Film Reviews: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One & The League

Making Things Happen

Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One & The League

By Marc Glassman

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

A blockbuster? The real thing.

By Marc Glassman

Christopher McQuarrie, director and co-script w/Erik Jendresen

Starring: Tom Cruise (Ethan Hunt), Hayley Atwell (Grace), Ving Rhames (Luther Stickell), Simon Pegg (Benji Dunn), Rebecca Ferguson (Ilsa Faust), Vanessa Kirby (Alanna Mitsopolis), Esai Morales (Gabriel), Pom Klementieff (Paris), Henry Czerny (Eugene Kittridge), Shea Whigham (Jasper Biggs), Greg Tarzan Davis (Degas)

I don’t think of myself as a film industry advocate, but it is, ironically for me, a happy day when I can declare that a summer blockbuster is not only wonderful to watch but a likely box-office hit. Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One is the seventh film in a film franchise that goes back to a hit TV series made in the halcyon Boomer era of the mid-60s and has been providing cinema audiences with thrills for the past two decades. Still starring the ageless Tom Cruise, the current film provides the jolts of pleasure and moments of high tension that marks this as a peerless action thriller. Mission: Impossible cost over $280 million to produce, which means that the film will have to generate well over a billion to make money, given the costs of promoting and distributing works these days. I predict that it will easily do it, making this Cruise starrer the first true blockbuster hit of 2023. 

This is a fraught season for Hollywood’s big studios. With the pandemic over, or so we hope, expectations have been high for huge summertime successes. But that hasn’t been the case. Three films, which I reviewed favourably, The Flash, The Little Mermaid, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny have not lived up to box office expectations, causing alarm in an industry dealing with strikes and the loss of revenues in Russia and China. Mind you, the numbers on blockbusters are astounding. The Flash cost over $200 million to produce and its box office results are $262 million. That’s a lot but not nearly enough to break even when everyone from theatre owners to publicists and distributors have to be paid. The Flash would have to make a billion in revenue and that isn’t going to happen. It’s a similar picture for the Little Mermaid and Indiana Jones franchises: there’s a lot of interest but not nearly enough to make them hits. 

Perhaps the problem with many of the blockbusters is that they are franchises and, almost by definition, stale products. No one needs to watch another Star Wars or Star Trek or X-Men movie. The only compelling reason is if the “product”—a term I hate to use—is worth viewing. And so few really excite the requisite audience, which needs to be vast in order to be a success. You can’t be “pretty good” and make a billion dollars at the box-office.

And so we finally arrive at Mission: Impossible. It is paced at a breakneck speed for all of the set pieces—on trains, in automobiles, at lush parties—which dominate the film. Technically, this film is impeccable. A bravura car chase in Italy is perfectly timed to be thrilling, scary and funny. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his new partner Grace (Hayley Atwell) are outfitted with an absurdly low-tech auto for most of the scene, which includes races in narrow streets, harrowing bumps and bruises as vehicles move down a steep hill and into an extended chase through city streets. Just as exciting is a sequence at the Abu-Dhabi airport where Cruise’s Ethan first meets Grace, a brilliant amoral thief, and while they purloin half of a key, which is absolutely necessary to possess, a potential bomb has to be found and dismantled by one of Ethan’s closest colleagues, Benji (Simon Pegg) before it explodes, potentially destroying the building and everyone in it.

Mission: Impossible is so brilliant at the key action sequences that it sometimes is hard to sort out Hunt’s IMF (Impossible Mission Force) crew and what they mean to each other. Besides the enigmatic Hunt, who is charismatic but mysterious, there’s his best friend, computer expert Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), and the nerdy but needy Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), who have accompanied Cruise’s character for much of the IMF’s journeys. Ilana Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) is an ex-MI6 agent gone rouge who has been on Hunt’s gang for several installments of the franchise, and Grace (Atwell) is the very exciting new addition to the group—funny, and a bit sexy. What’s impressive about this version of Mission: Impossible is how quickly we understand what we need to know about Hunt and his “force,” because there’s no dawdling—it’s time for more action all the way through the film.

The praise for this film will land on Cruise, who is stunningly fit at the age of 61, and commands respect as the leader of this franchise as well as the revived Top Gun. But the kudos should be shared with Christopher McQuarrie, the main screenwriter of Top Gun: Maverick and the director/co-scripter on Mission: Impossible. McQuarrie clearly sees Cruise as an icon, a tough secretive man of action—this generation’s Clint Eastwood or John Wayne. We know that Cruise can act but what McQuarrie requires is the myth, not a flawed man. In this Mission: Impossible, his character is all about the mission; if he cares about anyone, it’s not obvious. He’s a hero—isn’t that enough?

