‘Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning’ Self-Destructs in Three Long, Messianic Hours
The Plot: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to watch secret agent Ethan Hunt save the world one last time from a nuke-happy AI.
The Verdict: I’ve always been somewhat mystified by the reverence some cinephiles hold for the Mission: Impossible movie series. Like the Fast & Furious series, it’s one of those long-running franchises where the sequels all blend together in terms of titles and plotlines. Individual entries remain memorable, at best, for the action set pieces associated with them. The first movie had the CIA vault break-in; Ghost Protocol had Tom Cruise scaling the Burj Khalifa; Fallout had that two-on-one bathroom fight.
Going by those standards, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning isn’t even the first time in this series that we’ve seen Cruise swim for his life or hang off the side of a plane. Director and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie, now in his fourth at bat, seems to have run out of ideas for fresh scenarios, so he’s just reworked ones he used in the last three movies. This time, we get a ticking-time-bomb chase with biplanes and Esai Morales instead of helicopters and Henry Cavill (as in Fallout). Ethan Hunt shows off his lung capacity by holding his breath deep down in the ocean instead of an underwater vault (as in Rogue Nation), while a submarine goes off a cliff instead of a speeding motorcycle (as in Dead Reckoning).
The funny thing is, Cruise shot that motorcycle jump for the previous film on the first day of production, without knowing how it would factor into the movie. They reverse-engineered the plot around the stunt, which just goes to show how much the nominal “story” in M:I has become an excuse for Cruise to play daredevil. Maybe showing off is part of being an entertainer, but if so, The Final Reckoning could use more of that, since it front-loads itself with dull plot explanations before remembering to include stunts.
The eighth and seemingly last Mission: Impossible movie begins with an info dump—the first of many—where President Angela Bassett’s voice assures Ethan Hunt that he is the best of men, and that every risk he’s ever taken has brought the world another sunrise. This feels like the script massaging Cruise’s ego, layering in subtext about how his movie stardom and DIY stunts have helped stave off cinema’s death for another summer. Yet it isn’t enough for him to be an action-movie messiah. He’s got to be the savior of the whole human race, the only man capable of walking it back from nuclear Armageddon courtesy of a rogue AI called The Entity.
Two years ago, Dead Reckoning (then, subtitled Part One) began with The Entity tricking a submarine onto torpedoing itself. Now, it wants to do the same thing to the countries of the world with their missile silos. It’s a simple premise, really, but The Final Reckoning turns it into a 170-minute endurance test, where thrills give way to sheer tedium. In this movie, there is scene after scene where supporting characters stand around, talking the plot and finishing each other’s sentences in a merry-go-round of exposition.
The script is credited to McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen, but just because they’ve broken up their monologues into dialogue doesn’t make it sound any less like exposition. Platitudes are the characters’ other default mode of speaking, as they spout lines about how “our lives are the sum of our choices” and “we are masters of our fate,” and so on. These lines don’t add much profundity to an overlong flick that’s loosely constructed around two action sequences, some scattered shootouts and hand-to-hand combat, and the characteristic scene(s) of Cruise running at full throttle.
I remember how disappointed my father was when he came home from the first Mission: Impossible movie in 1996, because it had made Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) the bad guy. The original Phelps, embodied by Peter Graves, was the face of the franchise on television, where Mission: Impossible had a 30-year history before it ever received the movie treatment. Though M:I may now be synonymous with Cruise, it was never a one-man show on TV. Phelps was an unassuming team leader, part of an ensemble of series regulars like Peter Lupus and Greg Morris (and the latter’s real-life son, Phil Morris, in the 1988 Mission: Impossible revival).
Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible turned franchise tradition on its head by killing off Ethan Hunt’s entire team in the beginning, then pinning it on Phelps at the end. This would be the equivalent of Star Trek (which premiered the same month as Mission: Impossible in 1966) giving the Enterprise a new captain and jettisoning its crew into space before having Kirk break bad.
In De Palma’s film, you could see the wheels turning onscreen—almost literally—as an elevator impaled Emilio Estevez, and M:I reconfigured itself as a star vehicle for Cruise. By the end of the film, there’s only one IMF team member left standing who hasn’t betrayed Ethan Hunt.
Over the years, Hunt, the American action hero, would continue to play the self-assured individualist or unilateralist, disobeying his superiors and acting without agency support in more than one Mission: Impossible movie. He was, as one character says in this film, “always on the right side,” able to get by on his own resourcefulness.
As the series went on, it learned to reembrace the team concept, bringing back actors like Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, and Rebecca Ferguson, and returning the franchise to some semblance of its ensemble-driven roots. Ferguson managed to survive quite well in the boys’ club until they did her character dirty in Dead Reckoning: pushing her into the background, then contriving a scenario where Hunt was forced to choose between her and her replacement, played by Hayley Atwell.
Through it all, Cruise was always out in front, reminding us that these other people were just window-dressing for his character’s adventures. Ethan Hunt spends most of The Final Reckoning apart from his team, while the movie practically equates him to Jesus, putting a cruciform key in his hand and having him cheat death to save humanity.
At one point, The Entity even tells Hunt, “You are the chosen one.” Like, seriously? When did this character become Neo or Darth Vader?
It does feel like a cheat when Hunt manages to survive the ocean’s freezing depths (not to mention the bends) without scuba gear, only to turn around and live through a freefall in a burning parachute, too. And while The Final Reckoning’s cast is littered with other famous movie and TV actors—too many to name—they tend to gather around Cruise’s protagonist like disciples more than peers. At the risk of being labeled a suppressive person, this makes it feel like M:I has always just been a vanity project for Cruise, with the stunts he performs being an exhibitionist ploy to have the crowd marvel at his feats of derring-do.
The Final Reckoning is also filled with montage clips from other Mission: Impossible movies, as it attempts to tie the series together and give it a send-off after 29 years. Not since the James Bond film Spectre has a tentpole tried to retcon so much, to such unconvincing effect. Needless to say, Ethan Hunt is no James Bond … if only because Bond could die, and Hunt has too much plot armor to ever do that.
Even if he’s not mortal like the rest of us, Cruise should have probably progressed beyond this role by now, instead of remaining trapped in amber, with only a slightly puffier face to distinguish his 62-year-old self from his 33-year-old self. For perspective, Sean Connery went from Dr. No to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in less time than it took Cruise to get from the first Mission: Impossible to The Final Reckoning.
I’m all for Cruise wrapping Mission: Impossible with one last series of death-defying stunts. I just wish this baggy blockbuster could match the conceit of him telling fans, “Thank you for allowing us to entertain you.” As it is, apart from the submarine sequence, which is gripping, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is such a slog to get through that I felt like I myself had aged 29 years by the time I left the theater.