Fine, Tom Cruise, You Can Be President Of The Movies Now.
'Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning' is far better than its predecessor, and its submarine stunt is one of the greatest action sequences ever filmed.
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Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning is one of the better movies of the Mission Impossible series, and I say that as someone who hated the last one. “The Final Reckoning” is the eighth in the Mission Impossible movie franchise, and, just to make things more confusing, presumably part two of Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One (the last one, from 2023), and the fourth in the quadrilogy of Mission Impossible movies written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie
Dead Reckoning Part One bored me to tears but the Final Reckoning is an improbable return to form — which I intend both as a high and slightly back-handed compliment. Final Reckoning defines the essential dichotomy of Mission Impossible movies: It’s mediocre-plus as a movie, yet simultaneously maybe the greatest three-hour sizzle reel for “the movies” ever made.
The Mission Impossible series, now approaching its 30th year (after beginning as an attempt to capitalize on a television series 30 years older than that) is the perfect match for its star, Tom Cruise. Cruise isn’t particularly relatable as a persona. He isn’t the world’s greatest actor, he’s not the most shredded, the beefiest, nor the quippiest or most acrobatic action star, and he rarely does or says anything that I find particularly novel or clever. What he does have is a near psychotic commitment to the bit. Where “trying too hard” is normally leveled as an insult, Tom Cruise turns trying too hard into an artform; he so obviously puts so much of himself into every scene that you can’t help but respect the effort. Does he lack personality? Dangling from planes is his personality.
Tom Cruise being “trying too hard: the person” makes him the perfect movie star to carry “Trying Too Hard: The Movie,” and that’s both Mission Impossible in general and Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning in particular. In terms of story, there’s very little for me to hold onto, few characters I actually care about, and not much in the way of cleverness, humanity, or heartfelt drama. And yet it did have me consistently giggling with glee at the sheer audacity of it all. I couldn’t parse its plot in a million years, but there’s a centerpiece stunt set inside a wrecked submarine as it slowly tumbles down an ocean-floor embankment underneath the arctic ice, with Tom Cruise pinballing around a half-filled interior packed with loose torpedoes, that is quite honestly one of the most brilliantly conceived, planned, and executed action sequences in the history of cinema. It is pure genius. And then it ends, and there’s still almost an hour of movie left (Final Reckoning’s run time is 2 hours and 50 minutes, the longest in the series). “Well they’re never going to top that,” you think, and they mostly don’t, but the ensuing duelling biplanes sequences is at least a good enough attempt that it isn’t boring (not to mention a crotch-related stunt that’s the most genuinely and improbably funny moment in the movie).
So, The Final Reckoning begins immediately following the events of Dead Reckoning Part One (whatever the fuck those were). Ethan Hunt is trying to save the world from “The Entity,” an AI destroyer of worlds that spreads like a virus, eats truth, and sows chaos. Reality is in tatters and the nuclear-armed nations of the world are on the brink of war! There’s also some kind of tie-in with “The anti-God” from MI3.
I dunno, man, I never really bought into this whole deal, but that’s true of pretty much every Mission Impossible movie. At a certain point you just let your brain take a breather and enjoy watching Tom Cruise dangle. Simon Pegg (Benji) and Ving Rhames (Luther) are there, and Hayley Atwell’s Grace has taken the Tom-Cruise’s-pretend-girlfriend baton from Ilsa Faust, played by Rebecca Ferguson, who died in the last movie. Arguably the funniest part of the Mission Impossible canon is that Ethan Hunt is always deeply in love with some girl, who will inevitably end up being around for less time than a Spinal Tap drummer. When one of his wild stunts finally kills him Ethan Hunt will have more girlfriends in heaven than a suicide bomber.
Other points of distinction between MI movies include the Big Bad and Tom Cruise’s hair. Tom Cruise has objectively amazing hair, but the cut he sports in Final Reckoning is probably my least favorite of the franchise. It’s all shagged out, though not quite to the Fabio levels of MI2, and covers his ears in a way that lands halfway between 1980s Argentinian soccer player and fifth member of The Monkees. It looks pretty stupid any time Hunt is just walking and talking, but blows around enjoyably when he’s hanging off of a biplane or swimming through arctic waters (basically any time that you can forget that Tom Cruise is 62, which is most of the time). Hayley Atwell is also nice to look at, though she looks and acts so much like a fantasy girlfriend that you half expect her to turn out to be some trick created by the super-powerful AI thingy. She isn’t, and so it’s hard to tell whether it’s intentional.
Esai Morales is back as Gabriel, a guy who wants to… help The Entity destroy the fabric of reality because he thinks he can control it, I guess? Other players in the drama include President Angela Bassett, her fractious team of bellicose generals (Holt McEllany, Nick Offerman) pushing for nuclear first strikes, and many others too numerous and relatively unimportant to keep track of. The rub is that Ethan Hunt has to jump out of an Osprey, swim his way to a nuclear sub, hitch a ride on that sub (captained by Trammell Tillman from Severence, perfectly cast), swim his way into another submarine, which is wrecked on the ocean floor and whose coordinates will be transmitted by the rest of the IMF team — who themselves have to infiltrate a remote satellite outpost in the middle of the Bering Sea to find them. Once they tell Ethan Hunt where the wreck site is, he has to retrieve the doohickey that can kill The Entity, and somehow get back to the surface without dying of hypothermia, drowning, or the bends.
Mission Impossible as a franchise tends to be unparalleled when it comes to suspenseful set pieces (the quieter the better, as in both the dangling computer hacking scene in the first movie and throughout most of the submarine sequence in this one) — yet fairly pedestrian at gun and fist fights. Where Dead Reckoning Part One had far too many of the latter, The Final Reckoning consists mainly of the former. Trying to traverse a tossing turning submarine > a bunch of forgettable henchmen shooting at each other.
Final Reckoning’s plot is mostly irrelevant in making me care about it for its own sake, but truly transcendent when it comes to tying together the film’s insane setpieces and providing excuses for settings that function as wonderful eye candy. Manning the Bering Sea radar outpost is none other than Bill Donloe (Rolf Saxon), the guy who gets dosed with puke serum in Mission Impossible 1, thus allowing Ethan Hunt to hack into the CIA mainframe (the original Tom-Cruise-Dangling setpiece). “I want him transferred to a radar station in Alaska by the end of the day!” Major Kittredge (Henry Czerny) growls in that movie. And it turns out, that’s where Donloe has been, for the last 30 years.
I’m generally against tie-ins as fan service and continuity for continuity’s sake in action franchises, but Brian De Palma (can you believe the first Mission Impossible movie was directed by Brian De Palma??) was such a wizard at choosing character actors with interesting faces that McQuarrie is smart to reuse them here. Does anyone have a better “evil functionary” face than Henry Czerny? Maybe Shea Wigham, who is here also, adding notes of chain smoking and hard living.