‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’ Gets Lost in the Clouds
Although a slight improvement on ‘Dead Reckoning,’ the new installment fumbles the franchise's larger identity.
In its fourth installment, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, the series did a mini-reboot of sorts, keeping Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) as the lead, but putting a greater emphasis on his team dynamic while also building in breathtaking stunts that never lost sight of the narrative stakes. This was an important development as the second and third movies seemed unsure of what exactly Mission: Impossible should be. Rather than understanding why the 1996 original worked so well, Mission: Impossible II functioned like a John Woo-flavored James Bond riff while Mission: Impossible III leaned into the domestic/spy tension present in director J.J. Abrams’ TV series Alias. But the next three movies found a remarkable groove blending death-defying stunts with propulsive heist plots that made Mission: Impossible the best blockbuster series around. Unfortunately, Dead Reckoning and now The Final Reckoning speak to the MCU-ification of the series; an attempt to mimic the grand scale of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, but only coming off as a bloated, uneven mess of action and grandiosity. Although Final Reckoning does slightly alleviate some of Dead Reckoning’s errors, it’s stuck carrying too many of its woeful missteps.
Picking up two months after Ethan acquired the cruciform key at the end of Dead Reckoning, he’s still on the run as The Entity, the A.I. bent on world destruction, takes over all of cyberspace and is close to controlling all nuclear missiles. In a few days, it will have total control and launch nuclear Armageddon. The key will unlock the safe containing The Entity’s source code, but to destroy it, Ethan must pair the code drive with a “poison pill.” To do that, he has to find the sunken submarine, which contains the hard drive holding the code. This involves moving all over the map while the nefarious Gabriel (Esai Morales) seeks to control The Entity, as does CIA director Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) while President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) must contend with whether to launch a preemptive strike against other nations before losing control of America’s nuclear arsenal.
In Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Ethan’s greatest strength is set up succinctly when he’s told, “We need people like you, who care about the one life as much as they care about the millions.” But Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning reword this into “The Oath,” that IMF agents take when they join the agency after making “The Choice,” where they give up their old lives after some unknown transgression. “We live and die in the shadows, for those we hold close, and for those we never meet,” our characters somberly intone. That move from personable and succinct to leaden and verbose sums up how the two Reckonings feel like a clumsier version of Fallout. Director and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie (who, it should be noted, also wrote and directed Fallout) constantly seems like he’s using that earlier screenplay and updating it with more action and plotting, but never to the story’s benefit.
The Ethan we got in Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation, and Fallout was saving the world, but his humanity was always rendered through his relationship with his team. He is a superman of sorts, but climbing up the side of the world’s tallest building is juxtaposed against Ethan smacking his head against a window and his team members pulling him up so that he doesn’t plummet to his death. The Final Reckoning now positions Ethan as a messiah, the one man who can stop The Entity. These sci-fi beats permeate the story to its detriment as it no longer feels like we’re watching a film about a spy team working together, but the Tom Cruise Stunt Spectacular with the supporting characters shuffled off to do the busy work of finding the submarine or defusing bombs. Although Cruise always handled the biggest stunts, the team was never completely pushed off to the side as they are here.
This would be more palatable if the set pieces carried more narrative weight. What made the series’ best films click so well is how they wove together action and narrative so that we weren’t just watching a thrilling set piece, but a vital part of the story carrying dramatic weight. At the climax of Fallout, Ethan is flying a helicopter to chase after the bad guy, but McQuarrie builds the scene around the ticking clock of nuclear bombs so that we know not only where we are concerning the larger story stakes, but also that the scene itself has a time limit. Compare that to the biplanes in Final Reckoning, which is also a chase, but there’s no shape to it. It’s thrilling to watch Tom Cruise hang off a biplane, but from a story perspective, the scene is shapeless. Like the car chase in Rome in Dead Reckoning, it’s a neat idea undermined by a boundless affinity for the stunt itself rather than trying to serve the overall story.
There’s nothing wrong with some bombast, but Final Reckoning seems unsure of how to deploy it. McQuarrie thankfully adds more humor this time around, but the film is more enamored of the entire arc of the Mission: Impossible series rather than nailing particular moments here. Sometimes that nostalgia works beautifully, like the reintroduction of William Donloe (Rolf Saxon), the poor CIA analyst from Langley who got hacked in the first movie. But other times, the movie strains for unnecessary ret-conning like claiming that “The Rabbit’s Foot” from Mission: Impossible III was the origin for The Entity or that one character has a secret familial relation to a character from a previous movie. These revelations mean nothing but feel like Mission: Impossible trying to ape the MCU’s grand-scale storytelling without the necessary set-up and payoff.
This leads to a movie that can only work in fits and starts, an uneven experience where you marvel at Ethan infiltrating the downed submarine only to feel exhaustion set in as his team is off on some other mission or the President and her advisors bicker over whether or not to launch nukes before The Entity can. It’s great when you see Donloe come back or when we meet the delightfully charming submarine captain Bledsoe (Tramell Tillman), but then someone says a variation of “This is what The Entity wants!” for the eighth time and you do an eye roll so hard that you need to see ophthalmologist afterwards to check for damages. Final Reckoning aims to play like the biggest installment yet, but more often than not, we’re treated to a movie constantly grasping at pathos through flashbacks and character deaths without forcing Ethan to change or grow.
If this were a lighter affair, then the stagnant nature of Ethan’s character wouldn’t be an issue. But since The Final Reckoning wants to stress how much this installment matters, it can’t get away with its lack of character development or unwillingness to make a franchise-altering sacrifice. For a movie with “Final” in the title, there’s little finality here, as if the 62-year-old Cruise (who also serves as a producer on the series) has some more sprinting and hanging off the sides of airplanes in him. Nothing changes beyond saving the world one more time, and it’s disheartening that Cruise, a man with real acting ability, sees more opportunities in what his stunt team can construct rather than a character he can develop.
What The Final Reckoning offers isn’t a conclusion but rather glimmers of a better past as it seeks to copy someone else’s homework. No one showed up to a Mission: Impossible expecting a Marvel movie, but in trying to chase the audience to where they thought they were headed, Cruise and McQuarrie lost their footing and stumbled into a weaker version of a story they had already told. Mediocre Fallout isn’t the worst time you could have at the movies, but we know what these movies looked like when they clicked (and even if we didn’t, there are so many cuts to previous movies that we’d be reminded). The “reckoning” for Mission: Impossible has nothing to do with Ethan Hunt, and everything to do with a series that found its identity only to lose it once more by refusing to accept what made these movies special.