For nearly 30 years now, the Mission Impossible films have traded in one of the oldest cinematic arts – the thrill and perverse humour of putting your star lead in copious amounts of real danger, the kind of un-fakeable chicanery that made Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton such legends. Now, with Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise has finally found a stunt that even his Silent Era predecessors might have balked at; wing-walking on a real biplane in real mid-air high up in some real mountains. It’s a truly crazy gambit that caps off the eighth and likely final mission for Ethan Hunt, a barnstormer of a climax that, strangely enough, safely lands a film that, for a lot of its runtime, actually has M:I on its shakiest footing since the second one all the way back in 2000.
Originally intended as a Part 2 for 2023’s Dead Reckoning and to be released last summer, the two-year gap between Final Reckoning and its immediate predecessor does rather put it on the back foot immediately. These two films combined have the series’ most convoluted and ridiculous plot, and *a lot* of time is spent in the first act rehashing not just that, but plot strands from pretty much every other film in the franchise too. The result is a first 45 minutes that is, put simply, a messy slog, written and edited in a way that struggles to build any real rhythm.
Once all the pieces are in place (Ethan Hunt must take on the malicious AI god-thing ‘The Entity’, find its source code and destroy it before it nukes the entire planet), it does become smoother sailing, though. The sci-fi-ness of the central premise pushes the story into outright mythic territory, which is not always the neatest fit for an ostensibly ‘real-world’ franchise but becomes a very fitting mode by the time Ethan is doing things like freediving thousands of feet beneath the Arctic Ocean after launching himself out of a crashed submarine’s missile tubes.
This particular absurdity comes at the end of the best non-plane stunt sequence in Final Reckoning, involving a submarine that is both filling with icy Arctic water *and* rolling towards the edge of a deep sea trench, throwing Ethan, the water, and every heavy (and potentially explosive) object on board into every corner of every room. As always, the brilliance of the stunt work here is undeniable. No one else in Hollywood has the willingness or ability to do what Cruise does in these films and it’s so much more than just a vanity exercise or publicity stunt – the danger is palpable every second and it’s impossible to not be tight of chest and sweaty of palm when Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie do what they do best. The sheer logistical challenge of what they pull off would seem nearly impossible even if they weren’t having to capture crystal-clear, IMAX-ready footage of it, but every technical department here is at the absolute top of their game.
Though the constant highest-of-the-high stakes mean that the cast isn’t able to be quite as charming as usual (particularly in the superfluous-feeling sequences with Angela Bassett’s President and her Joint Chiefs), Cruise and Co are still good company. Simon Pegg’s Benji gets more action, Hayley Atwell and Pom Klementieff each get to be hyper-competent and astonishingly beautiful at the same time as master thief Grace and French assassin Paris, while Ving Rhames might just be the stealth MVP, genuinely moving as the ailing Luther. There’s quite a bit of nonsense dialogue they each have to chew through, but they’re all able to sell it in the end.
Less lucky is Esai Morales as returning baddie Gabriel, who has gone from worshiping the Entity to resenting and wanting to control it and is just…meh. Not every M:I villain is a winner (gun to my head, I could not tell you who Ghost Protocol’s bad guy was), but to see a franchise that has boasted Philip Seymour Hoffman and the best ever big-screen use of Henry Cavill as its top adversaries go out with a whimper in this department is a letdown.
But then, Mission Impossible is always ultimately about one man, and one man only. Throughout his entire career, but now more than ever post-COVID, Tom Cruise has been the King Of The Movies and, even if Final Reckoning is shakier than the best of its predecessors (for my money, Fallout remains by far the franchise’s high point), watching the king reign remains an inimitable thrill.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 