The Summer of IP Bloat

Dead Reckoning is a movie about reckoning with the fact that original screenplays are dead.

August 07, 2023

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They worked on this stunt for over a year… and…they just…they tweeted it out.

Tom Cruise doing his jump a motorbike off a mountain stunt from the new Mission: Impossible movie.

I had a bad time at the movies, and now it’s your problem. I wish that wasn’t true: I wanted to have a good time at the movies. I wanted to whoop and holler and tell the bad guy that Ethan Hunt is Number One and that the he (the bad guy) is a Wanker of Historic Proportions. But I forgot: like or not, we’re living through the Summer of IP bloat.

The most obvious target of Intellectual Property malaise this year is Barbie: a near two-hour existential comedy for… kids? … that caught the ire of smart thinkers while finding thoughtful defenses from a more forgiving crowd. Maybe we’ve put too much weight on a movie made by a toy company, but maybe it’s the blatant commercial tie-in that’s drawn all the attention towards Mattell and let the new Mission: Impossible film escape unscathed. Because, honestly, what was that thing?

In a world where film critics treat every Marvel movie with an exasperated sigh for being hand-wringingly sterile, it was surprising to see the amount of grace that was afforded this bloated, clunky, near-three hour flick. More than that, they loved it. Tom Cruise and screenwriter/director Christopher McQuarrie have been handed the mantle of saving the movie going experience (complete with a weird direct-to-camera thank you message before Dead Reckoning started), but I left the theater baffled as to why this film in particular would ever make me want to spend $14 on a matinee ever again.

The main enemy of the movie is an artificial intelligence that can access any connected computer system it wants, and in a world of literal deus ex machina, Dead Reckoning was saddled with too much of the good old fashioned variety. Plot points and character motivations seemed to materialize out of thin air in order to frame the movie around stunts it wanted to pull off, and instead of trying to tell an exciting story that moves forward, the script was constantly stuck in inventing a new past for Ethan Hunt. Remember how his original team was betrayed and murdered in the first movie while he ran around watching them die in sewer tunnels stuck behind wrought iron grates? Well, don’t worry if you don’t, apparently the exact same thing happened to him with someone named Marie that we’ve never heard of before in seven other installments. Also, here’s a new brunette for Ethan Hunt to fall for, time to kill off the last one we were introduced to.

McQuarrie built his reputation with sharp dialgoue-as-plot with 1995’s The Usual Suspects, and his work on Top Gun: Maverick shows he still has the chops to streamline a screenplay into a momentum machine. So why does Dead Reckoning start with a near ten-minute scene of upper echelon United States security heads jaw-flapping about what we just saw play out in the submarine action intro? It felt like McQuarrie had no trust that the audience could understand the moving images presented if they weren’t summarized out loud later by characters running down just exactly what happened.

Try as hard as I can, but I just can’t figure out why we need this movie outside of pushing an existing franchise to the limit of its tolerance. If sheer entertainment value was the goal, then it wouldn’t be as long as it is with as much filler as it has. If it’s trying to say something bigger about the human condition, then, well, what? That it’s bad when you let women with brown hair die? I probably could have sorted that out. And if the movie exists just to show off incredible stunts, then, well, why do I need the rest of it? I could just watch the stunts in a YouTube supercut—the opposite of this movie’s intended goal.

I’m flabbergasted that Cruise and McQuarrie made extensive promotional videos showing exactly how the biggest stunt in the movie was pulled off. If viewers are supposed to fork out for a ticket because they won’t believe what’s coming next, what’s the point of showing them exactly what will be coming next? People love to look at this one and say Can you believe that this movie was conceived around the stunts first and the script was written to accommodate it? Yes, yes I can believe this, because the stunt was good and the script was not.

