PLOT: With the world on the brink of a nuclear war due to the machinations of an evil AI program called “The Entity”, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team make an all-out, last-ditch effort to prevent armageddon.
REVIEW: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning aims to put a bow on the franchise by bringing together elements from all the previous instalments in one all-out conclusion that aims to send off Cruise’s Ethan Hunt with a bang. Picking up exactly where Dead Reckoning left off, it ties together many critical plot points from previous films. This is particularly true of the first and third films, to illustrate how Ethan Hunt’s efforts to save the world over and over may have inadvertently played a part in the fact that it’s now on the brink.
It’s a bold direction for the franchise, taking a detour into nearly mythical territory, with Hunt less the super spy he was in previous films. Now, he’s more of a hero whose destiny has always been to save the world from itself – he’s almost messianic in how he demands absolute trust and confidence from all he encounters. Only he has the power to save the planet. While perhaps a bit over-the-top in how the series now feels like it’s taken a hard sci-fi twist from the relatively grounded spy franchise it once was, no one can deny that The Final Reckoning is entertaining, with a few caveats.
For me, the biggest is that despite changing the title from Dead Reckoning Part 2 (going so far as to change the last movie’s title in the process), this is still the second half of a larger story. Given that the last one is underwhelmed at the box office, the makers seem concerned that audience members may not have seen the previous movie, so the film’s first thirty minutes are loaded with clunky exposition. Many flashbacks had me groaning, wondering when the movie would kick into high gear with some action. It takes longer than expected, and at over 160 minutes, the movie seems weighed down by over-explaining how interconnected all the elements are. The Final Reckoning definitely isn’t a stand-alone instalment.
The movie also suffers from an overabundance of melodrama, with the score by Max Aruj & Alfie Godfrey drowning the film in sentimentality, with long shots of team members looking at each other silently while over-the-top music fills the soundtrack. These elements draw attention to the limitations, or worse impulses, that director Christopher McQuarrie and producer/star Tom Cruise have when they do these movies, as they seem keen to elevate them to the point that they seem mired in self-importance when they should be romps.
Yet, some truly amazing things in The Final Reckoning make it unmissable as far as action movies go. If melodrama is one of their worst impulses, their dedication to verisimilitude is them at their best. As such, despite the sci-fi tinge of the plot, you can expect relatively limited CGI, and extensive use of real-world locations and top-shelf production design. The movie looks terrific, with it set mainly aboard submarines and underwater as Hunt tries to recover a piece of tech from the sunken Russian submarine, the Sevastopol. The underwater shooting is terrific, and the physical endurance required by Hunt to undertake his mission is emphasized, as is Cruise’s noticeably buffed-up physique.
The finale also features some of the greatest stuntwork I’ve ever seen, with Cruise taking on the movie’s returning bad guy, Gabriel (Esai Morales), by navigating his way from one plane to another in 140mph winds. Knowing Cruise is up there doing it for real makes this one of the most striking action sequences in recent memory, and one of the most jaw-dropping sequences in a series known for them.
The cast is also well-served here, with Simon Pegg’s Benji moving up from comic relief into a leadership role. At the same time, Pom Klementieff’s former baddie, Paris, has switched sides and is the latest recruit, along with Greg Tarzan Davis’s Degas. After joining the crew during the last film, Hayley Atwell’s Grace is once again part of the fold, although it must be noted that the film suffers a bit from the loss of Rebecca Ferguson’s Isla Faust, after she was killed off in the last one. Ving Rhames’s Luther gets a heftier part than usual, while many other characters return from the previous instalments.
It can’t be denied that Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning definitely feels overstuffed at times. A big chunk of the running time is devoted to McQuarrie’s riff on the classic Sidney Lumet film, Fail Safe, as the president (Angela Bassett) weighs the option of a nuclear strike, but the movie works more often than it doesn’t. I still don’t think it was a good call to make the Dead Reckoning storyline into two separate, nearly three-hour films, but even when it’s most uneven, the series is still worth watching. If this is the end for the IMF, one can never say Cruise didn’t give this franchise his all, and this ends it on a satisfying note. If it falls slightly short of the others, it’s simply because the bar has been set so high.
