Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Star/producer Tom Cruise has solidified his legacy through death-defying stunts and the kind of general showmanship not typically seen in American movie stars since the days of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and even Gene Kelly. After a bumpy late 2000’s to early 2010’s that saw his star in Hollywood slightly dwindle due to his ties to Scientology and acting erratic on Oprah’s couch, the mega star has always relied on his Mission: Impossible franchise to keep himself in the good graces of audiences around the world. After 2011’s Ghost Protocol saw the series return to new heights of success — heights that would only be emboldened with the career-high success of 2018’s propulsive and masterful Fallout — the franchise would become a beacon for Cruise to use his status as one of the world’s last-remaining movie stars to push the envelope of what was deemed possible in American Blockbuster filmmaking.

We’ve seen Cruise actually climb on the tallest building in the world, hang off the side of an ascending airplane, perform a HALO jump, and jump a motorbike off a cliff and make a successful parachute landing. Not to mention the many stunts we’ve seen him perform in both Top Gun films and several others in recent years. After promising a two-part finale that was quickly retooled and renamed in the wake of Dead Reckoning‘s underwhelming box office that opened just a week before the craze of “Barbenheimer”, the seemingly final installment of the franchise has finally arrived. It is also with a heavy heart that I must state that the eighth and final installment in the Mission: Impossible series is the weakest entry in over 20 years. Unfortunately, the bar has been set so high for the franchise, this supposed final installment fails to match those expectations. Cruise’s “final reckoning” is roughly 2 hours of tedious build up to a finale that fails to conclude the franchise on a high point.

Courtesy Paramount

The fate of the world is in the balance. The sentient AI, The Entity, has rampantly spread across the world, altering basic truths to cause mass confusion and hysteria, forcing the world to fall on the brink of nuclear war. As The Entity continues to gain control of several different countries nuclear weapons, American President Sloane (Angela Bassett) has only one man she can trust with saving the world from total annihilation; IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). Hunt has gone silent in the time since we last saw him in Dead Reckoning, following the death of his close ally, Ilsa Faust and losing his grasp on terrorist/former foe Gabriel (Esai Morales). Having rejoined his old crew including Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg) and Grace (Hayley Atwell); alongside new members, Paris (Pom Klementieff) and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), Ethan must locate The Entity’s original source code located deep at the bottom of the sea in a sunken Russian submarine in hopes of destroying it and saving the world.

Director Christopher McQuarrie returns to helm his fourth consecutive entry in the franchise, which promises to conclude the story of Ethan Hunt on a grand, exciting scale, but rather wastes time continuously building and building to a finale that comes in far too late. The initial opening act effectively sets the stage for an apocalyptic showdown, then continues to spin its wheels for the next two hours. We’ve seen McQuarrie hearken back to De Palma’s original, suspense-driven film several times at this point, even bringing back Henry Czerny’s snarling Kittridge– whose presence is welcoming here yet again. However, these homages and nods were met with slick filmmaking and confident stylization; Dead Reckoning‘s usage of dutch angles and creative shot compositions gave that film a distinct personality. With The Final Reckoning, McQuarrie’s vision is surprisingly flat, devoid of any personality, visual elegance or notable stylistic presentation.

So much of the first two hours is spent drawing out the intended epic finale, which arrives so far into the film, it would be near *ahem* impossible to make up for the lackluster dialogue and heavy-handed lip service. Making matters worse, The Final Reckoning is fairly joyless, with its self-serious, end-of-the-world tone proving to be detrimental. McQuarrie’s film is nearly smothered in its own sense of dramatic weight, rarely indulging the audience in the cheeky thrills they’ve come to expect. Rather than leaning on its tense, countdown-to-doomsday narrative, we’re often stranded in extended sequences set in stuffy boardrooms with government officials such as Bassett’s President, Nick Offerman’s General Sidney, Janet McTeer’s Walters and Holt McCallany’s hotheaded Sterling as they weigh the option to unload their nuclear arsenal before it’s hacked into by The Entity.

Courtesy Paramount

By the time The Final Reckoning does reach its finale, it is quite a stunning display of technical prowess and showmanship. Featuring Cruise hanging off the side of a small biplane as it flips around in the air and flies straight up and down, the audience is finally allowed to indulge in the Evil Knievel-style of stunt work that Cruise, and the franchise, has become known for. Despite the whiff of “been-there-done-that”, watching the movie star get throttled around mid-air is a spectacular sight to behold. It’s just a shame this sequence comes in well over 2 hours in. The only other notable set piece in the film arrives a bit earlier with an extended underwater sequence that showcases Cruise’s Hunt diving to a sunken submarine that happens to be slowly tumbling off an underwater cliff. This is a strong sequence, one that nails the insurmountable tension the film so desperately lacks.

What’s strange about The Final Reckoning is how the film lacks so many critical elements that made the previous films great. Rebecca Ferguson’s absence is piercingly felt as Ilsa, one of the best characters in the franchise, isn’t even mentioned here. For a character with such strong emotional ties to Ethan and the rest of the gang, it feels like a ghastly oversight not to pay some respect to a fan-favorite character. Core group dynamics are broken up, chopped and screwed with as the filmmakers seem to not know what to do with returning side characters for much of the 170-minute runtime. Simon Pegg’s Benji all but disappears for substantial chunks of the narrative, leaving the film to introduce nearly a dozen new characters, with only Tramell Tillman’s Captain Bledsoe and Katy O’Brien’s Kodiak making any lasting impression. It becomes quite clear that after the disappointing financial returns of Dead Reckoning, the filmmakers have lost the confidence in their audience to follow along without their hand being held at every possible moment. If you’ve never seen a previous Mission: Impossible film, do not worry as the filmmakers will spend over an hour catching the audience up on every detail they might have missed; regardless of how important those details are. The callbacks, while initially amusing, quickly grow tiresome with near-constant flashes of earlier films whenever something is referenced.

Courtesy Paramount

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning has its fleeting moments of grandiosity and stellar action, unfortunately it’s held within an overlong and sloppily written film. Director Christopher McQuarrie delivers his most flat and overstuffed entry that fails to invoke the spark of past installments. While not a terrible or even bad film, this supposed final installment severely lacks storytelling and narrative finesse, making it one of the more crushing cinematic disappointments in recent memory.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is now playing in theaters.