Christopher McQuarrie

Somewhere in every Christopher McQuarrie film a man sits down in a room and is asked to explain himself. In The Usual Suspects (1995) it is Verbal, and the whole film is his account, cut so that every version of events sounds as though it needs checking. Thirty years on, in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025), it is a succession of people explaining the plot to each other, and it takes an hour. The habit has not changed. What has changed is how long we wait for something to happen.

McQuarrie wrote Public Access (1993) with Bryan Singer, then The Usual Suspects, then directed The Way of the Gun (2000), and then spent a long stretch on writing assignments. The second career began with Tom Cruise: Valkyrie (2008) as writer and producer, Jack Reacher (2012) as writer and director, the screenplay of Edge of Tomorrow (2014), a hand in Top Gun: Maverick (2022), and four Mission: Impossible films from Rogue Nation (2015) to The Final Reckoning. Ten films together, and along the way he has become the writer studios bring in to fix other people's action scripts.

What he does better than anyone in his line is order. Edge of Tomorrow repeats the same day and understands that each pass needs a different emphasis: a stretch of fighting is frightening once and funny when we know where the mistake is coming, and Doug Liman's film trusts us to remember rather than running the whole thing again. Fallout (2018) keeps its action clear even when the intrigue around it is not, and gives Ethan Hunt's loyalty to Luther, Benji and Ilsa enough weight that the stunts have a purpose beyond the stunt. In The Usual Suspects the pleasure is five men in a line-up and the job of working out which of them to believe. McQuarrie knows when we have learned a thing and moves us on.

Then he stops and tells us again. The Usual Suspects is sometimes too pleased with its own cleverness, and its criminals do not always seem to have lives beyond the next piece of information. Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) halts roughly every twenty minutes for a room of officials or spies to say again what the key is and what the Entity wants; by the fourth briefing we were working out how much of the 164 minutes remained, and resenting the film for making us. The Final Reckoning does it for an hour, solemnly, before producing a set piece under the sea and another in the air as good as any the series has made. The puzzle is always built with more care than the people inside it, and lately the people spend the first act reading the instructions aloud.

Start with Fallout, where the writer and the director are on the same side, and go back to The Usual Suspects if you find you like the talk. The man who wrote Edge of Tomorrow knew we could be trusted to remember. We would like him to trust us again.