddles sequence at the airport. Delivered a lot of humanity in that scene, it was a nice meaty part for him. I just wish he had more to do besides computing, and funny yelling? This is one of the side effects of making a 7 movie series. Even in a nearly three-hour movie, there just isn't screen time for all the characters we care about. Rebecca Ferguson and Hayley Atwell have bigger and meatier parts, there's just no room for Pegg to actually participate as much...
  • They really build up the stakes in this movie to the point where it feels like they have to end the series, because how can they top this? Somehow the stakes seem higher than that other MI movie where the nuclear missile almost blew up San Francisco?

Fun Four Features At The Drive-In

The same night as Dead Reckoning, the Hi-Way was showing one movie we'd seen already, and two other films I'd see later in 2023: Indiana Jones 5, Barbie (the biggest crowd of the night), and, as we drove out afterwards, Oppenheimer was still playing, looking very serious and sepia-toned. Not exactly a perfect drive-in choice?

Other Missions



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