mission: impossible - dead reckoning 'part one', part three, or the road runner
in which tom faces his limits
The story goes something like this: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One opened well for a Mission movie, but it just found the wrong date. Underestimating the power of the two movies that would release on 21st July 2023, just a week and a half after Dead Reckoning, the seventh Mission would rapidly fade out of sight, eventually failing to make a profit and marking a rare commercial step backwards for a franchise that seemingly couldn’t lose.
True. We’ll get into it.
But this story of the Barbenheimer blitz omits a third movie that suplexed Tom Cruise in the summer of 2023, which I would argue played just as important a role in Dead Reckoning’s surprising underperformance. It’s just that said movie is really fucking weird to talk about.
It does sort of feel like it was a dream, this whole thing.
In any other summer, Sound of Freedom would have been the story of the season. The $14.5 million production, which was shot in 2018 under 20th Century Fox and then sat on a shelf for five years until upstart distributor Angel Studios snapped it up, was a genuine rock' ‘em sock ‘em sensation. It opened on 4th July, the week before Dead Reckoning, with a bigger weekend than anyone expected, and then went up 26% on Dead Reckoning’s opening weekend.
It became the tenth highest-grossing film of the year in the US, making $182 million domestically. Dead Reckoning made $172 million.
What the hell?
Well, a few things. It’s true that Angel Studios employed a slightly dubious ‘pay it forward’ strategy where audiences could donate ticket prices to audience members who couldn’t afford a ticket, which puffed up the grosses to an extent, but the ‘pay it forward’ thing only existed because of the narrative around Sound of Freedom that was making it such a mega-success anyway.
The story of a government agent going rogue to take on child traffickers in South America hardly seems like the stuff of blockbuster dreams. In fact, it seems like the stuff of direct-to-streaming action shlock, up to and including its star, Jim Caviezel, a staple of those kinds of films.
But Sound of Freedom had a secret weapon: a marketing strategy that I genuinely believe represents a roadmap towards the re-election of Donald Trump.
No, seriously. This seemingly innocuous thriller was lent an entirely new meaning by the full-court press campaign of of both Caviezel and the real-life man he was portraying, Tim Ballard, to link the film to QAnon.
Remember QAnon? That little podunk conspiracy about a possibly Satanic leftist global sex trafficking ring which only Donald Trump could stop? It seems quaint now, in a world that has entirely become QAnon, but it was a thriving subculture in the post-2016 years, and it found a remarkable megaphone in Caviezel and his film.
By all accounts, Sound of Freedom is more of a classically right-wing, moderately racist white saviour fantasy about the evils of Hispanic people than it is an actively conspiracist screed, but it didn’t really matter. Caviezel was going on every whacked-out conspiracy podcast you could name ranting about Satanic elites and baby farming, and Ballard was all too happy to back him up with his own insane interviews.
Indeed, the marketing was drawing on the pre-existing persona that Caviezel had built up of himself, as a rare representative of the truth-seeking Q-affiliated masses in a demonic and heretical Hollywood. In 2021, for instance, he Zoomed in to a fringe right-wing ‘Health and Freedom’ convention (complete with mask burnings!) to rave about the ‘adrenochroming of children’, referencing the popular Q theory that Hollywood elites were harvesting a chemical from the blood of children to give themselves longer life.
Caviezel is, of course, a fucking psychopath, and he gave the least interesting performance of the main cast of Person of Interest, but this struck a chord. Sound of Freedom quickly became the cause célèbre of the conspiracist alt-right, and they supported it heartily. Donald Trump screened it at his golf club, because of course he did. This was - and I use this words in full awareness that none of them exist in the Bible - Black Panther for white supremacists.
Sound of Freedom would have been a hit if it had just played to the crazies - but it didn’t just do that. See, as mentioned above, the actual film was closer to the middle of the road politically than Caviezel and Ballard had been selling it as. It even starred beloved character actor Bill Camp, right? Why would Bill Camp sign up for Pizzagate stuff?
