“Christopher McQuarrie’s exceedingly high run on this series had to come down eventually”
There’s no way to know if Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning will genuinely be the last entry in the long-running action franchise, even with star Tom Cruise now in his 60s, but it certainly plays like a victory lap. And don’t be fooled by the name change either, this is Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 2 in all but name.
Picking up about a month after the events of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) now holds the Crucible Key, but doesn’t know where to take it. His mission is to find the ‘Entities’ source code, so he can put a stop to a god-like, all-knowing AI system that has now sprung up cults in its name, and is looking to take control of all the world’s nukes and use them to wipe out the human race. Out of all the Mission: Impossible films, the stakes are the highest here, even if the race to face off against an all-seeing AI program is still far-fetched for some.
If you feel like you’re going to struggle to remember everything that happened in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, fear not, as Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning spends an obtuse amount of time offering up exposition in fast-paced dialogue scenes. A room of U.S officials, including Angela Bassett and Henry Czerny, returning as Erika Sloane, now the President of the United States, and Kittridge, the ex-IMF Secretary are more than happy to spend most of their scenes helping explain things either happening in the moment, or from a previous Mission: Impossible film that is now important. They’re also joined by a who’s who of talent, including Holt McCallany, Janet McTeer and Nick Offerman, who are also backed up by others like Hannah Waddingham, and most importantly, a scene-stealing Tramell Tillman in actors that director Christopher McQuarrie must have just cast to collect them up in his film.
What’s most disappointing in this entry, which seems to be the most dialogue-heavy of any entry so far, is that none of it seems to go anywhere. Other than Ving Rhames as Luther, who gets an appropriate amount of time here, everyone else is more lacklustre than even the previous film. Seperating Ethan Hunt from his crew early in the film is part of this problem, but the usually humour-providing Beji (Simon Pegg) is devoid of fun here, Pom Klementieff as Paris who was one of the most interesting additiosn in the past film is like a lioness without her bite here, and Hayley Atwell who was intoruced in the Dead Reckoning as this fast-talking and loud thief who doesn’t just jump because Ethan says so, here is now down to pray at the church of Ethan, even offering up the random assignment to him that he should be the only one to control the Entity. This line seems very out of character for Grace.
The camaraderie and team spirit that had been built up in this franchise since Mission: Impossible III is missing here, and the key mix between high-tension action and light-hearted fun provided in McQuarrie’s first two director efforts in the series, Rogue Nation and Fallout, is the critical missing element. With new co-writer Erik Jendresen joining McQuarrie for this film and Dead Reckoning Part One, I can’t help but wonder if there was a swift change in the tone of the writers room between these two that led to some of these changes in what had been the secret sauce making this franchise reach its heighest point at Mission: Impossible – Fallout.
Even the human body and on-the-ground henchman for the Entity, Gabriel, played with a masterful cunningness and cruelty in Dead Reckoning: Part One by Esai Morales, is short-changed here. Sprinkled into scenes, and still a prominent player in the background, he’s not felt like he was in the previous film, even if, at the end of the day, the film is about his showdown with Ethan.
The love story tease between Grace and Ethan throughout this film is also a constant reminder of the horrible choice to kill Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust in the previous movie. Every moment with Grace and Ethan reminded me how the scene may have worked if it were instead Isla.
The final hour delivers the pulse-pounding action by first having the audience join Hunt on a tense journey into the ocean’s depths, involving a rotating submarine set-up that must make Christopher Nolan jealous. It all leads into the final set-piece, which has Tom Cruise hanging from a biplane as it turns full-360 and more, which is the death-defying stuff fans have come to expect from the franchise. The big question this time is: was it worth the 2 hours that came before it? And in this case, it may only be for the hardcore.
