Tom Cruise headlines Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, a very long and slightly odd sign off for the series. Here’s our review.
We’re already one round of explanations into Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning when, after a few minutes, we see our hero for the first time.
It’s Tom Cruise, his hair straggled, billed as playing the death-defying Ethan Hunt for the eighth time. Reunited for a fifth movie – and fourth in this saga – with writer-director Christopher McQuarrie (McQuarrie sharing screenplay duties with Erik Jendresen), Cruise steps into view, every inch the movie star.
Seven films have got us thus far, with opening sequences previously seeing him ripping off masks and clinging to a plane in take-off. What could McQuarrie and Cruise have served up to kick off this final reckoning?
A VHS tape, and the watching of it.
A video thoughtfully cut together by Angela Bassett’s President of the United States. A tape that not only recaps plot, but also throws in umpteen clips of the previous films in the saga. Still irritated that Emilio Estevez got short shrift in the first movie? No bother, he gets an extra residual here. Can’t remember a set piece? Angela’s compiled them for you, as Cruise’s Ethan Hunt rightly looks puzzled as to why he’s being told – and shown – all of this.
And panic not if you arrive late at the cinema and miss Angela’s handywork. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning isn’t just content to recap things once or twice. Across its daunting 170-minute running time, it’s comfortable flashing back to other movies in the franchise with some regularity, and – if needed – sitting the characters down and getting them to explain it all again.
To a degree, this is needed. The previous movie, originally called Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, but now missing the Part One since it underperformed at the box office, does sort of directly lead into this one, but the plot only gets more convoluted. A month or so has passed, the villainous Gabriel (Esai Morales) is on the loose, and the AI antagonist The Entity is going to destroy everything. Tom Cruise versus AI? There’s a fight I can get behind.
The stakes, and again we’re constantly reminded of them, are massive. An illustration? In the last film, chip fat was aimed at Tom Cruise. Here, he’s hit on the head by what I presume to be a nuclear weapon. “Every living soul on Earth” will die, we’re sternly told. At one point we see what’s effectively an airport departure board, but for nukes. We get the most photographed Defcon counter this side of 1983’s WarGames, and a large world map is increasingly filled with red.
Not unreasonably though, you may be observing why we’re a fair way into this review and we’ve not really got to the film itself. That, though, is reflective of the problem. If the criticism aimed at the final Lord Of The Rings film – Return Of The King – was that it had umpteen endings, The Final Reckoning has the opposite issue: a seemingly endless circle of beginnings. During the prolonged first movement, characters spout dialogue that feels like it’s written for the trailer, and long-dormant threads from previous movies are excavated.
Marvel movies are criticised for their cross referencing, and requirements to have foreknowledge of what’s gone before. Kevin Feige, after The Final Reckoning, is off the hook for a bit.
Eventually though, after sweeping the World Movie Plot Explaining Awards, things finally get motoring.
Going plot light, and not explaining why some galloping horses suddenly appear in an AI vision of the future, the guts see Ethan Hunt, Simon Pegg’s Benji, Ving Rhames’ Luther, Hayley Atwell’s Grace, Greg Tarzan Davis’ Degas and Pom Klementieff’s Paris as the last line of resistance, with The Entity trying to – hello Terminator 2! – engineer nuclear war.
It’s with some relief that around this point, the film reminds us why so many of us have followed these movies for the last three decades. The first key mission for the team is great, and sees them trying to get Ethan Hunt on a submarine. It’s here the screenplay brings back the deft humour that’s been sorely lacking for much of the first hour, and properly lays out the peril involved. The trump card is then recruiting a scene-stealing Tramell Tillman.
When we head over to a colder climate for a separate sequence later on, the joyful playfulness of Mission: Impossible bursts through again.
McQuarrie too has the confidence to take away dialogue for stretches, confident in his set pieces. Heck, he delivers another terrific aerial sequence later on, and while I’d argue there’s nothing as tense and effective as, say, the chase through Abu Dhabi airport in the last film, there are some real standout moments here. Proper big-screen moments.
But there’s also gravity to consider. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning bafflingly keeps getting pulled back to earth by an inexhaustible desire to keep explaining things, or to throw in a reference, or try to describe the ever-complicating plot.
It didn’t have to be like this. Remember how in Top Gun Maverick the mission was explained properly, the difficulty was established, and how it simply made sense? Not so here. Even within this franchise, the superb Mission: Impossible – Fallout’s plot was not without complexities, but it’s Fisher Price compared to what you have to wrap your head around here. All the odder given that it comes down to computer data to a degree.
Plausibility suffers as well. There’s a moment when Ethan Hunt’s shirt comes off and I’m thinking that not even Tom Cruise could survive what he goes through in the scene that ensues. Even within the heightened parameters of the film, it doesn’t hold water. It feels like it’s cheating. Tom Cruise has become Arnold Schwarzenegger in Eraser.
The ultimate frustration is that the bar has previously been set so high. I don’t think Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is the weakest in the saga (although it’s down there), but I do think it’s the weakest collaboration of its star and director. Had it been, say, the mid-point in the series, then perhaps they wouldn’t have felt the need to treat this as a victory lap, and lay in so much exposition. Perhaps, then, there’d be a version of The Final Reckoning that’s half an hour shorter, a lot tighter, and makes a bit more sense.
But this is what we have. A 170-minute film that feels it, led by a movie star in his element, and a supporting cast who get different levels of shrift. In scale, it’s as big as the franchise has got. In impact, surprisingly small.
If they make another, one suggestion: fewer nukes, more chip fat.
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