Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

For years, Tom Cruise has flirted with leaving the Mission: Impossible films. It's hard to blame him: he's sixty-two, and the character of Ethan Hunt is one of the most physically demanding ongoing roles, even more so since Ghost Protocol solidified that each should be built around at least one insane, practically filmed stunt. Not that he shows any signs of slowing down. If they no longer look effortless, it's because the difficulty has increased with each successive release. Together, they form a lineage all the way back to the original, which director Christopher McQuarrie has been more than happy to draft off of.

In fact, the underlying preoccupation with this film is legacy - of Ethan, of Cruise, of McQuarrie, of itself. The opening mission drop is a supercut of moments from the previous films, with the voice of President Erika Sloane (Angela Basset) (herself a character from Fallout whose elevation was mentioned in Dead Reckoning) narrating it all and commenting on his unorthodox methods and undeniable results. The return of Kittridge (Henry Czerny) in Dead Reckoning is not the last time something from the original will come back in a semi-meaningful way. As in Dead Reckoning, McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen pulled liberally from Mission: Impossible 3, going so far as to address the most enduring unanswered question of the franchise: what the hell was the Rabbit's Foot?

The story of course picks up right where Dead Reckoning left off. Given the post-release, strike delay-influenced retitling, this is very much a narrative "part two". However, in a fascinating move, it's designed to be comprehensible if it's your first Mission: Impossible film. There's the aforementioned supercut to familiarize you with the major events and people you missed. Erika's voice-over establishes who Hunt is and his complicated relationship to his government. Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames) then take him to a secure location in order to recount the entire plot of the previous film, while we're shown more clips. It leads to a very strange feeling I hadn't experienced since the third film: boredom.

That's just the first of many sequences in which McQuarrie and crew don't trust you to remember (or have recently rewatched) the basic plot of the prior film. Gabriel (Esai Morales) and his connection to Ethan is shown and discussed again. We're reminded that Ethan gassed a room of top security executives to learn about the Entity. We see Gabriel retrieve then lose the Cruciform Key. The fate of the Russian submarine Sevastopol is shown once again. I could go on, but you get the idea. Recounting so much of the previous film lessens its importance while bloating this film, grinding the story to a painful halt to dispense the info, often to people who already know.

But more egregious is how often its done within this film. Any time a plot point is left alone for more than a few minutes, coming back to it triggers some flashback. A handful of lines of dialog are repeated numerous times throughout the film. When there's some item the team desperately wants to get their hands on, you better believe there are tons of insert shots of it spread over twenty minutes or so, despite there being no opportunity for it to go anywhere. This implies that McQuarrie and the producers assume people will only half be paying attention, as if being designed for streaming, where people only half pay attention. Which is bizarre, given how loudly supportive of the theatrical experience they (especially Cruise) have been. The alternative explanation is that they lacked confidence in their script, fearing it was too convoluted, and thus required spelling out what was going on. Which works exactly as well as you'd think.

Convoluted it most certainly is. Every plan they come up with so absurdly complex that they feel the need to show us a montage of it happening and going wrong just to ensure we understand what's to come before we see it "for real", leading to onerous exposition dumps. It's here we get the simplest and most straightforward details repeated at us three, four, five times for no good reason. If I swear to never use the phrase "the blink of an eye" again, will Benji please promise to do the same?

Which is to say nothing of the many, many plot threads that seem like they were left over from prior drafts. The mass movement welcoming the Entity is an afterthought, they introduce the device Gabriel used to communicate with the Entity only to never mention it again, and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) has nothing to do the entire time. Gabriel was a crucial part of Dead Reckoning despite limited screen time, making a strong impression through small but confident actions and a refusal to panic due to his certainty all would work out. Having failed during that film's climax, his menace is gone; while he's still the central (human) villain, his threats ring somehow hollow without the Entity behind him. Some good moments are undercut by this lack of follow-through, such as Ethan passing leadership of the team off to Benji in case anything should happen to him during his latest absurd task. It begins to feel like the movie's insistence on repetition is intended to cut through the mess of detritus they've created.

