‘Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning’ REVIEW: Madness to the Method
‘Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning’ REVIEW: Madness to the Method
Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, Hayley Atwell as Grace, and Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn in Mission:Impossible - The Final Reckoning / Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures International
14 years ago, in Mission:Impossible - Ghost Protocol, Tom Cruise climbed up the side of the tallest building in the world with a clear mission statement: this franchise is his and his alone. Cruise was at a relative career low point then, and Paramount was all set to replace him with Jeremy Renner as the next franchise lead. Ghost Protocol was supposed to be a passing of the torch, a farewell to Cruise that would allow him to be kicked out the door with some dignity.
With his back against the wall and doubters in every corner, Cruise – ever the maverick – proved them all wrong with his charmingly mad, death-defying ways. When he steps out that window thousands of feet in the air and begins his ascent up the Burj Khalifa, we’re left with no doubt; like a character in his own movies, there’s only ever really one man for the job.
As Eugene Kittredge tells (Henry Czerny) Cruise’s Ethan Hunt in The Final Reckoning, “That’s the pattern, isn’t it?” Together with writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, the Mission franchise has become their own personal Burj Khalifa. Each successive entry has been a taller task to conquer, an ever escalating game of self one-upmanship that never ceases to produce some of the finest action set pieces to ever grace the screen. Along with climbing greater and greater heights, the franchise and its star have come to represent a wholly and uniquely cinematic experience.
Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn and Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in Mission:Impossible - The Final Reckoning / Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures International
All that to say, there is immense weight on Mission:Impossible - The Final Reckoning to pull off what is probably impossible. Not only does the film have to reach the high bar of quality that its previous installments set, it also has to conclude the story set up in Dead Reckoning and wrap up the franchise. The title makes it no secret that the film is being positioned as the franchise finale, or at the very least, a finale for Cruise’s Ethan Hunt. If there’s any creative partnership that would choose to accept such a mission, it’s Cruise and McQuarrie. Nothing speaks to their filmmaking and storytelling prowess more than the fact that they make these films without completed scripts, constantly writing and rewriting on the fly and up until they’re in the editing room, and yet the results are seamless.
It is shocking then that The Final Reckoning falls apart at the seams. The film being a Part 2 in everything but name doesn't do it any favors. A general disregard for continuity has afforded the franchises’ filmmakers the opportunity to course correct between films, tell new stories, even give Ethan entirely different characterizations. As the first direct follow-up to a previous Mission, The Final Reckoning leaves Cruise and McQuarrie no choice but to lie in the bed they’ve already made. Or so one would assume. For better and for worse, The Final Reckoning simply drops certain storylines that were set up in Dead Reckoning.
Dead Reckoning introduced new series villain Gabriel (Esai Morales) and showed flashes of a shared past with Ethan and a mystery woman, Marie (Mariela Garriga). Though brief, these flashes add a new quirk to Ethan’s story that the previous entries had never been interested in: a definitive origin. Gabriel kills Marie and frames Ethan for her death. In the hands of the authorities, Ethan is given the choice to join the I.M.F or face the charges of his crime. Save for repeating the same brief flashes, The Final Reckoning discards the personal angle between its hero and villain. Even in scenes between the two, their shared history is never brought up.
Instead of mining that relationship for drama, Gabriel is instead used in the thankless role of explaining a lot of things. The filmmakers seem to be aware that they’ve saddled the character with the least interesting material, so they give him a personality transplant between films and write ridiculous lines for him to chew on. Morales now plays Gabriel as a cackling maniac with all the subtlety of a Saturday-morning cartoon villain. He says lines like “primordial digital ooze.” It’s the only saving-grace for a character stripped of anything interesting going on.
It’s certainly far more favorable than Marie’s fate. She’s cursed to remain on the cutting room floor, an accidental remnant of some version of a film that will never be seen. Whatever Cruise and McQuarrie had planned to follow up Dead Reckoning, it’s not what The Final Reckoning turns out to be. And that’s if they had anything planned at all. The omission of those storylines feels like an admission from the filmmakers that they should’ve never tried to go down those paths to begin with. For the first time, it is obvious how much these films are made up in production as they go along. The illusion has never been more clear, the filmmaking never more strained in its efforts to piece this all together. Perhaps it's a final reckoning of their own for the madness of their methods.