The film’s director Alejandro Monteverde was keen to stress this interpretation, distancing himself from the full-throated Q narrative with every interview. His intercessions were enough to turn the case for Sound as an obvious work of paranoid fringe art into a question mark. It required some wilful disbelief to dissociate oneself from the narrative it had become central to, but - well, look at the numbers. The disbelief was wilful.
A year and a half later, Donald Trump was re-elected through a combination of increasingly mainstream right-wing fanaticism and a block of cognitively dissonant swing voters selecting the aspects of the man they liked and ignoring the ones they didn’t.
I told you! I TOLD YOU!!!
Welcome back to Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One, a film that relied upon an older male audience for its commercial success, and found much of that audience cannibalised by the film Sound of Freedom.
We left off last time with the simple question of why Tom Cruise chose a computer as the final enemy his most famous character would face.
It seems an odd choice, right? Lining up the previous franchise villains, they all made a certain sense for Cruise and his franchise ambitions.
Jon Voight was the ghost of the original franchise who had to be discredited and conquered.
Dougray Scott was the bland floppy-haired pseudo-romantic hero who had to be cucked.
Philip Seymour Hoffman was the thundering acting heavyweight who proved Cruise’s supremacy under duress.
Michael Nyqvist was, respectfully, a placeholder whose role was to fire a missile that needed to be stopped with one second to go.
Sean Harris was a whispery shadow bastard who could only be defeated in a battle of wits and Tom Cruise’s incredible memory.
Henry Cavill was literally Superman, the action hero of the 2010s who still couldn’t win a fistfight. Sean Harris was still a whispery shadow bastard, but he had a beard now.
These make sense. These conform to a neat, tidy formula. Though I love my good friend Solomon Lane dearly, Mission: Impossible villains are always a little hollow because they exist to prove a different aspect of Tom Cruise’s worth. They grandstand and give speeches and try to punch him, and they lose ignominiously in the end. What they represent is narrow and clearly defined.
But the Entity is a computer, and it can’t talk, and it can’t punch. And as we’ve covered, as an evil artificial intelligence programme, it represents quite a lot.
Why, then?
It’s probably useful to note around here that the Entity has been the thing that audiences seemed to bounce against the most in Dead Reckoning Part One, give or take the Ilsa Faust travesty (we don’t have time for that, but it’s not good). Since the last newsletter came out, The Final Reckoning has been screened for critics and early audiences, and it seems as if the same complaints have carried over to that film, too.
The complaints are obvious, and not unfounded. The Entity is an abstraction. It’s a concept, not a character. Putting such a concept at the very centre of your two-part, five-and-a-half-hour franchise finale blowout is… well, it’s bold.
It’s such a complicated concept that it forces Dead Reckoning into reams upon reams of exposition that has to be delivered practically to camera, and you never had to worry about that with Solomon Lane. In the pre-titles sequence, there’s a scene Rob Delaney, Charles Parnell, Indira Varma, Mark Gatiss and Cary Elwes take it in turns to explain the Entity, because it takes six different characters to make all this explanation bearable, and that doesn’t even close out the explanation. It just keeps going. Deep into the third act, we still have to pit stop to let Elwes explain even more about the Entity’s origin story. By all accounts, further exposition awaits us in The Final Reckoning.
Aside from the exposition needs, it’s just such a weighty concept that it can’t help but unbalance the film. This is particularly apparent in the Venice sequence, which is so cluttered with Entity lore and its magical prophetic powers that all the simple tension that powers the best Mission sequences can’t help but dissipate. The Entity is such a huge MacGuffin that it needs sub-MacGuffins and cruciform keys and secret source codes, and yet it’s never clear what it actually wants, a question that most Mission films have never struggled to answer.
It’s well-documented that the McQuarrie movies are created essentially on the fly, with no set script, improvising around set-piece locations and basic story concepts. You can see how this would sit awkwardly with a piece of narrative equipment as heavy as the Entity.
