Flashes of the franchise’s brilliance are dimmed by odd pacing and an overload of exposition and flashbacks to previous entries.
You’d be forgiven for experiencing slight delirium coming out of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, a film which chokes on the admirable but misplaced ambition with which it moves through its nearly three-hour runtime.
The stakes are higher than they’ve ever been for both Tom Cruise and his almost-mythic IMF agent Ethan Hunt, who Cruise has been playing for nearly 30 years now. For Hunt, the fate of the world hangs in the balance once more: since the events of Dead Reckoning, the evil AI known as “the entity” has been busy bringing civilization to the brink of collapse, with plans of activating the world nation’s nuclear arsenal and kickstarting an atomic winter. Only Hunt and his ragtag team of specialists—including pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) and master technicians Luther and Benji (series regulars Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg)—can stop it. A little cartoonish? Sure—this is Mission: Impossible after all.
For Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie, it’s not the world, but legacy at peril. For the past three decades, Cruise had dazzled audiences with his portrayal of Hunt, famously upping the ante of each high-octane installment by performing increasingly dangerous stunts. In Ghost Protocol, he scaled the Burj Khalifa. In Rogue Nation, he clung to the side of a cargo plane as it ascended 5,000 feet off the ground. In the fantastic Dead Reckoning, he drove a motorcycle off a cliff-edge. When McQuarrie joined the franchise as series director with Rogue Nation, he and Cruise took the series a step further, elevating it from thrilling popcorn flicks to action movie masterpieces. So, if you had told me 24 hours ago that The Final Reckoning would be among the series’ worst, I wouldn’t have believed it. But then, this franchise is all about achieving the impossible against the most unlikely of odds, and here we find Cruise and McQ doing just that, making a clunky landing out of their apparent curtain call.
In an effort to honour its own legacy and the sprawling mythology of Ethan Hunt, the Mission: Impossible series finds itself flying a little too close to the sun. The first hour is the worst of it: a laborious momentum killer that sees Final Reckoning cycle through a dizzying amount of plot points and flashbacks to previous entries in a useless effort to force nostalgia and carry the weight of seven other movies into one last adventure. Unlike many modern blockbusters, the M:I franchise is typically adept at making exposition fun, embracing the campiness and cliches of espionage and using them to its advantage, but the stagnant pacing in Final Reckoning’s first act makes sitting through various characters explaining the stakes over and over again feel like the dullest of tasks. What is ‘the entity’? What does it want? How do we stop it? What if we fail? Astonishingly, the film’s efforts to catch the audience up to speed actually serve to do the opposite, dressing the plot up with such dense amounts of jargon that even the characters themselves end up standing around looking perpetually confused, rather than contributing anything memorable to the narrative. By the second half of the movie, you’ve long given up trying to keep track of what’s going on, instead the only question on your mind is how this bloated mess made it through the edit at all.
Thankfully, there are flashes of the franchise’s brilliance hidden under all the convolution of plot: nail-biting set pieces that reveal McQuarrie and Cruise’s knack for true cinematic spectacle, and Final Reckoning, at its peak, as a marvel of action filmmaking. Cruise takes to the skies and seas to prove without a doubt that he is one of the greatest movie star stuntmen of all time.
You’ll watch the 62 year old plunging into the depths of the ocean in a specially designed scuba suit (that Cruise could reportedly only wear for ten minutes at a time, or risk hypoxia), and soaring through the airwaves as he clings desperately to the wing of a vintage plane suspended thousands of feet in the sky. Some joke that the actor has a death wish, but it’s moments like those that are rooted so deeply in human expression—of ambition, of hubris—that their very existence feels in and of themselves a protest of the threat of AI on the cinematic medium. One hopes that by the time those moments of glorious filmmaking occur during that Final Reckoning will still have your interest at all.
