Over the last 30 years, the Mission: Impossible series has mutated from a simple blockbuster star vehicle, to an action director’s showcase for the likes of John Woo and Brad Bird, to a referendum on its star as both as a consummate showman and a possible IRL superhero. Now, perhaps ultimately, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, the eighth and maybe last installment, presents us with Tom Cruise/Ethan Hunt as a messianic figure possibly born to save humanity from itself, perhaps the greatest human being who ever lived. It’s the kind of thing you might expect as obvious subtext in, say, a Superman movie. So what’s it doing in a spy sequel?
Let’s circle back to that. Final Reckoning picks up a little while after 2023’s Dead Reckoning. An evil artificial intelligence known only as The Entity has proceeded on its mission of world domination, infiltrating governments, obfuscating reality via the Internet and the media, and even developing a cult of adoring worshipers. The last step is seizing control of the world’s nuclear arsenals. Ethan Hunt knows that if he can find The Entity’s source code, which for reasons too complicated to explain lie in a vault in a sunken Russian submarine under the Arctic Circle, he can potentially destroy it. To do so, he’ll have to reckon with his old enemy Gabriel (Esai Morales), whose enmity for Ethan is both boundless and unexplained, and who has his own agenda. But all the while, he may be falling right into the AI’s trap, and the world lies on the brink of nuclear annihilation
It all amounts to a mealy-mouthed mound of exposition — not that this is something we shouldn’t already be used to in a Mission, but it’s a lot to unload regardless. Final Reckoning runs a whopping 2 hours and 49 minutes, and this first hour is loaded front to back with setup, even while it delivers the most successful work yet of creating an emotional connection to the indefatigable Hunt (say goodbye to another franchise favorite character). It’s also crammed to bursting with flashbacks, callbacks to, and retcons of events from previous entries. That character you were wondering about might just be someone else’s long lost son, and that one guy who had two scenes 30 years ago is now a major character (not something that should be spoiled, and also one of the best parts of this movie).
And then, after all that setup, four hours into this six-hour, two-part impossible mission, Final Reckoning takes off and never stops. These films have never had airtight scripts, nor often even plots that make basic sense. Instead, they thrive on hurtling from set piece to set piece with hastily jerry-rigged frameworks in order to move an audience from one place to another like pawns, except then the pawns jump off a building or fall into a massive car chase. Here, Ethan must first commandeer an aircraft carrier, which sets things up for one of the franchise’s greatest and most suspenseful extended set pieces, a deep dive into a wrecked submarine while loose torpedoes clang about and the entire structure slowly rolls itself off an undersea cliff.
Christopher McQuarrie, directing his fourth straight entry in this series, may have overseen these movies becoming increasingly structurally incoherent, but he’s also shepherded their action into an age of largely — but not by a long stretch entirely — practical stunts, crucially filmed with such legibility that the spectacle has become one of the two main attractions on display. That submarine action is obviously a mix of live underwater footage mixed with vast digital sets and backdrops, but it’s also a marvel of geography and mostly silent storytelling, and certainly the greatest heist sequence of the series since De Palma’s inaugural entry. And then there’s the climactic bi-plane chase — the one audiences are already functionally familiar with from its placement in all of the trailers — which is nothing short of jaw-dropping. Even though you’re aware that the filmmakers are digitally painting out wires and replacing backgrounds, the individual stunt beats beggar belief, and it all looks utterly incredible on an IMAX screen.
That just leaves us with the other main attraction: Tom Cruise. Ethan Hunt’s progression from a never-give-up superspy to the savior of mankind has been a gradual one, but it has coincided with Cruise’s cult of personality multiplying like this movie’s Entity, slowly consuming the Internet. It simply cannot be a coincidence that, whether ironically or in complete sincerity (much more likely), Final Reckoning is about Ethan Hunt being destined to be the only human being on Earth who can be entrusted with control and possession of the most dangerous weaponizable knowledge ever devised. To call it reminiscent of the more cultish aspects of Scientology and Cruise’s role in it would be putting things mildly, and that alone is surely going to be more than enough to turn people off from this absurd, absolutely thrilling movie. But if you choose to accept and/or ignore that bit, you’re in for one of the wilder pieces of modern pop entertainment of the last few years, a rollicking adventure that makes analogs of the most famous man in the world with maybe the most important (fictional) man who has ever lived. It’s our good luck that he decided to make action movies.
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