“I need you to trust me one last time,” Ethan Hunt tells a disconcerted group of government officials as the fate of the world hangs in the balance. It’s a fitting summation of a franchise that has continued to defy audiences, expectations, and reality for thirty years now. We put our trust in movie star Tom Cruise to deliver pulse-pounding thrills and absurd spycraft, and he delivers every single time. So we put our trust in Cruise and director McQuarrie yet again for their biggest Mission: Impossible to date: series swansong The Final Reckoning.
Picking up where Dead Reckoning left off, The Final Reckoning opens with The Entity – the all-powerful, parasitic AI – now in control of the world’s nuclear arsenal. Countries are in disarray, societies have collapsed, and world-obliterating war is on the brink; naturally, Ethan Hunt is the only one who can save the day. Less sprawling than its predecessor, this time the mission itself is much more coherent, but still bogged down by semantics, the first hour and a half of The Final Reckoning are an expository dump. Relying heavily on flashbacks and tying in the mythology from older films, it’s a self-indulgent and self-congratulatory victory lap of Mission’s ‘greatest hits’.
It’s a lengthy, at times tedious, prelude to the setpieces audiences come to a M:I film to see, as Ethan spars with the film’s myriad of nameless government officials in generic conference rooms to hash out the politics and timings of what’s at stake – no less than the demise of all mankind, mind you. The choppy editing flits between frantic pacing to drawn-out conversations at a moment’s notice without much rhyme or reason, and the result is dizzying at best. It’s pernickety and overlong, but this is a culmination of three decades’ worth of work, paying off everything that has come before, so there is admittedly still a joy to getting all the added trimmings and seeing Cruise relishing in that.
When the action inevitably kicks off in the second hour, it more than makes up for the stodgier first half. There are only two major set-pieces, padded out with fun chases and fisticuffs in between, but they’re both comfortably amongst the greats of action cinema (they even rival the Burj Khalifa for the title of franchise best). The first is a dizzying dive sequence in which Hunt plunges to the depths of the ocean to retrieve a Maguffin from a submarine – a brilliantly constructed set, McQ’s taut camera work and the use of clever mechanics to cultivate a tangible threat drive the tension through the roof. Meanwhile, the biplane sequence – poster child for The Final Reckoning – is truly an astonishing feat of cinema; it’s an exhilarating, white-knuckle sequence so mind-bogglingly insane that it will have you questioning how the hell they pulled it off. When M:I 8 is Mission Impossibling, it is doing so at the highest level, and the spectacle of it all reminds us exactly why we come to a Tom Cruise tentpole: propulsive, nerve-shredding, physics-defying cinema that no one is even close to doing on a level anywhere near this.
It’s goofy, messy, maximalist action cinema at its best, and that alone is worth the price of admission. From the opening montage, which pays tribute to the Mission canon, and all the easter eggs and callbacks peppered through (the return of Rolf Saxon’s William Donloe from 1996’s original is well done and pays off a throwaway line from that film too), the passion that this team have for these movies oozes through the screen. It’s heartfelt and egotistical at the same time. A vanity project on a scale hitherto unheard of. However, should it be anything less? It’s hard to tell if this is, in fact, the final reckoning; Cruise is adamant he has more in him. Perhaps this is it. Or maybe we’ll get M:I 9 before the decade is out. Either way, there’s a thematic, emotional and narrative finality to The Final Reckoning. It ties together the last thirty years of Mission in expectedly (and fittingly) big, messy, sprawling, showstopping fashion. If this is indeed the end for Hunt and his team, they’ve lit the fuse and gone out with a bang.
Misson: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Summary
A goofy, messy, maximalist action cinema at its best – if this is indeed the end for Hunt and his team, they’ve lit the fuse and gone out with a bang.
