Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning review
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Writers: Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen
Stars: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Henry Czerny, and Angela Bassett
Running Time: 170 minutes
Please note there may be spoilers below
One of the great strengths of the implausibly entertaining Mission Impossible franchise is its old-fashioned commitment to not needing to mythologize its own history – each feature remains a broadly isolated experience, separate and unique within it’s pantheon of entries . As far as shared universes go, a major strength of the Tom Cruise series was how it never wanted to pretend that its lightly interconnected movies were anything but simple inspiration within the era they were made in. To watch John Woo’s absurd second entry and compare it to J.J. Abrams apologetic follow-up is a front-row seat to the evolving sensibilities of cinematic taste – what a difference 6 years can make. But now with the eighth entry, Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the franchise has unfortunately decided to fully commit to romanticizing its own mythology, providing us a film that feels weighed down by self-serious grand-standing and a retconned story that’s only interested in looking to its previous entries with rose-tinted glasses.
“By the time the first major set piece is provided, the audience is already ahead of the filmmakers, aware of the plots and uninspired by the developments.”
From the very beginning, the trouble starts. The first hour of the near three-hour running time floods you with a copious amount of clumsy exposition, awkwardly presented in stiff, single close-ups that poorly regurgitate the stakes for a movie we’ve already seen the first half of. The President of the United States herself (the always electric Angela Bassett) explains the plot, alongside every other major character in what begins to feel like the most expensive info-dump of all time. It’s a staggeringly flat way to begin this adventure, which by the time an expedition to find a lost submarine finally begins, we’ve already drowned in the type of inane ‘a single flinch will trigger World War 3’ dialogue that populates some of the worst Cold-War inspired thrillers. More damning is the fact it is completely unnecessary to delay the plot since this entire submarine plot line had already been established in the previous movie, yet after spending $150 million establishing this story, we are forced to see its threads be resown once again. It’s rare to see so much money spent on a redundancy.
It’s a bizarre conundrum, not least because director Christopher McQuarrie had already proven a ruthless ability to stay ahead of his audience in prior entries, particularly in the remarkable Mission Impossible - Fallout. But here he strikes himself as a director burnt out by the process of making enormous blockbusters – the very endless scenes of long-lens close ups keeping his visuals desperately boring speaks strongly to McQuarrie’s lack of interest; it’s so egregious it feels like each actor is performing from a different country, enunciating perfunctory questions to characters that instead should be established visually. By the time the first major set piece is provided, the audience is already ahead of the filmmakers, aware of the plots and uninspired by the developments.
Of course, Cruise is wonderfully locked in to the whole affair. Nearly 30 years into this role, it’s a testament to him that he still finds new life in such an archetypal character. Whilst the Daniel Craig’s of the world are understandably relieved to be spared the physical and commercial pressure of maintaining a billion-dollar franchise, to Cruise the very job is so natural that even in moments where his very ego threatens to sink him, he somehow manages to find a life raft. The centerpiece of Ethan Hunt exploring a decade-long sunken submarine is a stellar technical achievement, the Sevastopol’s lonely, cavernous spaces providing an unrelenting amount of thalassophobia, each bloated corpse and truck-sized torpedo floating hauntingly across our hero’s purview. Not since The Abyss has sunken wreckage affected us this much. Ironically it’s the series visual high-point, but unfortunately, it’s presented to us within a film that is its recent low-point.
The retconning and mythologizing is egregious. We are told the famously unrevealed Rabbit’s Foot McGuffin from Mission: Impossible III was in fact the A.I. antagonist in this very movie – over-dramatically referred to as ‘The Entity’ – yet it seems particularly silly that a story set in pre-iPhone 2006 had an A.I. software so advanced that even 2025’s infrastructure can’t handle it. It’s one of many choices that bruise the skin. Instead of giving us the camaraderie of friends, our grouped scenes carry only the hyper-serious weight of an impending death. By the time a major character does die, it’s sign-posted so much to rob us of either surprise or emotion. Keen to linger constantly on the humorless tone of an epilogue, the last act of The Final Reckoning lacks the light but vital comedy of previous entries. Like talking politics at the dinner table for too long, stripped of humor, each plot point leads us to another ticking-clock climax that feels too bleak, content to play the same song we’ve heard before but without any sense of inventiveness, rendering the whole experience strangely thrill-less and anachronistic of doldrum movies from decades ago.
Even the much marketed, climactic plane sequence, full of the type of Tom Cruise risk-taking we’ve come to expect, feels like a limited call-back to the extraordinary helicopter sequence from Fallout. Instead of pushing the series forward into new and exciting directions, it simply hearkens back to a better film, the human antagonist here lacking the delicious physical and comedic energy of Henry Cavill. At its most hollow, it’s simply a stunt show, a shallow tribute to an actor as famous for jumping off buildings as he is for emoting. Undoubtedly Cruise deserves the tribute, a Buster Keaton for modern cinema; it’s just a shame this series forgot that its lack of cohesion was it’s greatest strength.
