Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning
The Mission Impossible franchise goes out on an embarrassingly soppy climax that is stupidly pleasurable.
Following the events of Dead Reckoning, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and the IMF team continue the fight against the AI force known as “The Entity” which has now taken over the internet, distorting reality with fake information leading to political uprisings around the world, but it will soon have full control of the world’s nuclear arsenals as well. Hunt’s mission is to find the source code for the Entity which is buried deep in a submarine in the North Pacific Ocean. Time is running out as a nuclear holocaust seems imminent, will Hunt accomplish his gravest mission?
The stakes are higher than ever, and Mission Impossible the Final Reckoning doesn’t hold back from telling you so, in fact it spends the entire first act having every character explain to you why it so, and why everything that has happened since the first mission from 1996 has led Ethan Hunt to becoming the only man who can save us. Even the simple act of clumsily dropping a knife in the secure vault at the CIA has had life alliterating ramifications that Ethan doesn’t know about yet. Since Chris McQuarrie took the helm of the MI franchise, he set consistently smart and exhilarating standards for this franchise with daring stunts risked by Cruise himself, and suspenseful espionage thrills. Dead Reckoning took the mission scale to daringly relevant levels by making the central threat about AI. Reflecting the digitally perplexing age in which we live and anticipating further calamity was maybe a bit on the nose, but Dead Reckoning ran with energy and excitement that set the stage for the world ending possibilities to come. Final Reckoning sees through the painstaking conclusion of that arc simultaneously ruining itself as a self-aggrandising nostalgia fest which bloats the franchise into an oversentimental mess.
The plot that most audiences should still remember from Dead Reckoning gets repeatedly explained to us over again, as well as many highlights of Hunt’s career with endless flashbacks to iconic moments of the franchise. This brings us to the nauseating problem with nostalgia bait, a continuing trend with big franchise finales that feel the need to waste their near 3-hour runtimes by harking back to the greatest hits of their timeline, even resurrecting characters no one remembers for the sheer buzz of it, and Final Reckoning goes far out in this fashion. Unnecessarily made up threads and tie-backs to the previous films are forcefully shoehorned into the plot all to add to the self-important legacy of Hunt's career.
Building up Hunt as this unstoppable messianic figure is not out of place for how much the character as risked everything for sake of his friends and “those we'll never meet”, but McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen’s script just gets far too carried away with this glorification that ultimately overshadows the urgency of the plot.
With all the call-backs to Hunt’s past, one of the mysteries that never gets answered is the origin of Gabriel, whom Dead Reckoning teased as the key instigator of Ethan’s past that led him to the IMF and the most dangerous villain of the franchise, but Gabriel is confusingly absent for the bulk of the movie apart from the occasional name drop, and then shows up at the very end for the final chase. Even the rest of the ensemble of characters become hollow shells of themselves with Simon Pegg’s Benji doing his usual laptop stick, Hayley Atwell’s B-rate replacement of Rebecca Fergusson serving one busty purpose, and other secondary characters like Shea Whigham’s Jasper Briggs being given a pointless backstory for the sake a sheer handshake. You would never have guessed which side character ends up with the biggest emotional arc by the end, it’s laughably outrageous.
After an exhaustingly baggy first hour of non-stop exposition, we get to the critical centrepiece where Ethan must complete a claustrophobic deep dive to the Sevastopol to recover the source code. This sequence is stressfully patient and quiet in masterful tension which gets the film back on track to the thrill ride that we want. This is latterly coupled by the highly commercialised dogfight sequence where Cruise is hanging on to a biplane. It’s another complicatedly terrifying set piece, yet it is also a little familiar to the more heart stopping helicopter chase from Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018). These set pieces are worth the price of admittance themselves, yet we have to way through a headbanging number of pointless exchanges and justification before it cuts to the chase.
That’s not also to mention how much hilarious some of the dialogue is, with overdramatically delivery of lines like “Your decompression chamber is NOT part of our plan” and some gruesomely slapstick violence that we only see from Hayley Atwell's aghast reaction. There are more laughs in Mission Impossible Final Reckoning than most comedies this year, some of it intentional and some of it is not. To call and MI film ‘ridiculous’ feels misjudged due to the nature of the franchise, but we have come to expect a certain level of intelligence in the recent instalments that justifies the absurd nature of the action, however Final Reckoning is leaking with plot wholes and inconsistencies, whether we should care or not at this point is dubious, but I think it is worth asking at the end, Where did he get that parachute from?
When you are two and half hours into the film, the mind-numbingly cheesiness of its fallout has washed over you, you kind of just give over to it. It’s a mess that by the final act takes off in such a madcap rush you can’t help but laugh and cheer with it as you see your heroes do their stuff one last time, I mean you get exactly what you pay for at a shmaltzy cost.
The MI movie franchise has been with us for just under 30 years and clearly deserves a grand send off if this is well and truly the end, but is it really the kind of franchise that needs a syrupy tribute as embarrassingly indulgent as this?
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