Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning in theory brings the franchise to a close. Some spoiler-filled thoughts on what next.
With the long-running Mission Impossible franchise reaching a climactic end, we ponder how impossible the next mission to find a new lease of life might be. Careful of spoilers within about Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, or Tom Cruise might throw you out of a plane…
That’s it then. The end of a cinematic era as Tom Cruise’s super agent and almost certainly certifiable Ethan Hunt asks us to trust him one last time in Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning to save the world and… well, spoilers, but you probably won’t be too surprised to learn that he does.
Yet the last of his impossible missions, half of which he has powered through alongside Christopher McQuarrie behind the camera , really is billed as the last. No longer the intended Dead Reckoning Part 2 but a Final Reckoning. Cruise’s swansong as the character could not be more swansong-y. This review says it all – The Final Reckoning throws in so many references to the previous seven films (almost), it makes other concluding chapters of franchises pale in comparison.
That’s it. Cruise is done. Ethan is an ex-parrot—sorry, character. There will be no more Mission Impossible.
Except, well… that’s not true, is it? Of course there will be another Mission Impossible. A bit like how Halloween Ends won’t be the end of Halloween—shocker, a new TV series is in development—nor will The Final Reckoning be it.
Why? Because it’s Mission Impossible. It’s a bit like saying there will be no more Star Wars or James Bond or Deuce Bigalow (okay, maybe not the last one). It’s not if Mission Impossible will somehow continue, it’s when.
Granted, Cruise might well have skin in the game there and potentially could even hang about in some kind of consultant and producing role, because while Bruce Geller created Mission Impossible in 1966, there is little doubt Tom Cruise is the man who has ensured it didn’t wither on the vine like other kitsch 1960s TV shows such as The Invaders (what’s The Invaders? Exactly).
When it was revived by he and Brian de Palma back in 1996, it existed within the space of 1990s post-modern revisionism and deconstruction of narrative conventions past. The same year Scream took apart the horror genre in a way Mission Impossible rebooted itself by blowing up the team and having the hero of the 60s, Jim Phelps, be a disaffected villain, a role actor Jon Voight seems to have gone method on over recent years.
Point being, the Cruise MI was never the MI of the 1960s. Not really.
It tried to morph into an American James Bond series under John Woo, Cruise having a mid-life crisis wearing leather, being all smarmy and riding big motorbikes in dark shades, but Mission Impossible 2 felt more Mission Difficult (to paraphrase Anthony Hopkins brief but entertaining MI boss, swaggering in like he was on holiday and they just gave him a part) than anything that befitted the concept.
Cruise then pivoted again in 2006 for Mission Impossible III, employing JJ Abrams to port over his Alias concept to a hyper real but equally grounded, family man/mentor take on Ethan. But while the IMF became less opaque the centrifugal force of the franchise remained its star. Only Ghost Protocol, by Brad Bird, of any film across the eight, truly marries Cruise’s star power with the team-based espionage intricacy of the 1960’s idea, which perhaps account for why it’s the favourite of many a fan.
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Personally, for me the series reached a high with the sixth outing, Fallout, primarily because it elevated the scale and scope of the action to somewhere between Christopher Nolan’s gravitas and the action prowess on screen that, for the first time, truly saw Mission Impossible eclipse both Bourne and Bond.
Now they were playing catch up. Despite this, again, even that film would not, in its construction, have been able to exist without Cruise and Hunt.
Though the building blocks had been there across McQuarrie’s run, from Alec Baldwin’s Hunley describing Ethan as “the living manifestation of destiny”, the two-part finale, if you will, as Ethan battles a rogue artificial intelligence itself, took the mythic idea of what he could do up a notch.
Parts of both Dead and Final Reckoning are infused with tech-mysticism that frankly try and ascribe narrative order on chaos. Even if the Entity can know every computational possibility, there’s something quite ludicrous about how it could manifest a villain like Esai Morales’ Gabriel.
Point being that, arguably, the last two films begin to entirely lose touch with reality as Cruise and McQuarrie elevate the stakes so the former can employ increasingly outlandish and fearless mid-air stunts. Impressive as they are—and they really are—Mission Impossible concludes less as tricky espionage and rather instead science-fiction. It is highly entertaining but you do feel that any semblance of holding true to the roots of the original concept are long gone. It’s the Ethan Hunt show and we all just live in his world, his reality.
Don’t get me wrong, we are better off in a world where all of these movies exist. Cruise is the evolving constant within a series that twists, turns and transforms across 30 years and numerous eras of cinema in fascinating and almost always rewarding ways. They will always be thrilling examples of, often, classic filmmaking, driven by a man in Cruise who truly believes in cinema with a capital C. Think what you like about the man, there really is no other film star like him, and in some ways there never has been.
Yet the simple truth is that Mission Impossible now needs to move on and, it could be argued, the best means of doing so could be to move back.
Not necessarily to the 1960s. Similar calls have been suggested for the Bond franchise and they should equally be rejected. But rather back to the idea of a balanced team, thrown into impossible situations rather than impossible odds, deeply rooted in espionage as opposed to mythic narratives about fate, reality and the apocalypse.
It should find the impossible mission more in line, perhaps, with a lower key spy picture rather than $300 million action blockbuster. The IMF having to con an autocratic leader inside an embassy, or Inception-style trick a Musk-like uber rich tech bro into selling their company, something akin to that. Reflective of modern day politics and culture but with the set up of the series past.
Bringing back the original characters would be a start. Jim Phelps rather than being the villain could be the team leader Peter Graves played back in the day. Then there’s dependables such as Barney Collier, Cinnamon Carter (who Ghost Protocol admittedly threw back to with Jane Carter) or Rollin Hand. Ethan Hunt was never an original series character, he was all new for 1996, so removing the shackles of what Cruise represents and returning to the IMF as a team who go into a sensitive and critical situation using smarts, tricks and slight of hand would be a fresh approach.
Not to suggest the films themselves have ejected these elements, indeed often far from it, but from the beginning the emphasis has very much been on Ethan Hunt in his various incarnations – betrayed agent, slick superhero, family man, lost samurai, take your pick. What would make sense as a full reboot would be to eject the reliance on a primary character. Even should you cast an emeritus American actor, a George Clooney if you like, as Phelps (though we all know they’d cast Pedro Pascal these days), he would not have to be that same centrifugal force.
The idea might perhaps be better returning to television to begin with, creating a show akin to the 1960s but shot through with modern aesthetics, that might give these revived classic characters and undoubtedly some new creations time to breathe in a way they cannot do over the running time of a film.
It would also help to distance the franchise from Cruise’s unique set of films, which ever more started to reflect his sensibilities and desires of how to push heightened action cinema. The Final Reckoning after all emblazoned ‘A Tom Cruise Production’ on the credits, which says it all. McQ might be directing, but Tom’s the gaffer.
Whatever happens, if even Ethan overcomes his final reckoning and returns one day, the future of Mission Impossible is assured. There will be more. It would just benefit now from a deliberate change of style and focus. Time will tell. This article will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Mission Impossible.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his podcasts and books, via Linktr.ee here. Hear him discuss the first Mission Impossible on his podcast At the Movies in the 90s on the Film Stories Podcast Network.
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