REVIEW: ‘Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning’ is a mostly earned victory lap
Tom Cruise stars as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, directed by Christopher McQuarrie.
There are certain inescapable elements that define the Mission: Impossible series. They’re the core way we rank the (now) eight films in the franchise. The first thing that’s always cited are the stunts that star Tom Cruise develops for each installment, including running along the outside of mega skyscrapers, HALO skydives, clinging to the exterior of cargo jets. We also have the unmasking shots, where Cruise’s character and his team remove highly detailed disguises. And then there are the glamorous international locations and gadgetry that any good spy movie needs. Cruise and the Mission filmmaking teams over the years have always pushed themselves to find new ways to entertain us, and it’s almost enough to help you forget about the star’s offscreen antics.
But now Cruise is making a clear effort to wind the whole thing up. Whether because he feels the ravages of age finally catching up to him, or whether the solid-but-not-fantastic box office makes it harder to greenlight sequels, it’s possible that The Final Reckoning may indeed live up to its name. So the film spends a lot of time working in goodbyes to favourite characters and callbacks to previous films. And it tries to pit Cruise’s Ethan Hunt against his most omnipotent adversary of all. But in doing that, it stumbles here and there, making you long for the more compartmentalized Missions of the past.
The movie is the second part of a story set into motion in 2023’s Dead Reckoning Part One, a title I’m still not sure we’re supposed to use (given the lack of a Part Two in this one). Hunt and his team of superspies are in the throes of fighting the A.I. known as The Entity, which has begun taking over the nuclear arsenals of the world in an effort to cleanse the planet of humanity. You know the drill: go to a place, get a MacGuffin, go somewhere else, defuse a bomb, etc. It would be a fairly rote exercise were it not supremely well-executed by now-veteran Mission helmer Christopher McQuarrie, who broke the streak of these movies each having a different director and has now presided over half the series by this point.
Tramell Tillman as Captain Bledsoe of the U.S.S. Ohio.
But that’s where some of my issues with The Final Reckoning start. By morphing the series from episodic adventures to a cohesive, serialized format, some of the flimsiness of the characters and the story begins to show. Both Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning try to retcon Hunt’s backstory, giving him a dead love interest and an oath to the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) that he’s seemingly repaid many times over. The screenplay recontextualizes old plot elements, like the so-called Rabbit’s Foot from M:I 3, into this film, to apparently sweep us up into the feeling that we’ve been on a grand journey with the series for 29 years. Personally, I don’t need the extra emotion that Cruise is squeezing from the material; it was more fun (and maybe more plausible) to go on one-off trips with these characters.
By design, The Entity is an unfeeling, unknowable enemy, and it’ll be a little sad if Ethan Hunt’s final showdown on screen is with an artificial being. Obviously the threat references a real-world concern, but I think it would have been more interesting for Hunt to outsmart another human with his usual bag of tricks. We’re just supposed to buy that The Entity can overtake the minds of other people, turning them into zealots of technology, and force them to do things they don’t want to do. It’s harder to root for Hunt to succeed when his ultimate goal is to sequester a computer virus, instead of the more visceral defeats of characters played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Sean Harris or Henry Cavill.
Hayley Atwell as Grace, alongside Simon Pegg as Benji and Pom Klementieff as Paris.
Among all the segments in this 2 hour 49 minute epic, my favourite is not the showy biplane battle in the climax that got the most pre-release buzz, but the portion in the Bering Sea. Tramell Tillman appears as a U.S. Navy sub commander (Cruise must be a fan of Severance) and the scenes both aboard the American sub and later as Hunt infiltrates the wreck of a Russian sub were the most gripping. Forget about making another Ethan Hunt movie; give me a spinoff about Captain Bledsoe and Kodiak (Katy O’Brian) engaging in undersea combat against high-tech Russian subs and I’m sold.
I’m also desperate to understand how romance works in this series. I get that Hunt has had love interests and even been married, but the character’s relationship with series newcomer Grace (Hayley Atwell) is baffling. Hunt allegedly separated amicably from his wife, Julia (Michelle Monaghan), to protect her. But Grace is fully immersed in this spy world and can’t expect the same level of safety. Nevertheless, the movie keeps us guessing whether Hunt and Grace are attracted to each other. This culminates in a scene in a depressurization chamber that looks like them canoodling in bed, but with no payoff. Despite all the people who refer to Ethan Hunt as America’s James Bond, the lack of horniess makes for a pale comparison.
I can mostly forgive Cruise for wanting this film to be a more self-reflexive effort. For better or worse, the series has always served as a showcase of his unique powers on the screen and his dedication to the craft of entertainment. Everyone jokes that his final stunt would be the one that kills him. Will you have a bad time during The Final Reckoning? Certainly not. But there’s just enough odd choices here that hold it back from being a true capstone. So who knows - maybe we’ll get a Final_Final Reckoning.
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning gets three stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
There’s an awful lot of loose high-yield nuclear bombs lying around that Gabriel (Esai Morales) can set up to cause problems for Ethan.
Strange that The Entity doesn’t seem to care if Gabriel is trying to control it; he’s kinda allowed to do whatever he wants.
For all the trouble The Entity caused, you’d think they’d want to drop that glowing drive into the Mariana Trench.