What has been your favourite news item about the new Mission: Impossible film? Was it leading star Tom Cruise’s tempestuous COVID rant (weird to hear this particular celebrity swear!)? Or maybe that there will be a 20-minute car chase through Rome (eat your heart out, Vin Diesel!)? Perhaps it was the time that Cruise visited a curry house in Birmingham while shooting the film, which truly feels like it has been coming out for the last 26 years. Here’s a late entry: its running time.
Gaming website IGN revealed that the latest film in the blockbuster franchise will be two hours and 36 minutes without credits (those are the best bits, stick around!). That makes the film, ludicrously titled Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, the longest in the franchise. In fact, the film, directed and co-written by Christopher McQuarrie, is almost fifty minutes longer than the 1996 debut film which was a tight hour and fifty minutes.
While inflation is hard to celebrate, we can make an exception here. The franchise has emerged as a prestige offering, among a slew of lifeless copycats. There has been directorial flair (in particular, Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol), genius casting (Vanessa Kirby’s electrifying turn as the White Widow), and of course, those stunts. Do you know how hard Cruise works on those stunts? Well, you probably do, as he talks about them constantly. In the latest film, he rides a motorbike off a cliff, begins to free-fall and opens a parachute just in time. I’m not sure if Cruise’s endless (and potentially deadly) need to entertain is the healthiest mindset, but he certainly earns those two hours and 26 minutes. If he can jump off a cliff, you can sit in a seat.
How does it stack up against the other summer blockbusters? Oppenheimer is “kissing three hours”, according to director Christopher Nolan. No word on Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, though her films hover around the 90-minute mark. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is around two hours and a half. The just-released Fast X has a runtime of two hours and 21 minutes. This may feel like a long time to be inside on a summer’s day, but may I remind you of a time, not too long ago, when we had to watch the latest releases at home, on televisions that were not the size of cinema screens.
Besides, discourse about film length is boring and pointless. Short films can be good, long films can be good. While a tighter running time can create sharper, more concise projects, there’s no reason why a three-hour film, in the hands of the right director, can’t share those qualities. Perhaps Mission Impossible 7 will outstay its welcome, maybe it will feel like a two-hour preamble ahead of part two (out next summer, somehow), but give it a chance. No telling what Cruise will get up to, otherwise.
‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’ is out in cinemas on July 14 in the UK
Henry Wong is a senior culture writer at Esquire, working across digital and print. He covers film, television, books, and art for the magazine, and also writes profiles.