As the film reaches its breathtaking conclusion, Ethan and Grace have to deal with a classic disaster, the runaway train plunging towards certain doom. McQuarrie and his admirable team have devised an extended sequence in which one train car after another falls down a vertiginous Swiss cliff: it’s absolutely brilliant. As Ethan and Grace desperately leap from one car to another, the situation becomes crazier and crazier—especially a sequence where the kitchen eventually explodes all too close to them. It is the funniest and scariest scene ever made on a train. I never thought I’d say this—it’s better than the action scenes in Buster Keaton’s The General, one of the finest films ever made. 

Mission: impossible —Dead Reckoning Part One isn’t as good as The General but it is some kind of wonderful. Go and see it. Be part of that billion-dollar box office.

The League

(US, 2023, 1 hour and 44 minutes)

Dir: Sam Pollard

The eminent Black filmmakers director Sam Pollard (MLK/FBI) and producer Questlove (Summer of Soul) have joined forces to make a fascinating history of the Negro Baseball Leagues, vastly popular sports institutions that attracted huge crowds and featured colourful players from 1920 to 1948. The League uses archival film and photos as well as interviews with former baseball stars including Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, umpires, historians and cultural figures—notably the writers Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka—to weave a story of Black pride and entrepreneurship made during the depths of racial segregation in the U.S. It’s a documentary of serious purpose, extolling the successes of Blacks when dealing with prejudice, while simultaneously celebrating the joys of great athleticism and sporting heroics.

Pollard is a brilliant editor and producer, who came to prominence working with Spike Lee on the docs When the Levees Broke and 4 Little Girls, is a master in finding and assembling footage in order to tell a compelling story. Along with Questlove, who rose to prominence as a music producer, the film is a treat, weaving indelible images from the Thirties and Forties of crowds entering parks, working in factories, and fighting in World War Two with jazzy tunes extolling the baseball prowess of big stars like the homerun hitting Josh Gibson, the lanky maverick Satchel Paige and the man who finally broke the racial colour barrier in 1946, Jackie Robinson. The filmmakers make it clear that the baseball played in the Negro Leagues was different from that of the stodgy all-white Major Leagues: faster, more improvisatory, filled with stolen bases, flashy defensive plays and tricky strategies. 

In The League, Pollard tells the complicated tale of a series of baseball leagues, which stretched over decades, with team owners embracing overwhelming successes followed too quickly with terrible defeats. Rube Foster, the great pitcher who evolved into a manager, then an owner and a creator of the first Negro National League, was nearly asphyxiated by a gas leak and never recovered, dying in his early 50s. Gus Greenlee, a numbers runner and racketeer turned philanthropist owned the most successful team of the Thirties, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, but it all unraveled when his star Satchel Paige left for the Dominican Republic with half his team, after the notorious dictator Rafael Trujillo offered the players much higher salaries to move to the Caribbean. The biggest pioneer of all, Effa Manley, the only woman inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame as an owner, was a civil rights leader who forced white shopkeepers to hire black women on 125th Street in 1930s Harlem and propelled the Newark Giants to a baseball championship in the late 40s, just before Robinson’s Brooklyn Dodgers proved far more attractive to Black customers than their own league. 

Pollard’s film tells the story of the owners and such great baseball players as Paige, Gibson, Monte Irvin, Larry Doby, Cool Papa Bell and Buck O’Neil. Integration proved to be a pyrrhic victory for the Negro Leagues. Manley’s Newark team folded in 1948, a year after Robinson achieved stardom with the Dodgers. A few Negro League players—Doby, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, Irvin and, of course, Mays and Aaron—became stars. Astonishingly, Paige entered the Major Leagues with Cleveland and pitched for a winning World Series team at the age of 42. 

But those were the few successes. Negro baseball declined quickly and was only a sad remnant by the early 50s. All the great new players joined the newly integrated baseball leagues—and that’s how it should be. But The League makes it clear that the all-Black sport that flourished between the two World Wars was often brilliant and the spirited owners who made it happen deserve to be celebrated. Thanks to this film and the Negro League exhibit at the Baseball Hall of Fame, the legacy will continue.