“Sacrificing Ilsa to push Grace forward.” That criticism misses the point the moment it treats a new character’s success as a mistake in itself. My problem with Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One lies elsewhere.
The question is not how often Grace, the pickpocket, appears. What matters is whether the film gives both Ilsa, the established agent, and Grace, the newcomer, the chance to choose their own paths. If this is a movie about trusting people, then we should ask not only whom it keeps alive, but whose judgment it respects all the way through.
This time, the enemy is an artificial-intelligence entity capable of manipulating information and even voices. Governments around the world want to control it, while Ethan Hunt, an agent determined to protect his colleagues, wants to destroy it. In a world where no one can be sure what is real and what is fake, the film puts its faith in human judgment over a force that can calculate everything.
That faith comes alive during the car chase in Rome. When Ethan and Grace, handcuffed together, trade places behind the wheel, I laughed—and accepted that neither of them could get out alone. The action proves why people are worth trusting. But the story does not give some of its characters enough room to make decisions for themselves. That is why I could not fully trust the film by the end.
The Problem Isn’t the New Face. It’s the Right to Choose
I do not blame Grace for showing up. The real question is who the film allows to choose their own path. If we decide that an established character has been pushed aside simply because a newcomer has a lot to do, we risk missing what was actually taken away.
Grace does not arrive intending to save the world. She is a pickpocket who puts money and her own survival first. The fact that she becomes entangled with Ethan does not mean she is immediately obligated to take responsibility for his mission.
Of course, it is hard to like someone who keeps running while the person beside her is risking his life. But being irritating is not the same as being useless. A character who could run away has to choose, at some point, to stay. Only then does that decision carry any weight.
Ethan needs more than subordinates who move when he gives an order. He also needs the story to show someone who has survived by relying on her own calculations learning to trust his judgment. Grace’s distrust is not noise to be removed; it is a question the film needs to answer properly.
Then the same standard should apply to Ilsa. Even while being hunted, she remains an independent agent protecting the key. Saying only that she is someone Ethan cares about does not account for everything she does.
What interests me is not how much screen time the two women share. It is what each of them wants, what each is willing to give up, and how those decisions lead to their next actions. A character can have plenty of screen time and still have very little agency if all she does is help someone else make up their mind.
That standard connects directly to the struggle over the Entity. Governments want to seize its power, while Ethan wants to destroy it. They may be chasing the same key, but they want different worlds.
The governments’ goal is to gain control before anyone else. Ethan rejects the very idea of one party monopolizing that power. On this point, I am firmly on the film’s side.
But simply creating a hero who rejects domination is not enough. Just as we need to follow Grace’s decision to trust Ethan, we need to understand what Ilsa wants. Choosing whom to trust also means accepting the risk of choosing wrong.
It is easy to tell someone to trust. It becomes difficult the moment you extend a hand to someone who may not move the way you want. The film shows that difficulty most convincingly not in its exposition scenes, but in the chase sequences where the two characters have to escape together.
The Action Gets Stronger When People Hold on to One Another
The Rome chase and the train escape turn trust into something physical. Neither character can get out without putting their body in the other’s hands, so trust becomes not a lofty idea but an immediate necessity.
In Rome, Ethan and Grace trade places behind the wheel while handcuffed together. One person’s mistake creates the next danger as the other tries to fix it. Their frantic improvisation made me laugh.
Ethan, before saving the world, let’s settle who’s driving.
The important thing is that the danger does not disappear just because the scene is funny. The more badly the driving goes, the more closely they have to watch each other’s movements. Neither the thief who has always relied on her own skills nor the agent accustomed to missions can make every decision alone.
The handcuffs keep them together, but they do not make them move in sync. Being in the same car does not instantly make them allies. The film makes that distinction clear not through arguments, but through the way they keep passing the wheel back and forth.
Here, mistakes are not jokes that briefly pause the action. The mistakes create the next threat, and that threat demands cooperation in turn. That is why, even while laughing, we cannot stop watching how the two characters move together.
On the train, that cooperation becomes far more urgent. Each falling carriage has a different floor and a different exit, so the method that worked before cannot simply be repeated. The two have to assess the changing space and hold on to each other.
At this point, I found myself following not who was stronger, but who reached out a hand. Getting across alone matters less than helping the other person make it over too. The person being rescued has to help hold things together the very next moment.
That is why the train escape is more than a repetition of the same danger. Every time the ground shifts, the relationship between the two characters is tested again. Giving the other person time to move—and bracing your own body while you wait—becomes part of the action.
