Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

The Mission: Impossible franchise is a multi-billion dollar franchise that has been going on for thirty years. A franchise does not continue for this long if it isn’t entertaining. So, to get this out of the way: Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is entertaining, but it is a slog getting through the first hour of mostly exposition to get to the entertaining parts of the movie.

The Final Reckoning is a direct sequel to Dead Reckoning. There is a malicious AI named The Entity that is aiming to kill all of humanity – maybe after it does, it’ll rebrand itself Skynet? Disowned by The Entity is its former human helping hand, Gabriel (Esai Morales) after he fails to acquire a special key from Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise).

Final Reckoning takes place two months after the events of Dead Reckoning and we find Hunt hiding from a world that is falling apart because of misinformation and propaganda spread by The Entity. The IMF has been separated. Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) has been diligently working on a poison pill (ie. a USB drive) that can kill The Entity when paired with a drive holding the original code of The Entity. Unfortunately for everyone, that drive is located at the bottom of the ocean in a submarine which sank in the previous film.

There’s more story and it’s all shoved into the first hour of the film – complete with flashbacks to the previous films including big references from the first and third films. Somehow writer/director Christopher McQuarrie and his writing partner, Erik Jendresen thought audiences really cared about what The Rabbit’s Foot from M:I 3 was and they make a flimsy connection to the third film. I know I was curious about The Rabbit’s Foot 20 years ago, but now? I could careless. McQuarrie and Jendresen also figured the audience would not only remember, but care about a minor character from the first film. I did and found his redemption arc satisfying, but how many casual M:I movie viewers would remember or care about this character?

One of the things that the Mission franchise has always gotten right was casting. And wow, did they get it right in this film. There are so many great actors in the film and some of them really left a mark, especially Tramell Tillman as a submarine captain. Tillman’s part was small, but the man and his comedic timing made such an impact with the role. Hannah Waddingham has a small role as the captain of a carrier, she wasn’t given much, but she too made an impression – and her American accent was spot on. Henry Czerny is, as always, excellent as Kittridge. I am so glad they brought that character and Czerny back (in Dead Reckoning and now The Final Reckoning) to the franchise from the first film.

Tom Cruise feels more engaged with this film than he did with Dead Reckoning. The Final Reckoning continued the mess that the character Grace (Hayley Atwell) is. The film happens two months after the last film where Grace was merely a pickpocket. In this film, she fought like a trained agent in one sequence that seemed completely out of character. The relationship between Ethan and Grace was also a mess. His constant “I’ll save you” and “I’ll protect you” moments rob Grace of any power.

There are quite a few problems with this film and it all starts with the film losing its sights on what made us love the franchise: Fun. For the first hour of this film, it is self-serious and pretentious, it is dour and dark, and it is no fun. The Final Reckoning is so busy trying to tie 30 years of franchise films together that it forgets that fun is what made them so endearing.

Introduced in the fourth film (Ghost Protocol) was a sense of levity and comedy that continued throughout the films that followed it – that is until The Final Reckoning. The Final Reckoning has lost the levity that helped balance the tone of previous films. With a run time of almost three hours, some more levity would have really helped to make the movie flow better.

I really did not enjoy the warroom scenes where everyone is finishing everyone else’s sentences. These were needed because having the big baddie as a vague AI somewhere in the cloud does not generate any tension. The Terminator did it better by embodying Skynet into a singular robot. Both Reckonings embody the AI in what looks like a music visualizer from WinAmp. And that just does not work.

Setting up Hunt as a Messiah with his team (and even the President) as faithful worshipping disciples and going with an “only Hunt can save the world” throughline didn’t ring true to Mission: Impossible. This all makes the movie indulgent of Tom Cruise and his character Ethan Hunt.

Gabriel is a human villain, but the character is so thinly written that by the time the third reel starts rolling, the character had been reduced to a two-dimensional dime-a-dozen cackling villain.

When the action finally started in the second hour and continuing into the third, the movie was a hoot, hollar and fun to watch. And I’d argue a bit better than Dead Reckoning. The stand out sequences are the submarine sequence and the biplane seqeunce. The later being shoved at the end of the movie to leave audiences feeling thrilled and distracting the audience from how dialogue and exposition heavy the opening hour of the movie was.

When The Final Reckoning does go real-on-reel for stuntwork, it is unbelievably thrilling. The biplane sequence had me at the edge of my seat and it is so well done. What makes the stunts so great in the Mission franchise, unlike those of The Fast and Furious franchise is that Cruise genuinely emotes and is vulnerable during these seqeunces. Ethan Hunt is allowed to take hits and get beat up; he suffers and gets hurt; and he sometimes looks as scared about what he’s doing as we are watching Tom Cruise do the stunt. The egotistical muscle head actors in Fast and Furious would never allow their characters to be shown as vulnerable.

While The Final Reckoning is overstuffed, dour and at times not very fun, by the end of its three hour run time, I was left entertained and that’s all that I can ask for from a movie. I wish the franchise did not go down the route of serialization because not everything needs to be a Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sometimes episodic is actually better.

I recommend The Final Reckoning, but go in with the expectation that the first hour is slow and, dare I say it, boring. But, once past the first hour, the movie picks up and is genuinely thrilling and entertaining.

Watched at the Oakridge Century 20.

Spoilers

If this is Cruise’s final Mission: Impossible film, it’s a great way to cap off 30 years of action, stunts and storytelling. The open-ended closure of The Final Reckoning leaves opportunities for the franchise to continue on. But, I don’t know if the franchise can survive without the Cruise’s maniacal focus on giving audiences the best entertainment they can get watching a movie. I would not be sad if the Mission: Impossible series ended here, it’s a good place to stop. But, my fear is that money hungry studios that produce the Mission: Impossible series will demand more of this multi-billion dollar film franchise — with or without Cruise attached.

In my review of Dead Reckoning, I suggested that this franchise should move on from the Ethan Hunt character. Have him in a supporting role, but give some other actors a chance to breathe life back into the franchise. Christopher McQuarrie has written for the series since the fourth film and has directed since the fifth. If this series is to continue, it’s time for McQuarried to give the reins of the series to a new writer and director. The series has become increasingly weighed down by its own baggage and it needs new ideas and a new vision for it going forward. At 62, I don’t know if Tom Cruise can take anymore of the stuntwork that he’s been doing for these films – though, I am not sure there is anyone who has the same drive as Cruise to do the stuntwork either.

As a big fan of this franchise, I was really happy the return of Donloe (Rolf Saxon) from the first film. I am even more happy that he got a redemption arc. How much of this matters to causual viewers, I’m not sure.

The connection of Briggs (Shea Whigham) to Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) from the first movie was tenuous at best and just stupid at worse. This was one of the places where the script strained credibility trying to connect the films together. I did not like this and the film would have worked better with this addition.

Gabriel’s death was shocking enough that I gasped when it happened. It was so unexpected that there were others in my screening that gasped too and there were others that were so shocked they chuckled aloud.

I really missed the Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) character. Grace is no replacement for the nuanced Faust.

I did not like Luther dying. The Mission: Impossible franchise is as much a Ving Rhames series as it is a Tom Cruise series. If they continue tthis series, Luther will be missed. RIP Phineas Phreak.