Directed by Christopher McQuarrie | Written by McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen | 170 min | ▲▲▲
This is a movie that still satisfies as a good Mission: Impossible thriller while desperately weighed down by the legacy of 30 years of a franchise in ways it didn’t need to be. A few storytelling decisions threaten to diminish the very achievement Christopher McQuarrie wants to commemorate with what is likely the last of the series.
McQuarrie has directed the past four movies and script-doctored the one before that, amongst them the two best: Rogue Nation and Fallout, but the 2023 movie Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning (which has retroactively dropped the Part 1 from its title) was a bit of a letdown for the way the filmmakers replaced one essential cast member with another — and that’s no shade on the excellent Hayley Atwell, but Rebecca Ferguson was done dirty.
McQuarrie referred to producer and star Tom Cruise as “his action figure” at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Together, they manage to pull up the crashing plane of the plot to bring the kind of entertainment we’ve come to expect from the best of the eight movies in the franchise.
However, that first hour, it’s a disaster — it moves all the way from turgid to incoherent. It’s slammed with flashbacks, pointlessly reminding us Ethan Hunt’s action beats from the previous films — pointless because you’ve gotta figure anyone who’s watching this one has seen all the others!
It’s condescending to the loyal audience this franchise has built using better material than this. The movie works overtime to remind us Ethan Hunt is a god among men, he’s risked his life to save the world multiple times even as he’s managed to keep (most of) his friends alive at the same time. That’s been the key tension in the past couple of movies, his refusal to sacrifice his pals for the sake of millions of other people, and he’s pretty much had it both ways.
This time he doesn’t get to choose: Someone’s getting killed early on, but maybe we’re supposed to not be as bothered by his death because he was already clearly ill? One of the sins of this early part of the picture is how — despite reams of exposition — it refuses to give a little more time to explain what’s going on with this character.
The Final Reckoning is a direct sequel to the last movie, picking up its unfinished business: Hunt and the IMF team have a key that will give them access to the source code of a deeply aggressive artificial intelligence called The Entity, which is aboard a sunken Russian nuclear submarine. The Entity also wants this MacGuffin so it can remain autonomous while it takes a few days to control the world’s arsenal of nuclear weapons and trigger armageddon. Working for The Entity is a shadowy agent named Gabriel (Esai Morales), who killed someone close to Hunt back in the early days, which got Hunt into the IMF. Those details are also frustratingly thin on the ground, and this movie isn’t going to explain any of that — it’s too busy polishing Hunt’s reputation as The Man.
Hunt’s team, including Atwell, Simon Pegg, Pom Klementieff, and Greg Tarzan Davis, have to find the location of the submarine — which brings in the welcome Mission movie veteran Rolf Saxon and the fantastic Lucy Tulugarjuk — before the Russians get to it. This while Hunt stares down the American defence staff — Henry Czerny, Nick Offerman, Holt McCallany, Janet McTeer, Mark Gatiss, and playing the President, Angela Bassett — and convinces them to give him access to a nuclear aircraft carrier. And while this isn’t even close to the most far-fetched part of the picture, it is pretty hard to swallow even by the ridiculous internal logic of this franchise.
The funny thing is, this is also when The Final Reckoning starts to get good.
Solid casting helps a lot — aside from the talent mentioned above, we also get some nice work from Hannah Waddingham and Tramell Tillman, both of whom are in the Navy.
That the almost 63-year-old Cruise is still fully plausible as an action star is to his credit, and I continue to appreciate that he risks his life for our entertainment. Yes, he has shown a lot more range in other performances than he does as Ethan Hunt, but by far his favourite role is playing someone impressively capable who, faced with unbelievable odds, still manages to overcome them. He’s been doing that since the original Top Gun. It won’t be a surprise that this movie has him doing it again in two incredible set-pieces that, as seen in IMAX, are truly astonishing cinema.
But it sure took its time to get there. In the meantime, did we need one antagonist’s shoehorned familial connection with a character long dead, going back to the first movie? No, we didn’t. This effort to connect everything back to Hunt’s past, a lot of it feels clumsy and transparent — it’s what they tried in the Daniel Craig James Bond series, and that was ill-advised, too. It’s fascinating that a sense of duty to a higher cause just isn’t enough for audiences to relate to their heroes anymore, it’s somehow all got to be personal for them.
Either way, in the end the professionalism of the filmmakers and Cruise’s monomaniacal determination to top himself as a stunt person carries the day. The action overcomes the deeply boring first act, which is already fading in the memory. The later stuff, it still burns.