As much as critics may ignore it, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is more indebted to twisting itself to support ongoing studio IP than to tell a good story. And looking at the 2023 box office numbers, the only four movies that cracked the Top 20 that aren’t based on existing IP are Oppenheimer, Elemental, M3gan, and…. The Sound of Freedom, a literal piece of extreme right-wing propaganda with an astroturfed ticket sales scheme. Movie enthusiasts want nothing more than for the movies to be back, but these sales numbers mean we’re firmly entrenched in existing properites for any big budget film moving forward. If that’s the case, so be it. I liked Top Gun: Maverick. But if you’re going to make a movie with a near unlimited budget pulling from a world that already exists, you gotta make it at least as coherent as the last installment of your seires.

Some notes:

  • I really like the Mission: Impossible franchise, and especially the other McQuarrie ones. Ghost Protocol is the series at its tightest and most fun, but otherwise they all seem to ask the question Do you want to be entertained? while Dead Reckoning asked Do you want to be informed?

  • For a spy movie there was shockingly little spy-craft. “Oh, the mask machine broke.” Huh, did it? Is there a reason why? No? Ah. Not even that the bad guy is a computer virus who hacked into it?

  • The whole slight of hand thing has gotten, well, out of hand in this movie. It was fun with the disc in the original, but relentless magic tricks are best left to magicians.

  • Pom Klementieff’s character was a French person whose name was Paris? And dressed like a murder clown? And behaved like a kitschy Bond villain? What was that about? Her character wasn’t afforded any aspect outside of masochist for the whole movie and then at the end she flips and is human after all, because the plot needs her to be.

  • Cary Elwes’ sniveling American accent was the opposite of Verbal Kint: an immediate oh so this is probably a bad guy, huh that then led to zero payoff.

  • The car chase scene was just… goofy. And the flat, stale one-liners felt like the worst of Joss Whedon Marvel quips. A huge disappointment, especially after I rewatched the car chase in Rogue Nation where the action is immediate and the danger is palpable.

  • Why did we need Hayley Atwell’s character at all? Sadly, it just felt like a younger IMF recruit was written into the script to potentially inherit the mantle if, say, Tom Cruise retires (or dies doing a stunt in the next one).

  • The train scene is literally ripped straight out of the PS3 classic Uncharted 2. For a movie that built itself around stunts first, maybe the could have come up with original ones?

Read

I’m about halfway through this thing and it’s written in an intriguing style that hides all present tense action for a scene inside the voice of the narrator. I thought I would get tired and demand something to happen, but, well, the narrator is very engaging. It’s intriguing seeing an author play out the philosophy of war in real time though one character’s observations and experiences and I love having my real-world views challenged by fiction.

Watch

I’m a sucker for Gareth Evans action sequences (see: The Raid), and the first Gangs of London season delivered. I spent this last weekend sucking down the second season and, well, was a bit miffed at the show’s dedication to crafting a twisty plot rather than the most inventive beat-em-up sequences I’ve ever seen. Still, pretty good. The show balances deep, brooding cinematics with high-drama soap opera plot twists, perfect for a few good slack-jawed reactions, as long as you have a stomach for the extreme violence that keeps popping up.

Listen

I wrote previously about another Little Feat song, but I couldn’t help but get pulled into “Fool Yourself” these last few weeks. Written by Fred Tackett, it’s a gentle groove that blossoms under Lowell George’s deeply sad vocals explaining to the subject that the people around you might not always have your best interests at heart. The release when the harmony of the chorus hits, however, is just pure sonic bliss.

Consume

One of the hallmarks of an excellent wine producer is taking your first sip and thinking huh, I’ve never tasted anything like this. I’ve been lucky to have sampled Martha’s wines over the past few years after hosting her at a coffee event, and time and time again I’m just in awe of what I’m drinking. You can most likely find her Post Flirtation white at a natural wine store near you—it’s peachy, crisp, and tastes like poached pears in simple syrup. I’m a bigger fan of drinking wine than tasting wine, and this bottle disappeared fast last night when our friend came over for dinner.

Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.