It doesn't help that that tone is relentlessly dour throughout. One of the defining aspects of these films has been how much fun they manage to have while saving the world. After a shaky start in Rogue Nation, McQuarrie nailed the balance between humor and Serous People doing Important Tasks in the previous two films, making it unsurprising he missed so badly here. It's absolutely dire from start to finish, with very few attempts at comedy or lightness to be found. Sure, the looming threat of nuclear war brought on by a sentient AI taking over control of every weapons systems the world over as it endeavors to wipe out humanity isn't exactly a laughing matter. Then again, none of the prior plots lent themselves to lightheartedness, yet they found a way to make it work.

The movie is just way too high on its own supply. In trying to give the series and Cruise an appropriate send-off (despite the denials this will be his last), it spends far too much time worshiping at the altar of Mission: Impossible lore, while also adding to it. It continues to hit on The Choice, the process by which IMF agents join the force introduced in the last movie. It hits on the masks and "Your mission should you choose to accept it" and disavowal and Ethan's success going rogue. Ethan is once again revered for his loyalty to his team, and held up as the only trustworthy person who's working for the greater good. Every word spoken is uttered with a gravity that threatens to collapse in on itself, and endless reassurances that "We'll figure something out" melt into static after the first half-dozen assertions, with another half-dozen yet to come.

My neglect of the major set-pieces is not a reflection of their quality, but of their abundance. Whereas Fallout achieved its widespread acclaim by battering you with set-piece after set-piece, from big stunts to creative but smaller action scenes, The Final Reckoning really only involves two that are worth any mention. Everything around them is a bland shootout or foot-chase you've seen a million times before, unless it's one of the many speeches to make the audience feel like their investment in this series was worthwhile. What's weirder is how often the movie turns away from the action, content merely to imply it. This begins early, when we simply watch Grace's (Hayley Atwell) horrified face while Ethan dispatches their captors, only showing Cruise so we can revel in the bloody aftermath. In a movie with greater control of its tone, this could be a solid comedic beat. But here, it just saps the movie's energy before it even gets started.

Those set-pieces, however? Magnificent.

At the mid-point, we get a daring expedition into the heart of the sunken Sevastopol, as Hunt attempts to retrieve the source code for the Entity. As you'd expect, there are myriad complications on either side of the plan, which prove to be thrilling despite their predictability. One of the most exciting parts of the series is how the characters' built-in adaptability allows the screenwriters to hand them only partial wins, then force them to improvise. Thus, you never know where one of these sequences will go, keeping you on the edge of your seat as the sub shifts and creaks all around him, torpedoes falling off shelves and the floor becoming the ceiling.

The promised major practical stunt, in which Tom Cruise risks life and limb for our entertainment (with the aid of CGI to hide the safety equipment), comes in a climactic biplane chase. The whole scene is quite thrilling, despite starting as a quotation of the helicopter chase that closes Fallout. As the tension rises, Ethan must crawl between the spokes of the wings, eventually forced to hold on to the loose passenger seat belt for dear life when the plane inverts. There are some great aerial shots, which serve to both get your heart pumping and to drive home that yes, they really did this, they really hung one of the biggest movie stars of all time out of an upside-down airplane.

But none of that was enough to wash the taste of the prior two hours and change out of my mouth.

Part of what made the first half of the series (through Ghost Protocol) so successful was its episodic nature. The series was delightfully free of concern for its past, able to introduce new characters with ease, craft fresh villains, up the stakes, change the tech as need be. Under McQuarrie, the narratives turned inward, obsessed with its own mythology. It became increasingly self-aware, a tendency of his which started to buckle in Dead Reckoning, and has completely collapsed here. His story feels the weight of the series pressing down upon it, so this lands as an exercise in McQuarrie convincing himself the last decade of work was worth it, that this was important and meaningful. While I appreciate a story taking itself seriously (probably more than most), there's a difference between self-awareness and self-importance. The latter can easily slip into insufferable when its ideas are rote and trite, such as "Our lives are the sum of all of our choices".

McQuarrie bought into the hype, hype that he (and Cruise) helped create and stoke, and lost sight of the core truth: the reverence we place on the franchise has everything to do with its commitment to practical stunt work in an era of muddy CGI. Outside of that, it's just another blockbuster action franchise, and any attempts to rise above will inevitably disappoint, resulting in an ignomious end.