Released: 17th May
Seen: 25th May
The Mission: Impossible franchise has been a part of the cinematic landscape since 1996. Some people who were conceived on the opening night are now weeks away from turning 30, that’s a staggering amount of time for us to have been watching the ever-growing world-ending adventures of Ethan Hunt and his pack of associates who are as expendable as they are available for the shooting schedule required. No matter what your stance is on the franchise, it’s hard to deny that it’s been an iconic action franchise the likes of which we will not see again for quite a long time. Partially we won’t see it because we just will never see another star like Tom Cruise again who, despite how you might feel about him deciding to be a spokesman for one of the most evil organizations ever to exist on Planet Earth (WHERE IS SHELLY!?), is an undeniably charismatic superstar who can make even the flimsiest of action premises enjoyable thanks to his utter devotion to the craft. So here we are, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, which is allegedly the final film in this franchise… I’ll believe that when I don’t see it but if this is the note that the franchise is going out on, I’m not gonna be mad about it.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning picks up shortly after Dead Reckoning: Part One with Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) chasing down Gabriel (Esai Morales) through a series of tunnels that eventually lead to Ethan finally getting to have a one-on-one conversation with the AI known as The Entity. The Entity was the underlying problem of Dead Reckoning but now its mission is being made clear, it’s going to take over all of the nuclear warheads on the planet and set them all off to kill humanity for a reason that only makes sense to an AI that is somehow impossible to turn off without the special key that the last film was spent trying to find. Naturally the only one who can stop this AI is Ethan and so begins a three hour tour of the world where assorted action scenes will be used as story beats to have Ethan stop the evil AI at the last minute and save the world, possibly losing several core cast members on the way because this is a grand finale and everyone is expendable now!
To say it’s incredibly timely to have a film where the main antagonist is an AI set to destroy the world is an understatement, it feels like everything that we touch online is in some way being infiltrated by AI so to have it as something that can destroy the globe by creating deep fakes and causing us to distrust each other is a brilliant use of a computer program as the antagonist. Sure some of the logic used is weirdo moon logic that makes no sense because it suggests the AI is sentient enough to have dramatic evil villain monologues when required, but it works for what’s needed here and creates a force powerful enough to feel like an escalation from previous instalments of this franchise, which is something that Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning sorely needed since there wasn’t anything else that was going to escalate other than the runtime.
Look, after eight films it’s hard for this franchise to go much further than it has already. It’s the same issue that Fast and the Furious had where they went to space and then couldn’t go much further… the catch is that Fast and the Furious is about as close to straight camp as an action franchise will get so they can make up for that with personality, Mission: Impossible doesn’t have that ability because it is always deadly serious with limited exceptions for whatever Simon Pegg throws out every now and then (and in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, he has exactly one half joke if that). It can’t push things by being sillier or weirder or throwing people into space because that wouldn’t make sense in this universe, it’s also kind of impossible for them to go bigger since they’ve already gone to the nuclear armageddon place (One of the films in the franchise is literally called FALLOUT referring to the nuclear fallout that was a potential risk). There is nowhere bigger to go, but if they can’t make things bigger, then they’ll make the big things they’ve been doing take longer.
The big problem that Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning has is its punishing length. It’s 3 hours long, and every second is felt because they have no problems milking every single second as long as they can. You’re going to get 13 different angles of every shot in every action scene, be it a shot of Ethan Hunt fighting bad guys in his underwear or a pair of planes flying so close together that I think one of the planes might actually be pregnant now. It will milk everything as long as it can and when there’s some actual tension then that can work but after a while you just end up wanting the movie to be fucking over. At one point, I literally caught myself wishing that the bombs would explode so the film would be over with because I was getting tired. I’ve sat through long films before. Endgame was also 3 hours long, the Crystal Lake Memories documentary is pushing 7, but those understood how to pace themselves in a way that made their watch time manageable. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning? We get it, this is the last film and you want to wave your cinematic dick in our faces one last time, can you wave it faster because I have things to do!
Maybe it didn’t help that Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning had some pretty bad strobing effects right at the start for the entire sequence where Ethan is talking to The Entity. Maybe that threw me, I’ll admit that it NEVER helps when a film does the strobing bullshit for no reason and this was particularly annoying but in general the film just didn’t have the good sense to know when to cut shit down because it wanted to use as much footage as it could. Again, some part of me gets why, if your lead actor is going to do all of the stunts and almost kill himself to get the shot, then you’re going to use all the footage but maybe you could use it better so that I’m not staring at Tom Cruise screaming into the void for several minutes for no reason. I shouldn’t be looking at a countdown clock that says five minutes for a 20-minute-long sequence, something is terribly wrong here.
Now, while there is a lot of stuff I do wish they had cut down, one thing I appreciate that Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning does to make it accessible to the audience who isn’t going to remember eight films worth of nonsense, so they have put in flashbacks so that everyone can follow what’s being referenced. It makes the film a lot easier to enjoy because you don’t have to rack your brain trying to remember too many names or events, they give your memory a little kick and it works really well. It also kind of furthers my belief that a lot of this film was made by looking at the previous films and retrofitting them to make it seem like everything that’s ever happened built to this exact moment which doesn’t work as well as they would hope, but it’s a cute thing for them to try to do.
I know that I’m being somewhat negative about Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, so let me state pretty clearly that it’s a good enough action film that does what you kind of expect from this franchise. I expect several lengthy stunt sequences that feel like Tom Cruise’s elaborate suicide attempts got caught on film and a big climactic ending where the world is saved when a countdown timer gets to the last 5 seconds because no one does anything quickly enough to have time to spare. It’s what you expected upon seeing the title; it’s just longer and slower and your mileage may vary depending on whether that works for you. I’m sure someone at Paramount is hoping it works, cos they spent half a billion on this one, but it really just feels like the franchise is running on fumes. If we’re being honest, this franchise really hit a peak with Fallout, and ever since then, the returns have been diminishing so maybe it’s good to stop now while there’s still a drop of gas in the tank.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning might not be the glorious ending that the franchise deserved, but it’s a decent enough ending that puts a nice bookend to the franchise. It’s bloated, a little repetitive and leaning way too hard on its history for its own good but it’s also the final film in a 30-year-long saga and at that point you’re allowed to be somewhat self-indulgent as you make your way out of the cinema. This film may be forgotten in 5 seconds, but hopefully it’ll have made some people happy before it does that.
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