Tom Cruise’s latest blockbuster has stunning stunts, but the fun is missing
ACTION In the course of its 2-hour, 49-minute running time, Reckoning gives you two fleeting moments that suggest that, yes, even Tom Cruise is required to obey the laws of physics. In the first, he’s resurfacing from the depths of an arctic sea when, cramping with the bends, he curls into the fetal position and floats helplessly through the water. Much later in the film, gravity hurls him in the opposite direction: He plummets, just as helplessly, down through the sky and vanishes in a cloud. You get a sense of Cruise as just another solitary soul, a speck drifting through time and space.
Don’t kid yourself.
In this surprisingly dour conclusion to 2023’s Dead Reckoning, Cruise—as—Ethan Hunt, the superspy he’s played for nearly 30 years—has become nothing less than Atlas, eternally braced to prevent the world from sliding down off his back. (Judging from a few brief shirtless scenes, the 62-year-old star has done plenty of shoulder shrugs to bear up under all that weight.) Who else, the film’s characters repeatedly ask, can possibly stop the terrifying AI engine the Entity from gaining control of every nuclear warhead on the planet? The American President (Angela Bassett) is so anxious for Ethan’s assistance, you wouldn’t be surprised if she showed up on his doorstep with a meatloaf.
Ethan accepts his responsibility with what appears to be a nagging, troubled humility. Cruise, strikingly, has all but abandoned the confident star power, the gleaming look in the eye that comes close to a wink, that defined his performance in seven previous outings. He still runs blurringly fast, whether crossing a bridge or exiting an airborne vehicle, but often he seems to be brooding in shadow, like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. And what’s with the thatchy hair?
There’s nothing wrong with a performer of Cruise’s charisma and talent grappling with emotions that are darkly ambiguous. But this is a mega production with a reported price tag of about $400 million. Imagine if Pete “Maverick” Mitchell just stared at oil patches on the hangar floor, searching for meaningful patterns.
Of course, you never have to worry that Ethan won’t take whatever measures are necessary—and death-defying—to destroy the Entity. In other words, the big action scenes, when they finally arrive, really deliver. The movie’s centerpiece—a long, silent sequence with Ethan gingerly making his way through a submerged sub—is gruelingly suspenseful, like Sandra Bullock’s Gravity but with H20. It’s one of the best action scenes in the entire franchise, a classic unto itself.
From time to time the movie lightens up—there are tiny puffs of humor. Severance star Tramell Tillman is very funny as an American submarine captain who keeps addressing Ethan as “mister” with a subtle note of hostility. It’s as if he were thinking, “M:I, my eye!” (May 23, PG-13)
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