For as lauded as the franchise has become, it’s also been knocked from the start for being confusing, convoluted, and full of exposition. It should not be surprising at this point that a Mission film would be loaded with a ton of table setting but what is surprising is how dull it comes across here. McQuarrie had gotten really good at deftly delivering exposition and moving the story along at a propulsive pace. The Final Reckoning falls out of the rhythms that have made the previous couple installments so thrilling. Moments that feel like they’d be major character beats in a film that took its time instead occur off-screen, while over an hour-long chunk of the near three-hour runtime is mostly devoted to repeatedly going over the steps and stakes of the mission and reviewing the events of the previous film.
Even the placement of the opening titles, which usually hits like the perfect punctuation to the opening sequence, feels a step off the beat. The film moves in stops and starts, lurching with a sputtering engine instead of rocketing with jet fuel. Haphazardly strung together are the reintroductions of Grace (Hayley Atwell), Paris (Pom Klementieff), and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), who were introduced in Dead Reckoning and are dropped right back in the story with some of the series’ most lackluster action scenes. An opening act featuring a prison break leading to spy intrigue at an embassy leading to an interrogation escape sounds thrilling on paper, but in actuality plays like a limp retread of sequences they've done before and done better.
Worse yet is the navel-gazing that’s apparently requisite for all franchises now. Cruise and McQuarrie attempt to wrangle all eight installments into a single, overarching narrative to give the finale an extra bit of added weight, but the last minute retcons and the returns and callbacks to old faces tie everything back to The Final Reckoning so neatly that they ultimately have the opposite intended effect. The franchise starts to feel smaller, not grander.
Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in Mission:Impossible - The Final Reckoning / Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures International
Or perhaps they've earned the right to be that way after 30 years, earned the trust that they can land the plane for this swan song even if the plane catches fire and loses a wing. After all, there's no Mission:Impossible film where the characters don't first appear to be completely in over their heads, teetering over the edge of failure before miraculously succeeding by the skin of their teeth. In that sense, The Final Reckoning is the most like a Mission:Impossible film that a film can be. For most audiences, I suspect none of my complaints will matter. When things finally start to get rolling, the rough start fades into the distance and the film begins to resemble its enthralling predecessors.
It helps too that the film is populated with a mix of new and returning character actors and known faces who add a bit of new color to a world starting to feel well-worn. There are a lot of characters in this film and not enough time to flesh them all out, so casting becomes an effective shorthand. What isn’t said about a character on the page can be communicated by a look. Holt McCallany and Nick Offerman read instantly as government hard-asses, while Angela Bassett as the president exudes power and authority. Their side plot revolving around the quandary of a potential nuclear strike against the rest of the world’s nuclear arsenals gives McQuarrie the opportunity to play around with a nuclear anxiety drama for a few moments. He loads it up with enough sweaty close-ups and canted angles to make its own separate movie.
There's still no other franchise that can pull off the scale and spectacle that a Mission film can, closing the book with two near back-to-back extended set pieces that can hang with their best. Cruise's insistence on performing his own stunts and getting as much in camera as possible isn't just vanity or for viral marketing — it's storytelling. These sequences are why you go to see these movies. They blend practicality with showmanship. The deep dive submarine sequence requires a functioning dive suit that’ll also make a fitting costume for a movie star. Cruise needs the helmet to breathe underwater, but he also needs it to have a wide window lined with lights so we can still see his face perfectly lit. As impressive as the massive submarine set is — large enough for the camera to pull back on Cruise entering a chamber to reveal rows and rows of nuclear torpedoes — what really sells the danger is that we can see all his expressions. If the action hero looks labored and worried, it’s high time for us normal people in the audience to get worried too. The exposition can fall flat, but the action is the juice of this franchise and Tom Cruise is cinema's greatest action figure. The Hitchcock influence on these films has been present since the beginning, only when the biplane comes diving towards Cruise a la North By Northwest, he doesn’t duck for cover to avoid it — he drops down to grab ahold of it. They never let you forget how dangerous an act this is. Each shot is framed to emphasize just how high up he is, just how fast they're going – that yes, indeed that is Cruise’s real face being whipped back by the sheer, blinding force of the winds.
Tom Cruise does not end his Mission run on top of his own personal Burj Khalifa, but that’s never where he’s at his best anyway. With him, it’s not the destination that’s interesting, but the journey. Scaling new heights, barely clinging on, always in danger of falling thousands of feet at any moment; that’s where his true magic lies. Though I would’ve liked to see them go out on a franchise high, that it ultimately fails to reach those heights is a testament to the filmmaking philosophies that have driven Mission:Impossible. Each installment always lived up to the Cruise seal of entertainment that you’ll always get your money’s worth. They never saved their best for last.
Mission:Impossible - The Final Reckoning is out now in cinemas nationwide.
