THE STORY – Ethan Hunt and the IMF team race against time to find the Entity, a rogue artificial intelligence that can destroy mankind.
THE CAST – Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Henry Czerny, Angela Bassett, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Holt McCallany, Janet McTeer, Nick Offerman, Hannah Waddingham, Shea Whigham, Greg Tarzan Davis, Charles Parnell, Mark Gatiss, Tramell Tillman & Katy O’Brian
THE TEAM – Christopher McQuarrie (Director/Writer) & Erik Jendresen (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 170 Minutes
The “Mission: Impossible” franchise has dazzled and thrilled audiences for nearly thirty years since the first film’s release in 1996. It was the first film produced by Academy Award-nominee Tom Cruise, and he has remained a creative driving force behind these movies from the very beginning, even with the changing directors. His partnership with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie has resulted in McQuarrie directing the last three films in the franchise, and now with his fourth, the eighth overall and possibly final film in the globe-trotting, high-risk, action franchise, the duo turn in what is undoubtedly the biggest movie of the series yet. However, bigger doesn’t always mean better, as “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” seeks to not only close out the story that was initiated by “Dead Reckoning” but also to serve as a potential final chapter in this long line of films that has had its fair share of ups and downs. Unfortunately, this latest mission, should we choose to accept it, is a more mixed offering than the grand, emotional, and pitch-perfect sendoff Cruise and McQuarrie probably wanted.
The Entity, an advanced, self-aware rogue AI, is swiftly invading other countries’s cyberspace and taking over their nuclear arsenals. In four days, it will have complete control over the remaining four nations: the United Kingdom, China, Russia, and the United States. In the states, President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) leads a security council with General Sydney (Nick Offerman), Secretary of Defense Serling (Holt McCallany), Head of the NRO (Charles Parnell), Walters (Janet McTeer), and Angstrom (Mark Gatiss). Everyone is panicking that if they lose control of their security and weapons, they will be open to an attack from another country. A nuclear strike is imminent, and paranoia is seeping through. However, despite pleas from the others to turn him in, President Sloane is giving IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) the time needed to continue carrying out the mission from “Dead Reckoning,” locate the sunken submarine known as the Sevastopol, retrieve the Entity’s source code and bring it back to the US so they can control it. Ethan, however, does not wish to allow anyone control over the Entity, especially if it falls into the hands of Gabriel (Esai Morales, returning as the film’s central antagonist in another dull performance). Instead, he wants to kill it. The Entity knows this and will stop at nothing to prevent that from happening. Any and all outcomes have been predicted by the rogue AI, but has the fate of humanity been written? Or do we have control over our own choices to shape our destiny? Hunt’s mission will take him from the bottom of the Bering Sea to the lands of South Africa and force him to reckon with the sum of all his choices in what is his most important mission to date.
While not as disastrous as “The Rise Of Skywalker” but not as great as “The Dark Knight Rises,” “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” suffers from the same problem those two finale films did: it crumbles under the weight of its own ambition. McQuarrie’s fourth film in the franchise achieves this through many means, but chief of them is too much emphasis placed on the exposition of how to find the Sevastopol and destroy the Entity (with characters comically finishing each other’s sentences one too many times in such a distracting manner) and needlessly recapping previous entries of the franchise (sometimes replaying previous scenes in full even) so that bits and pieces you may or may not remember can be relevant for the story being told here. Hopefully, if enough pieces fit, whether by design or not, it can create a cumulative effect on the whole worthy of a movie with the word “final” in its title. However, what inadvertently happens is the runtime starts to get padded out, with “The Final Reckoning” clocking in at a whopping 170 minutes (for context, that’s longer than the two previously mentioned bloated blockbuster films and the longest entry in the “Mission: Impossible” franchise). Had McQuarrie’s latest contained the pacing of “Fallout” (the best of the series, in my opinion) and the humor of “Dead Reckoning,” these nearly three hours would’ve flown by like a breeze, but instead, they get bogged down by excessive callbacks (Was Rolf Saxon’s inclusion as former CIA analyst William Donloe from the first “Mission: Impossible” film really necessary?), tie-ins, forced revelations (many of which I do not wish to spoil in this review) and an overstuffed narrative with so many moving pieces and characters (played by some truly great actors who are not given enough material to work with in most cases) that instead of one big action set piece flowing naturally into the other as they have with other films in the franchise, audiences will be left anxiously awaiting when the next one arrives so that something, literally anything of consequence will happen.
