The Loudies: 2023's Best Moments in Action Movies Part 1
The award for Best Decision of 2023 goes to "Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part One" for bringing back Henry Czerny as IMF head Eugene Kittridge
2023’s Mission Impossible: The One With Three Colons is equal parts 1970’s Wide World of Sports stunt spectacular and existential crisis. Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt tries to save the world from a renegade artificial intelligence by jumping off cliffs, glaring suspiciously, and running. Lots of running.
Veteran character actor Henry Czerny is the glue that holds the whole thing together. And the decision to bring him back after a more than 25 year gap since his first and only appearance in the Mission: Impossible franchise is the best decision in action movies in 2023.
You may remember Czerny from 1996’s Mission: Impossible, where he played Impossible Mission Force head Eugene Kittridge. While Hunt was hanging from ceilings and getting double crossed by Jon Voight, Kittridge was hot on his trail, convinced that Hunt was a mole that killed his team and sold out other spies for cash.
Plot aside, Czerny spent most of Mission: Impossible locked in an intensity-off with Tom Cruise and held his own. For instance…
“You want to shake hands with the devil, that’s fine with me. I just want to make sure you do it in hell.”
Watch how committed Czerny is to making this chock-full-of-zingers-and-wackadooness moment feel grounded and real. Like, of course Ethan Hunt had to explode that whole restaurant with his bomb gum. That very intense man with the 60’s politician haircut made it very clear he was in trouble.
Kittridge is throwing this energy around the whole flick. Like this scene, where he misses catching Hunt in a meeting with a mysterious arms dealer by a matter of seconds:
Look at that man, rolling in and tossing that big-ass hat, all Wild-West-sheriff-like. Slagging on Actual American Hero Dale-frigging-Dye with nothing but condescending enunciation and unreasonable closeness. He gets right up in the grill there. No room for the Holy Spirit whatsoever.
Cruise would go on to turn Mission: Impossible into his personal fantasyland, using the franchise to do whatever insane thing he could dream up. But Czerny’s character was nowhere to be seen after the first film—in a New York Times piece, he speculates it’s because he got too big for his britches about what Kittridge could have done and talked his way out of further work.
Who knows how much truth there is to that, but regardless, Kittridge is back for Dead Reckoning and glowering just as judgmentally at Hunt as before. In the same NY Times piece, Dead Reckoning director Christopher McQuarrie said he always planned to bring back Kittridge.
“Henry’s Kittridge is not a villain,” McQuarrie wrote in an email. “He’s not even an antagonist. He’s a worthy adversary, walking the line between a guy we love to hate and want to like. He’s a bastard, but he’s a bastard we want on our side.”
Czerny does not disappoint. His character gets introduced early and has the unenviable task of explaining how the AI, called “The Entity,” is changing the nature of reality and truth in the world. He also has to explain how two keys are needed to control the AI, and what’s at stake to track those keys down.
It’s a bunch of technobabble and gobbledy-gook, and there’s a lot of dialogue that drifts very close to “freshman philosophy major smokes pot for the first time.” But thanks to his chops and that pure-gold-covered-in-black-coffee voice of his, Czerny once again holds the whole thing together and makes it sing.
The best part of this scene (other than unstoppable quip machine Rob Delaney popping up as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) is Czerny’s big DGAF energy. Every line he delivers as Kittridge is dripping with this “y’all are playing hopscotch while I’m trying to save America” vibe. He’s seen everything, he’s done everything, and he has no time for anyone’s nonsense.
He’s the only person I believe in that room. Except for Rob Delaney.
Czerny told NY Times that his DGAFness was a choice rooted in how he believed the character had weathered the time between his appearances:
I figured Kittridge got schooled by Ethan 25 years ago, so he figured, “OK, I’m going to work in all the other agencies in Washington because I don’t like being schooled by somebody who’s younger than me.” So I think he’s worked everywhere he could at as high a level as he could, and came back to run the Impossible Mission Force a great deal more edified. He has a sadder but wiser knowledge of how the American intelligence machine works and who it’s working for.
Also, Czerny explains what IMF stands for in this scene, and it’s glorious. While nodding slightly at the ridiculousness of calling something “Impossible Mission Force,” his delivery is two steps removed from caring at all. Like yes it’s a ridiculous name, but that’s the name, and I’ve been stopping rogue states since you were in 3rd grade so I have no time for your opinions.
Oh, and yeah, Tom Cruise drives a motorcycle off a cliff and it’s awesome. But to be an actual movie that makes sense, those moments of Evel Knievel spectacle need a brusk, annoyed bureaucrat who’s tired of this and wants to save the world on a reasonable schedule.
Henry Czerny was, and is, the right man for the job.