Ethan’s leap from the cliff is almost superhuman. But on the train, even he cannot solve every problem alone. I admire the choice to place, behind the scale of the stunt, moments when he still needs someone else’s hand.
Grace does not remain merely cargo carried by a hero. Because the two of them hold on to each other, the escape is not solely Ethan’s triumph. But to build that kind of trust, the story first has to leave the person whose hand it is a place to make the next choice.
Cruise’s Panic and Atwell’s Fear Make Them Human
The two leads come to trust each other through panic and fear rather than flawless skill. For reliance to feel urgent, the film needs to show faces that cannot solve everything alone.
Tom Cruise, playing Ethan Hunt, does not cling to the hero’s dignity in Rome. I like the panic that surfaces when the driving refuses to go according to plan. Ethan can control his own body, but he cannot control the movements of the person beside him.
He can leap off cliffs, save the world and master every variable. The driving, however, is still under negotiation.
That panic does not diminish Ethan’s abilities; it gives him a reason to cooperate. If he always looked like he knew the answer, Grace would only have to follow instructions. Cruise keeps him in the moment as someone who has to watch and respond to another person.
The urgency on the train serves the same purpose. Because Ethan does not pretend to be relaxed in the face of danger, his efforts to save someone else do not feel like an effortless service. There is a meaningful difference between a person who is struggling himself and still manages to hold on to someone else.
As Grace, the pickpocket, Hayley Atwell makes the difference between confidence and fear unmistakable. The face she wears when her skills are working is different from the one she wears when she is trapped in unfamiliar danger. That difference keeps her reliance on Ethan from feeling like an abrupt change of heart.
It is especially clear when they trade the wheel while handcuffed in Rome. The self-assured thief becomes a frightened beginner, but Atwell never makes Grace helpless. She is afraid, yet still determined to do her part in the moment.
It is fair to say that Grace’s instinct to run is irritating. But her character’s frustrating behavior should not be confused with a failure by the actor. Atwell conveys both Grace’s reluctance to trust anyone and her fear that she cannot manage alone.
As the longtime colleague Luther, Ving Rhames calmly keeps Ethan’s desire for revenge in check. Simon Pegg, as Benji, solves the airport bomb puzzle without erasing the character’s fear.
These colleagues are trustworthy not because they automatically agree with Ethan, but because they work alongside him even when they are afraid or opposed to him. Being on the same side does not erase their individual judgment.
The actors preserve characters who have their own weaknesses and decisions. The question is whether the story gives every one of them the same opportunity to choose.
Grace Isn’t the Problem. It’s How Ilsa Is Used.
I do not agree with the criticism that Grace is a problem because she replaces Ilsa. I do agree that the story narrows Ilsa’s choices until they mainly serve someone else’s transformation.
Grace is a thief who initially puts her own life and money first. The film needs to show her deciding whom she is willing to take responsibility for. Because she does not trust Ethan at the beginning, her eventual decision to trust him belongs to her.
Atwell makes Grace’s transformation convincing. She sells the shift from a confident woman to someone who is frightened but keeps moving. I do not think we need to diminish Ilsa’s role in order to acknowledge that achievement.
The two characters’ appeal is not a limited resource they have to steal from each other. Grace moving to the foreground does not require Ilsa to retreat. We can enjoy a new character and still be angry about how an established character is treated.
Even while being hunted, Ilsa remains an agent protecting the key. She risks herself to fight for Grace’s rescue. There is clearly a decision of her own in that action.
So it would be inaccurate to say that Ilsa makes no choices. The problem is what the film holds on to after those choices. In the second half, it prioritizes what Ethan feels over what Ilsa wanted.
An attempt to save someone reveals the character making it. But when that action is used mainly to deepen someone else’s anger and determination, the story changes. It is not enough simply to give a character the chance to act bravely.
I am not demanding that Ilsa be kept safe. In a film about dangerous missions, a guarantee of safety would make little sense. What I want is for the film to keep following her thoughts all the way through the danger.
I understand that Ethan’s emotions matter. But Ilsa is also someone who has always acted on her own judgment. If her role is reduced to what she means to Ethan, a film about trusting people ends up looking less closely at one of them.
Grace is given the arc of a person who runs away before choosing responsibility. Ilsa also needed room to carry the meaning of her actions into her own story. That, more than the difference in screen time, is what disappoints me.
Giving someone the chance to make a decision is not enough. The film also has to show how that decision changes the enemy’s plan.
The Fuzzier the Enemy’s Powers, the Fuzzier the Human Victory
If the film wants us to trust human choices, it also needs to show what the enemy cannot do. By leaving the limits of the Entity’s abilities unclear, the film makes the achievements earned through human judgment less distinct.
