Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning is now on streaming.
And that’s the title now; just Dead Reckoning, not Dead Reckoning Part One as it was called all through its theatrical release. The Part part has been lopped off for home video, presumably because the conclusion of this story will be given a different title when it comes out (and perhaps because the second “part” has been delayed because of last year’s Hollywood strikes, which means by the time it does open in theaters it might be viewed as a negative to be referred to as a direct continuation, rather than a standalone Mission: Impossible sequel.)
Whatever the title, this was yet another extremely entertaining entry in the long-running action series featuring Tom Cruise running and jumping and dirt biking and base jumping and doing all sorts of other ridiculous stunts on behalf of national security. In Dead Reckoning Part One, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt must stop an artificial intelligence known as “The Entity” from destroying the world. Timely!
READ MORE: Every Reference to Old Mission: Impossibles in Dead Reckoning
And not just timely, but a perfect subtext for a film filled with practical stuntwork by Cruise and others. As I wrote in my positive review of the film here at ScreenCrush…
McQuarrie gets a lot of mileage out of turning the IMF’s deceivers into the deceived. But these are not just plot twists for their own sake; the notion of not believing what you are seeing once again reflects back on Dead Reckoning’s motifs about the old versus the new, and on placing undue emphasis on the things that computers can do. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One starts at absurd and only gets more bonkers from there. (The film openly jokes about how many times Ethan Hunt has gone rogue and still managed to keep his job as the world’s greatest spy.) But Dead Reckoning also passionately believes in those themes — and, above all, in Tom Cruise doing ridiculous things on camera for the amusement of his paying customers.
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning is now streaming on Paramount+. This message will not self-destruct in five seconds, unless you have a very old and faulty laptop.
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