Now, with that said, when the giant set pieces do arrive, they indeed are pretty spectacular. McQuarrie and Cruise have truly outdone themselves here, delivering two epic setpieces that will go down as some of the best, if not the best, the franchise has to offer action junkies the world over. The Sevastopol submarine sequence, in particular, is a standout for its sound design, score, and tension created by never cutting back to the rest of the IMF team as the camera stays underwater with Ethan during a thrilling sequence that would make James Cameron proud. Add in a scene-stealing turn from “Severance’s” Tramell Tillman as submarine commander Colonel Burdick, who aids Hunt in this endeavor, and you have a tremendous middle section that nearly earns the film its runtime and grandiosity. And the ending, featuring certified madman Tom Cruise flying, dangling, and clinging for dear life off an airplane as he chases down Gabriel in another plane, also delivers on the adrenaline-fueled goods in awe-inspiring fashion. It’s kind of miraculous what Cruise is willing to put himself through for the audience’s entertainment. No one would ever dare question his sincerity in this exertion, and at the age of 62, it’s even more impressive considering how much of what is considered action filmmaking nowadays is done with a green screen. But with Tom and his well-preserved body (on shirtless display in certain hand-to-hand fight scenes), he wants the audience to know there are no stunt doubles or other cinematic tricks involved to hide the fact it’s really him in camera putting his life on the line to make these films special.
And despite the flaws presented, even if it’s considered possibly the worst “Mission: Impossible” film (everyone seems to have a different ranking when this subject comes up every few years), they remain special, not just for the action setpieces or the fun time audiences can have with these characters (despite “The Final Reckoning” being the most somber of the franchise) but for the commitment on display from everyone involved. Crafts-wise, “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” sets a high bar for what other action films will have to measure up to moving forward (it’s a shame this film is being released two years before the introduction of a Best Stunt Design category at the Oscars). Still, it’s the story and characters that matter most. And while you can tell everyone is pouring every ounce of their heart and soul into this film, if the screenwriting, and later the direction and editing can’t get the pieces to formulate into a cohesive working whole, then the film will sink faster than the Sevastopol to the bottom of the frozen Bering Sea.
The themes of “The Final Reckoning” are more critical than ever as Cruise’s Hunt aggressively shouts at one point, “You spend too much time on the internet.” The Entity has pushed the world to the brink, and that’s precisely where we are now as a society, with AI flooding our lives faster than we could stop it and leading to a world that may still be here but will one day look very different than the one we once lived in. Tom Cruise’s, and by extension, Ethan Hunt’s battle against this self-aware digital technology in a world where heroes are scarce, paranoia, fear, and cowardice run amuck makes the latest two films in the “Mission: Impossible” franchise the most pertinent as opposed to disposable popcorn entertainment. However, along with that creative decision comes an overall sense of self-seriousness, heightened expectations, and an urge to cram so much into this final film to give Ethan, Luther (Ving Rhames, acting with as much wisdom and soul he can conjure), Benji, and new IMF members Grace (Hayley Atwell, who strangely doesn’t have as much emphasis placed on her character as “Dead Reckoning” until one pivotal moment towards the end), Paris (Pom Klementieff, another sidelined character) and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis, who pretty much owes his entire career to Cruise moving forward) the finale they deserve.
Everything in “The Final Reckoning’s” two extravagant setpieces is what Tom Cruise promised us when Ethan Hunt asked us to trust him one last time in the film’s trailer. It’s just a shame that what surrounds those two expertly crafted scenes is a lot of filler with either payoffs that don’t land emotionally or, even worse, setups without any payoff at all. “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” like “Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part Two” before it, plays out as one extended climax, but it’s nowhere near as tight or emotionally fulfilling due to how many other elements don’t land. It really is a direct continuation of “Dead Reckoning” rather than functioning as its own film within the franchise (which makes it all the more curious why the title changed from “Dead Reckoning” Part One and Two to what we have now when what’s here is more fitting). The effort from Cruise, McQuarrie, and everyone else is to be commended, and where the franchise goes from here is anyone’s guess unless you’re Cruise and McQuarrie, but after pushing the stakes to their highest point, stretching the narrative over two films and needlessly calling back to previous films in the franchise to give this entry some semblance of importance (think of the worst tendencies of the James Bond film “Spectre”), McQuarrie and Cruise’s mission may have finally become impossible after all.