The result is something McQuarrie Missions have never been, which is inconsistent. Scenes can either be thrilling or tedious, and there’s no certainty about which. When it’s great, it’s as great as any of these films can be, but not since maybe Mission II has there been an entire sequence - the aforementioned trip to Venice - that basically doesn’t work from concept through to execution.
While Fallout or Rogue Nation works on a level that is almost entirely sincere, I find myself appreciating Dead Reckoning sometimes from a slightly more ironic place. I can enjoy Ethan Hunt remembering every brunette woman in his life before he jumps off a mountain on a motorbike, but I can also recognise that that is a really silly idea, and draws attention to how obvious the brunette swap from Rebecca Ferguson to Hayley Atwell was.
Go further, and it can feel like a lot of Dead Reckoning is off-kilter. It’s noticeably less visually ambitious than previous films, the digital cinematography lending a workmanlike sheen that feels atypical for a franchise that has always had a strong sense of its own look. The COVID-era production is sometimes noticeable to an almost No Way Home-level, with heroes running through eerily empty Venice streets or anonymous Alpine landscapes. There are - and this is a technical term - a lot of weird camera angles in that thing.
Rogue Nation and Fallout, though not unflawed, are exceptionally controlled blockbusters with a keen sense of themselves. Dead Reckoning Part One is not that at all.
And yet. And yet. There is a purpose behind this, or at least a reasoning. Maybe - just maybe, this is a result of our old friend the Entity, and how it makes Tom Cruise feel.
The following grand theory of Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning is cribbed in part from the Twitter user @jailedamanda, whose tweets are locked and I cannot quote. I build upon foundations already set. I credit my sources, damn it.
Walk with me.
2019 was a remarkable year for Hollywood. Nine movies made a billion dollars, a total that genuinely may never be matched, and the winning party was clear - Disney. Seven of those nine billion-dollar blockbusters were Disney productions, with the eighth being a Spider-Man sequel created in close concert. Number one was the temporary number one of all time, Avengers: Endgame, number two was the live-action Lion King, and number three was Frozen II.
These three films have plenty in common, but chief among them is that they were predominantly made on a computer. The Lion King was a ‘live-action’ work featuring entirely animated environments and characters. Frozen II was, and this will shock you, animated. I hear you kvetching about Endgame, which is obviously a movie with real people in it, but it and Infinity War are both impressive creations of green-screen filmmaking stuffed full of sequences working around actors not on the same set.
Endgame’s final battle, of course, was set in a muddy field in absolutely nowhere, populated largely by actors wearing animated pyjamas for their costumes to be projected onto in post.
The direction of travel in the industry towards these worlds of computer-driven artifice felt clear. When the pandemic struck, putting Hollywood in its most profound crisis in generations, it seemed as if these sorts of blockbusters could be the first to get back up and running - shot on soundstages and pre-visualised on computers, minimising the need for real people and practical locations that had become genuine safety risks in this new world. The very first blockbuster to resume shooting, in July 2020, was Jurassic World Dominion, a CGI-infused blob of a movie set in the middle of absolutely nowhere that could easily be represented by Pinewood Studios.
Combine this with the major advances streaming services were making in pandemic times that we covered back in the Top Gun: Maverick newsletters, and we have a recipe for existential crisis, if you happen to be a movie star invested in practical filmmaking and the theatrical experience. The world seemed to be telling Tom Cruise all the things it tells him in Maverick - that he’s out of date, out of touch, and needs to be left behind.
And remember - Maverick didn’t make it to cinemas, giving Tom his big vindication and hero’s victory lap, until 2022. At this point, there was just the existential crisis stuff.
The enemy at this point to Tom Cruise’s ongoing mission of making these kinds of movies no longer seems capable of finding embodiment in Sean Harris or Henry Cavill. It’s more amorphous, and more potent than that.
