In modern-day cinema, the quality of a movie is based on how well it alters or avoids beaten-to-death tropes, reimagines characters outside of their overdone stereotypes, and experiments with new ideas, techniques, or graphics within the medium. Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning does none of these things, instead relying on action scenes and cardboard cut-out-characters filled with recent-Marvel level quips.

This film does nothing to further its plot and fails to capture or engage the audience throughout its 2 hours and 43 minutes of run time. It uses its action and fight choreography—which other films have done more interestingly—to hide the fact that the plot is very poorly-executed. Each character introduced is either a one-dimensional caricature of the funny sidekick, deceitful femme fatale, classic villain’s henchmen, or is one with absolutely no characterization at all. On top of the lack of depth, the film relies on the audience remembering events from past films, causing scenes that are supposed to be heart-wrenching to be uncared for. 

With its lack of originality, this film does incorporate an interesting concept. The most interesting aspect of this movie is the implementation of a non-human villain for Ethan Hunt, an AI figure named “The Entity.” But it’s not until two hours into the film when the Entity is shown to be able to mimic humans and control devices that the audience finally understands why the threat is dangerous. The cherry on top of all of these flaws is that within the first couple minutes of the movie, the entire mystery that Hunt is trying to solve is revealed to the audience, changing the frame of the movie from mystery and pursuit of a culprit to a quest for Hunt, who has no real idea how to move the story forward.

Overall, the issues of this film mainly boil down to the fact that this movie is a part one of two, so the story is dragged out through multiple 10+ min action sequences. It is half of an uncompleted story that feels extremely long despite it seemingly not having enough time to write characters with emotional depth. With this mediocre and far-too-long film causing a loss of faith in all Rotten Tomatoes scores, the only word to describe Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One is “mid.”