The Entity manipulates information and voices, and it can read human behavior on a broad scale. The idea that even familiar instructions cannot be trusted is compelling. It shifts the skill Ethan needs from following orders to making judgments.
The problem is that such a powerful enemy leaves conspicuous gaps during the chases. I am not asking the film to explain every variable. But we need to know what the Entity can read and what it misses, so that a human decision to exploit that gap carries real weight.
It can read every move in the world. Yet in the field, it is still just another chase.
I would not call that an outright contradiction. Predicting every action does not mean being able to stop every action. But because the film does not establish the difference clearly enough, it becomes difficult to tell when a character has made a smart decision and when the enemy has simply weakened for a moment.
Paris is a more convincing example. As Gabriel’s pursuer, she owes Ethan her life and gains the possibility of making a different choice. Her movement away from an order and toward the person who saved her has a motivation we can hold on to.
The more such actions accumulate, the more we believe in people who exist outside the Entity’s calculations. Conversely, when the explanations of the enemy’s abilities grow louder, it becomes harder to see what humanity has overcome. Making the enemy seem larger does not automatically make the human contest feel larger.
The difference becomes clear when we compare this film with Mission: Impossible – Fallout. That movie binds the choice to save a colleague more tightly to the risks of the mission. Here, the acts of saving one another are vigorous, but the extent to which they change the fight against the enemy is deferred.
I understand that the story is split into two parts, as the title itself makes clear. Even so, audiences who have spent 163 minutes with this film cannot be asked to wait until the next installment to see whether the choices made here pay off. The design of an ongoing story and the incomplete ending of a single film are separate things to judge.
In Rome and on the train, the characters’ decision to trust each other changes the immediate danger. I will also take into account the narrow space the story gives its characters to choose, along with the enemy’s unclear rules, which blur the results of those choices.
I Trusted the Hands Reaching for One Another, Less So the Story
I like this film’s action. The mistakes in Rome and the urgency on the train make a convincing case that people who hold on to each other matter more than people who are simply strong on their own. But the story does not extend that trust equally to every character.
Cruise’s panic and Atwell’s fear keep human beings alive inside the spectacle. By contrast, the decision to narrow Ilsa’s choices around Ethan’s emotions diminishes the film’s achievement. And because the Entity’s capabilities remain unclear, the results achieved through human judgment are less distinct than they should be.
My rating is 3.5 out of 5. The Rome chase and the train escape are more than enough reason to spend the time, but I cannot rate the characters’ agency or this installment’s ending as highly.
If you enjoy action that follows who grabs whom in a dangerous space, I recommend it. The pairing of a fumbling agent and a frightened beginner is fun, too. But if you need a story to reach a satisfying conclusion within a single film, this may not be for you.
Rather than trying to keep up with every prediction the Entity makes, watch for the moments when the two characters put their bodies in each other’s hands. The wheel being passed over and the hands reaching out are where the film’s best work comes together. You should also go in knowing that “Part One” is not decorative.
The next film to watch is Mission: Impossible – Fallout. It offers a useful comparison for how tightly the choice to save colleagues can be tied to the mission. The unresolved story continues in the direct sequel, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.
I trusted the hands these characters used to hold on to each other. I did not trust the story to respect the people those hands belonged to all the way through.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Can I follow the film without seeing the earlier installments?
The story surrounding the Entity and the key begins here, so the broad outline is easy enough to follow. Still, watching the earlier films will help you feel the long-standing trust between Ethan and his colleagues. If you choose just one, I recommend Fallout, which offers a useful comparison between saving colleagues and completing the mission.
Does the story end in this film?
No. Important actions and changes in the characters’ relationships take place here, but the larger story surrounding the Entity is not resolved. It continues in the direct sequel, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025).
Is it based on a true story? Is there an original work?
It is not based on a true story, but is a spy-action film based on Bruce Geller’s television series Mission: Impossible. The Entity is a fictional artificial intelligence capable of manipulating information and voices. It is best not to approach the film as an explanation of how real-world technology works.
How long is the film, and which scenes stand out?
The runtime is 163 minutes. The Rome chase, in which two handcuffed characters trade the wheel, and the escape from the falling train are especially impressive. Do not focus only on the scale of the stunts; it is more fun to watch how the characters deal with each other’s mistakes.
Does Grace’s arrival weaken the established characters?
I do not agree that Grace’s success is itself a problem. Atwell convincingly portrays a self-assured thief confronting fear and changing as a result. The issue is not the new character’s appeal, but the way the story prioritizes Ethan’s emotions over Ilsa’s next choice.