No. Tom Cruise’s enemy at this point was the algorithm.
The algorithm. You know, any algorithm. The Netflix algorithm, or the Marvel Studios pre-vis CGI algorithm, or the taste cluster algorithms David Zaslav likes. Any algorithm. Doesn’t really matter. They all represent the same thing - the victory of the digital programme over real human experience and judgement - and are easy to fuse together into some kind of evil super-algorithm that represents it all.
I think this explains why the Entity wound up being a touchpoint for all that AI anxiety in 2023, despite these movies’ production predating ChatGPT or DALL-E: it wasn’t ever really about AI as we know it now. AI was just a useful vessel, a set of recognisable narrative tropes, to hold all those algorithmic anxieties plaguing Cruise and by extension McQuarrie. Perhaps the pair of them saw Hollywood’s increasing technology reliance as leading inevitably towards generative AI. Maybe not. In any case, it was never really about ChatGPT.
This makes Dead Reckoning Part One a product of anxiety, which explains why it doesn’t feel very much like Rogue and Fallout, which confidently set up challenges that Tom Cruise/Ethan Hunt will inevitably surmount.
It doesn’t really feel like its Cruise contemporary Maverick either, which touches on similar worries about the obsolescence of the movie star in a simpler milieu where the only bad guys are generational guilt and faceless jets probably belonging to Iran, and where the inevitable triumph feels pre-ordained.
In Dead Reckoning, that triumph is not certain. All the tricks of the franchise - the masks, the near-futuristic technology, end up useless. Rebecca Ferguson dies out of nowhere because she’s busy. The nuclear bomb the heroes heroically defuse isn’t even real. Ving Rhames just leaves in a car before the third act because he doesn’t have anything useful to do. It’s all just a little bit wrong. The movie itself is freaking out.
In fact, thanks to the magic of the cinematic two-parter, Cruise/Hunt doesn’t even really win at the end, the big victory being the acquisition of one of the aforementioned sub-MacGuffins that might help him win in the second part.
To approach Dead Reckoning Part One as a work of cinematic flopsweat straining to prove its own usefulness in front of us doesn’t exactly make all the weird narrative decisions and moments of subpar craft work, but it does make them make sense.
This is Cruise as we haven’t seen him in a while - a version of Cruise who needs to justify his ongoing existence and isn’t sure if he’ll manage. As we covered last time, it’s a version of Cruise who has internalised his own status as a load-bearing pillar of the industry and has come to see his work as necessary. Indeed, this is a version of Cruise who will be caught on audio screaming at his crew for not socially distancing because he’s up all night begging insurance guys to not do insurance stuff (I don’t know).
Movie stars like Tom Cruise don’t strain and sweat like this in public. They’re not meant to. We’re not meant to see the effort. This is a franchise built on exuding effortlessness, producing an entry that is nothing if not effortful.
Or maybe Tom Cruise just doesn’t like iPhones and had to work during a pandemic and that stressed him out. I don’t know.
It feels fitting that all of this didn’t quite work.
Not the movie - we like the movie! - but the other side of it all. We’ve covered the numbers. The numbers are boring. What’s more relevant is that Dead Reckoning Part One just didn’t look like it had succeeded. The world seemed to pass it quickly by, mostly because it really wasn’t the biggest game in town.
We finally got back there. Thank God.
Once upon a time, I was going to spend this whole newsletter on Barbenheimer, but there was too much Cruise lore to get through, so we’re going to try and make this efficient.
For our purposes, there are two interesting things about Barbenheimer. The first is that these two films, which earned a combined $2.4 billion and 21 Oscar nominations (with eight wins), captured almost the entire moviegoing audience. More or less.
There was a lot of discourse and gender essentialism about it at the time, but which one was popular with who doesn’t really matter - at least one of Barbie or Oppenheimer appealed to somebody, somewhere.
