Movie Review – Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning
Principal Cast : Tom Cruise, Haley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny, Angela Bassett, Greg Tarzan Davies, Holt McCallany, Janet McTeer, Nick Offerman, Hannah Waddingham, Tramell Tillman, Shea Wigham, Charles Parnell, Mark Gatiss, Rolf Saxon, Lucy Tulugarjuk, Katy O’Brien, Stephen Oyoung.
Synopsis: Hunt and the IMF pursue a dangerous AI called the Entity that’s infiltrated global intelligence. With governments and a figure from his past in pursuit, Hunt races to stop it from forever changing the world.
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Time, it seems, has finally caught up with the eternally youthful Tom Cruise, here reprising his role as the inimitable Ethan Hunt in what is reputed to be the grand finale of 8 instalments of the popular Mission Impossible franchise. The Final Reckoning – a slight retitling of the sequel to Dead Reckoning Part One – is a prolonged swansong for Cruise and his directorial muse Christopher McQuarrie, a near three-hour action bombast of intrigue and incredible practical stuntwork – mostly on the part of its headline star – and yet unlike the series’ propulsive narrative hooks and reliance upon shock-and-awe from Cruise et al, this film’s jam-packed plot and brisk pacing somehow manage to be something a Mission Impossible film should never be: boring.
Plot synopsis courtesy Wikipedia: IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) races against time, two months after the events of Dead Reckoning Part One, to stop the rogue artificial intelligence known as the Entity, which has infiltrated global nuclear systems. Joined by Grace (Hayley Atwell), the skilled thief turned ally, and his longtime teammates Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), Hunt must retrieve the Entity’s source code—contained in a module recovered from the sunken Russian submarine Sevastopol—and use a specialised virus known as the “Poison Pill” to trap the AI in a digital bunker in South Africa. Along the way, the team faces off against Gabriel (Esai Morales), former agent of the Entity, and contends with orders from President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) to surrender the AI key.
Maybe it’s the fact that Tom Cruise is starting to look his age, perhaps its the fact that the series’ has been unable to capture the same eye-popping stunts of past films with the same sense of insanity, or perhaps its the undercooked and ponderously laborious exposition The Final Reckoning is saddled with, but my goodness this film is a tiresome bore. And I shouldn’t be saying that about a climax to a mini-series within the franchise that loosely began with JJ Abrams Mission Impossible III. Instead of jittery shootouts and glorious vehicular mayhem, interspersed with Cruise putting himself directly into harms way, we get a long treatise on the dangers of AI (about two years too late, in my thinking) and Cruise’s increasingly aged-out face trying desperately to retain some semblance of his admittedly eternal agelessness that has served him well, mixed with nostalgia hits that work superbly well, not to mention a cavalcade of glorified cameos designed to pay off sidebar plots from previous films; The Final Reckoning is stuffed to overflowing with ideas and creative endeavour, but there’s an inertness to the movies tone, a weird disconnect between the action and our ability to care about it, that may finally have put paid to Ethan Hunt’s sieve-brained mission concoctions once and for all.
While the story picks up pretty soon after the confusing events of the previous, it soon becomes pretty obvious that the former film boasts the centrality of McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen’s best concepts. The rise of an AI plot device known as the Entity, a literal deus ex machina from which there’s supposedly only two bad options of escape, is given crisp alacrity considering how popular Artificial Intelligence has become in the current tech space, and while the proposition that It could grow so powerful as to take control of the world’s nuclear arsenals and threaten humanity’s very survival is intriguing on a basic level, The Final Reckoning’s flirtation with off-screen computer power limits the emotional catharsis the viewer will find within this incendiary pop-culture moment. The writing is solid but the protracted exposition and ponderous end of the world diatribes become wearying, and the expansive cast do their best with what are auspiciously derivative supporting roles, particularly the second-billed Haley Atwell, who succumbs to the franchise’s long-standing tradition of being primarily eye candy for Cruise and a sidebar character of limited input.
Where emotional resonance is sought, empty platitudes and an abyss of interest resides, with Cruise’s Ethan Hunt having something of a mid-life crisis trying to get people not to give up on his shaky IMF team as they battle the Entity’s global reach. Cruise looks committed but now incapable of forcing his facial muscles into much beyond minor scowling or steely-eyed glares that were once the domain of Eastwood and Schwarzenegger, and moreso than any of these films before it he actually looks his proper age – an early 60’s Hollywood icon brought down by the ravages of time. That’s not to say the man still doesn’t have the juice, because he easily acquits himself of the film’s staggering stunts and action sequences, as low0-key as they are. A highlight is a hair-raising third act plane chase sequence that sees the star flipping, sliding and leaping from the flimsy infrastructure of a light aircraft chasing Esai Morales’ scene-chewing villain in Gabriel, while a mid-film submarine venture will have you holding, and perhaps even gasping for, your breath. In spite of several solid callbacks to previous films, and wisely finding a way to utterly avoid reminding audiences about the dire John Woo one, not to mention the return of a classic first-film character that acts as an overall sense of coming full circle, The Final Reckoning’s stakes leave the audience largely un-entertained, if not bored by the whole thing. I found myself asking the screen “is that it?” when the final credits rolled, I was baffled that I spent three hours in the dark for such a mild, confusing romp with so little impact.
I think where Cruise and McQuarrie stumbled with this film is that the usual sizzle seems to have fizzled out. The overly serious nature of what should be a largely preposterous series of heists and double-crosses has turned into a dour mix of James Bond and The Fast & The Furious, topped out by Cruise’s ability to do some crazy stunts but at the expense of us caring about anything else. The main ensemble of Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg, and the returning Henry Czerny, all do serviceable work but there’s a finality to the film that sours things a lot, a little like Daniel Craig’s dark and brooding final Bond outing, No Time To Die. The inevitable closing chapter feel of it all lacks the fun of the popcorn cinema sensibility of previous entries, and although I absolutely thought Dead Reckoning nailed its brief, the balance of character and story alongside briefer and less combustible action sequences here make some of the creative choices a bit of a misstep. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a very glitzy, well produced and superbly mounted movie. In any other world it’s a pretty decent action film, but when the bar has been set so high before, The Final Reckoning is a mid-teir Mission Impossible film.
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