Dead Reckoning Part One was the inevitable Mission: Impossible comedy

polygon.com:

The sky is blue and Mission: Impossible movies have stunts. This wasn’t always the series’ MO; Brian De Palma’s 1996 franchise starter fused the director’s Hitchcockian thriller impulses to more traditional ’90s shoot-’em-up action (to great success). But as star Tom Cruise became more of an extreme-sports obsessive, so too did his on-screen alter ego, Ethan Hunt. What started with the mandate to Always Be Running escalated in the fourth installment, 2011’s Ghost Protocol, when Cruise dangled from the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. The actor has been pitching audiences death-defying reality ever since.

Three sequels later, something has changed again. This month’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One was poised to bounce from set-piece to set-piece, the high-impact camerawork once again exalting Cruise as Hollywood’s unkillable dram-athlete. Instead, it’s total Looney Tunes, an anti-vanity project that’s arguably the series’ first comedy entry.

[Ed. note: This story digs into the entire movie, including the ending.]

Credit goes to Christopher McQuarrie, whose mission for the last decade has been to demolish and rebuild Cruise’s image over and over again. After McQuarrie punched up the Ghost Protocol script and directed Cruise in 2012’s street-level actioner Jack Reacher, Cruise invited him to step up and helm 2015’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. The writer-director could think big in development on screenplays and rewrite on the fly, which is exactly what the M:I movies required. As McQuarrie has explained it over the years, Cruise showed up with a list of stunts for Rogue Nation, and the filmmaker’s job was to stitch it all together with plot and emotion. McQuarrie accepted the mission,