Review: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Director:  Christopher McQuarrie

Stars:  Tom Cruise, Angela Bassett, Esai Morales

If you’re worried that you might not be up to speed on what’s going down in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning because it’s been a minute since Dead Reckoning (or because you skipped it two summers ago in favour of Barbenheimer) you’re not nearly as worried as screenwriters Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen. The bombardment of exposition, flashbacks, montages and recaps that have been built into this thing create an almost unprecedented wall of fatigue for a franchise movie experience. There’s close to a solid hour of it at the top of the picture, and it nearly kills it.

It’s almost as weary as the ceaseless efforts to remind/convince us that all prior M:I instalments have been leading up to this. The urge to assimilate is understandable. But McQuarrie and Jendresen test patience, irritatingly retconning the franchise’s storied history so as to feed as much of it as possible into Ethan Hunt’s (Tom Cruise) last stand against The Entity (an AI butthole that has the same plot functionality as the Eye of Sauron). In terms of the writing, this is the weakest M:I in some time – and maybe in the entire series – overwhelmingly preoccupied with it’s own self-ascribed importance. The portentousness is unrelenting, especially in light of the comically inflated stakes this time out.

It’s the end of the world, obviously. Two months on from Dead Reckoning and a lot has happened. Principally, The Entity has crippled the globe with a barrage of fake news so that it can Trojan Horse its way into the nuclear arsenals of every superpower. Now it’s systematically taking control of each one, and once the whole map turns red, it’s annihilation time, lads. What’s more, enclaves of the general populous have been radicalised into protecting it, meaning that it has sleeper agents everywhere (bit rich coming from a Scientologist). For some reason, shutting the thing down will mean the death of cyberspace (what?) and an endless famine (what?). That’s not about to stop Ethan, who’ll go up against every nation on Earth (but principally Russia) to hit a hard reset on the AI takeover.

As far as enemies go, AI is a relatable one right now as we acquiesce more and more of our collective effort and intelligence to the ease of an auto-generated answer. It also feels like something of an amorphous stand-in for the ‘new’ that Cruise himself rallies against. He likes the old ways. The theatre experience as opposed to streaming. An actor who’s a master of many talents as opposed to a charmed line reader. Cruise is heavily involved in the making of these films now (Final Reckoning even announces itself as A Tom Cruise Production). That finality in the title possibly touches on his own reckoning. With ageing. With mortality. With legacy. The beginning of the movie almost plays like a self-assembled Academy In Memoriam segment. Clap now. 

As the very name of this series suggests, Ethan Hunt has always been pushing against ideas of fate or inevitability. Both Reckoning films have confronted this hard, with The Entity’s algorithms cogitating eventualities until the future is ‘written’. Yet Mission has always had a sense of the predestined coded into it. One of the series’ fixtures is the classic bomb clock counting down to zero, the audience aware that Ethan and his team will stop it as close to zero as possible. Indeed, the plans they devise are always made clear to us. There’s no suspense in what they’re going to do, or particularly how they’re going to do. The tension and drama comes from how close they get to failing, how fast they have to improvise. How much can Mission teeter on the brink of collapse.

This feeds into Cruise’s increasingly insane daredevil antics; an obsession with upping the ante til the end. It seemed unlikely that he’d top the mountaintop motorcycle jump that Dead Reckoning built itself around, but Final Reckoning gears itself around two bravura set pieces in which the world itself literally turns around Ethan. The first takes place within the bowels of a wrecked submarine on the floor of the North Pacific. A rolling machine filling with water that’s like the corridor sequence from Inception on hard mode. The second is the film (and series’) grand finale in the skies above South Africa. If the submarine set feels relatively contained and controlled, here you can sense the stunt coordinators, second unit team and insurance men perspiring behind the monitors. It’s fabulous.

These set pieces do a lot to carry and forgive the remainder of Final Reckoning, which flirts with being objectively bad on many occasions. It doesn’t have the relentless pacing of Fallout or Dead Reckoning, plodding with self-sabotaging seriousness, and the perpetual exposition is incredibly tiring (I laughed out loud when, during fifteen minutes of dialogue-free action, the only two words uttered were, yup, more exposition!). Then there’s the Dr Strangelove melodrama in the American bunker as President* Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) frets over the pressure to enter the launch codes and commence WW3. This more or less excuses itself until some eleventh hour gun-play pushes it cleanly into the absurd. Bassett does her very best to sell it, but it’s the kind of dopey soap opera shenanigans Irwin Allen used to peddle. 

Ethan’s team are fairly well distributed, old players and new ones alike (it’s really pleasing to see Pom Klementieff’s Paris and Greg Tarzan Davis’ Degas welcomed into the fold), while Hayley Atwell’s position is elevated now that Grace is the primary romantic prospect. But this is, from beginning to end, A Tom Cruise Production. It might even have been up to an hour shorter were the interminable opening stretch not so preoccupied with lionising the bravura of Cruise himself. Final Reckoning is a preening act of self-congratulation. Over 30+ years one could argue that it’s a well-earned curtain call. That Cruise has done more than anyone to entertain us. To dance on the high-wire for our pleasure.

But Final Reckoning is disappointingly turgid, frequently forgetting the fun that made this franchise a tent-pole event encouraging repeat visits, mired in its own history and gloomy predictions, the thrill and immediacy of the present is often far from it’s radar.

McQuarrie has been the series ringleader for four films now, bringing a steady albeit MCU-esque cleanliness to proceedings. Final Reckoning tips affectionately to the Dutch angles of De Palma’s 1996 outing, and there’s a stylish ’60s aura to how Elias Morales’ dastardly Gabriel is perpetually framed in the shadows. Otherwise, without Cruise’s pirouetting stunt play, this is a strangely sober (yet insufferably silly) attempt to close out the series at maximalist high volume. It groans under its own weight and size when, ironically, something less globally bombastic might have hit harder. Not exactly a whimper, but hardly a bang.

*When did that happen!?