Movie Review: "Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning" Navigates A Clunky Narrative To Deliver One Final Round Of Thrills
9/12 ForReel Score | 4/5 Stars
If there's one thing Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning wants to say, it's that every step, jump, kick, and bullet has led to this very moment. Between the franchise’s latest film and its predecessor, Dead Reckoning (née Part One), it's been a near-billion-dollar production helmed by one man’s goal to jump off and climb as many things as humanly possible. Between a worldwide pandemic, industry strikes, a title change, four release date delays, and a submarine scheduling snafu, the production for The Final Reckoning has been an impossible mission in and of itself. Capping off three decades of some of the most exciting genre filmmaking on this side of the Pacific, Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is an undeniably messy yet heart-palpitating face-melter from one of our last true movie stars.
Between his sheer charm and his masochistic desperation to torture himself for the sake of cinema, it’s hard not to appreciate what Tom Cruise has been up to in recent years. He’s hanging off of planes and doing underwater stunts that the most daring of daredevils wouldn’t attempt, and it’s euphoric to watch. The mileage that director Christopher McQuarrie (nicknamed McQ) manages to carve from Cruise’s Evel Knievel/Buster Keaton nutcasery is pure cinematic gold, and it’s why he’s managed to become the figurehead for big-screen filmmaking after the industry-saving success of Top Gun: Maverick. The mantra of the Impossible Mission Force has been “We live and die in the shadows for those we hold close, for those we never meet,” which might as well be a pledge for Cruise’s near-suicidal devotion to entertaining his audience.
The inherent allure of each Mission film is that Cruise simultaneously plays Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny; he is both Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner. He’s either chasing an impossible-to-catch enemy or trying his damndest to finagle himself and his friends out of situations. Whether he’s trying to steal something from the bottom of the Arctic Ocean or to pursue an enemy mid-flight, the mission always feels impossible, especially in the Reckoning duology. The stakes are higher than ever in The Final Reckoning, emotionally and apocalyptically, with the rogue “Entity” AI threatening to end all life on Earth (which might serve as a timely metaphor for the technology’s infringement on the cinematic space), starting with Ethan Hunt and his friends.
Even if Cruise can carry a blockbuster like Mission with no problem, what makes Ethan Hunt such a lovable character is that he’s a team player. He relies on people and they rely on him, which makes the IMF feel like a group of longtime best friends rather than coworkers. The cast has been rounded out with mainstays Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) as well as recent additions such as Grace (Hayley Atwell), Paris (Pom Klementieff), and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), all of whom fit perfectly into the team and have excellent chemistry with each other. Coupled with McQuarrie’s naturalistic Oscar-winning screenwriting, you always feel like you’re part of the team, too.
As with all Mission films, the narrative comes second to the stunts surrounding the film, but The Final Reckoning might suffer from the clunkiest writing out of any of McQuarrie’s entries in the franchise. Trying to tie together all seven previous films is quite the Herculean task, and it comes with a decently exposition-heavy first 45 minutes that felt like an awkward departure from McQuarrie’s prior films. Flashbacks occur far too often, and while they don’t interrupt the flow of information, they do start to feel annoying after the umpteenth time. I suppose the flashbacks are needed for more casual viewers who don’t have the entire franchise lasered into their brains like me, but I think that McQuarrie should’ve had a little more faith in the audience when he was in the editing room.
Once that first forty-five minutes passes, though, The Final Reckoning finds its footing and sprints towards the finish line with breakneck momentum. The front-loaded first half makes way for a white-knuckled second half that pushes the boundaries of action cinema to new heights, leaving me both breathless and nauseous in the best way possible. Whenever the aspect ratio would expand on the IMAX screen, I felt a little piece of my soul get closer to heaven. The loose plot threads could’ve come apart quite easily, and the seams are certainly visible, but the filmmaking on display is so hypnotically thrilling that I couldn’t even think straight. It’s not perfect, and it’s certainly my least favorite of McQuarrie’s Mission films so far, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I had barrels of fun.
Between eight films, thirty years, and five directors, the journey from 1995 to now has been a wild and unforgettable ride. Walking out of the theater, it was hard to say goodbye to a franchise that has been around longer than I’ve been alive. It’s not just another franchise, it’s a piece of our cultural consciousness. There’s something bittersweet in that, and neither McQuarrie nor Cruise took it for granted. If Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is truly a goodbye to our friends at the IMF, then it’s a worthy sendoff to a franchise that has been constantly trying to up the ante by any means necessary.