(It’s my basic assumption that just about everybody who saw them liked at least one of those films. If you know anybody who hated them both, please tell me about them, because I’d love to interview them for science.)
The only ones maybe left out were young kids, which explains why the Ninja Turtles film that came out a couple of weeks later did well. Mission: Impossible unfortunately does not really cater to four year olds, and as such it was competing for an audience who had the three most culturally relevant and conversation-starting films of the summer. None of those films starred Tom Cruise. (Yes, three. I didn’t explain the concept of adrenochroming for you to forget.)
The second thing is that while Barbie and Oppenheimer were Cruise’s opponents at the box office, they represent a lot more of what he stands for than they do the Disney-stuff of the immediate pre-pandemic era we were talking about.
Barbie was based on existing IP, but it was directed by Greta Gerwig with all the idiosyncrasies and used a ton of practical sets and effects in its production. Oppenheimer, of course, is the ur-Christopher Nolan project, where he almost singlehandedly brought back nuclear warfare for verisimilitude. It’s easy to imagine Cruise liking them both.
(It’s at this point that we do have to remember that Cruise allegedly loved The Flash, an abomination to all he holds dear, but I genuinely just cannot explain that one for you.)
Cruise wasn’t defeated by the algorithm, or by Netflix. He was defeated by two critically-acclaimed films made by well-liked directors whose release became the biggest event for cinemas since Endgame.
There are worse ways to fail, and that’s perhaps why Cruise seemed to take it lightly. While the Fast & Furious franchise span into terminal panic when its big part one event underperformed, he and McQuarrie stayed the course, getting on quickly with filming the next part.
The only concession to Dead Reckoning Part One not quite working was that Paramount, as they delayed the film for strike reasons to 2025, removed the title Dead Reckoning Part Two from the sequel. This also meant retroactively striking Part One from the previous film, which means I can finally stop doing that stupid fucking crossed-out text bit that has plagued me for 10,000 words.
They’d sneak Reckoning into the title anyway, eventually. Silly sausages.
A period of principal photography even lengthier and more convoluted than the first movie ensued, with strike shutdowns and other challenges lengthening the shoot to well over two years. By all accounts, Cruise continued to squabble with Paramount over expenses, and the budget of The Final Reckoning ballooned to $400 million.
This was not a man chastened.
In the time since, he’s smoothly laid the runway for a post-Mission life, choosing a Alejandro González Iñárritu film as his first original dramatic performance in a decade. (I’m not thrilled about the director either, but it’s what it represents, okay?) He’s hanging out with Ana de Armas, who he’s either dating or preparing for a deep-sea thriller directed by Doug Liman, depending on who you ask.
And yes, it still seems as if he wears the title Mr Movies with pride, mentoring younger stars like Glen Powell and endorsing movies like they’re Presidential candidates. Here he is giving the Cruise Badge of Honour to Sinners, because all theatrical successes bend towards the Cruise sun:
This photo was taken in Cineworld Leicester Square on the afternoon of 26th April 2025. At that exact time, I was a few doors down in the Vue West End watching Revenge of the Sith. I came close, okay?
At the time of writing, The Final Reckoning is less than a week from release. Its reviews are the weakest for a Mission movie since III, and it’s almost certain that the live-action Lilo & Stitch will eat its lunch at the box office.
But does it matter?
This is the question I’m left with, reader, and the answer very much seems to be a no. It’s the one constant of Cruise’s career through the 40 years we’ve covered - nothing sticks for long. Sofa jumps, antidepressant opinions, Jeremy Renner, Netflix and generative AI - they take their shot, and sometimes they draw blood, but they never really seem to stop the guy.
Ultimately, he’s the Road Runner, and the world is Wile E. Coyote. I think he’ll keep taking hundreds of millions of dollars from studios and making movies until his body or the Sun gives out. There are good and bad things about this, and very few certainties we can hold to.
But I’d rather have him around than Jim Caviezel, and I hope you feel the same way.