Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning is somehow the best and the worst Mission Impossible, existing both at the same time. It is far too long and spends far too much time as a clip show devoted to showing the greatest hits of Ethan’s past entries – everything from the first all the way through to Fallout is shown here early on, and it can feel daunting. It means that there isn’t enough time for the actual plot of Final Reckoning to get going until the last act, where it’s – whilst delivering two of the greatest action sequences of the decade so far in quick succession, almost feels too little too late. Good action sequences do not a good movie make, and good action sequences does not a good Mission Impossible movie make on its own.
The film is too wrapped up in being a bookend to the whole franchise that it gives a distinctive air of the disasters that were The Rise of Skywalker and Spectre to it before slightly redeeming itself at the end with echoes of The Dark Knight Rises, a cult favourite despite its flaws. It’s a connect-the-dots franchise slop in its first hour that this franchise has never really needed with its standalone entries working so well because they were standalone, and you never really needed to watch any of the others to understand what was going on. Here The Final Reckoning feels like the antithesis of that, bringing back guys who had five second appearances in the first film and almost undoing the Jim Phelps, the hero of the original television series, being the villain all along plot thread of Mission Impossible for good measure. There’s also a distinctive need to connect the Rabbit’s Foot plot device from the worst entry in the series, Mission Impossible 3, to which The Final Reckoning owes far too much inspiration from. See, at the end of the day – it’s all JJ Abrams’ fault.
The Entity is the faceless all-consuming villain of the film and Ethan and his team need to stop the world from launching all their nukes in a pre-emptive strike and triggering the end of everything. It was inevitable the escalation would reach this point; and to be fair, once it gets going, it propels the film forward – searing into its final act with gutso and energy that is unmatched by just about anything in the entire series that came before it. These two sequences involve a spectacular submarine scene – because of course, the action inevitably returns to the craft that started it all, the Sevastopol from which the Entity escaped from – and the gravity-defying old-school plane set-piece where Ethan once again clings onto the outside of an airborne vehicle trying to get to the bad guy that’s escaping with a key. It’s thrilling and the emphasis on this being real as opposed to being a CGI-generated mess really helps add to the danger of holy shit, it’s Tom Cruise doing these things – and it creates a spectacle that has been rarely seen on film. This is Mission Impossible at its purest form, stripped down, insane, designed to be seen on the biggest screen possible.
But I could do without every connection. Characters are tied to each other in a way that echoes the “Rey Palpatine” structure of The Rise of Skywalker and it feels hamfisted, forced. A major moment in the first act isn’t given the weight it deserves because it is surrounded by exposition. Instead, the team of regulars, Benji, now a lot more experienced and almost a proto-Ethan in his own right, real character growth across the course of his introduction from Mission Impossible 3, Grace, pickpocket and love interest for Cruise, Luther, the reliable Ving Rhames, effortlessly cool as ever, are joined by old faces with different roles. After being betrayed by Gabriel, played by a fantastic scenery-chewing Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff’s unhinged killer Paris joins the team in a thrilling opening act and is used for brilliant comic relief, and Greg Tarzan Davis switches sides to round out the team. The sentimentality and the fact that Ethan values his team more than he values his own life adds weight to every situation, and the theme of these characters fighting for people they’ll never know they exist and they’ll in turn never meet lands a mark.
It’s just a shame the first so sluggish. The whole first act is devoted to Ethan trying to convince the guys in charge to let him do what he does best. There’s no suspense because we know they’ll cave. Thankfully the guys in charge are all great that guys who look excellent being guys in charge – Angela Bassett is upgraded to the President of the United States, Patton Oswalt, Hannah Waddingham, Shea Whigham, Mark Gatiss and Henry Czerny are either new additions or reprise their roles with great charm – Whigham is given new material but his role is reduced from the madcap chase after Cruise that made Dead Reckoning so fun. Tramell Tillman is a star – perfectly matching Cruise’s tempo as Commanding Officer Bledsoe, a rogue and daring submarine officer – but throughout it all the dialogue seems too disjointed, too awkward. It feels like a rough first draft that never fully takes flight; a great idea that at once feels too heavily edited and not edited enough. Newcomer Katy O’Brian is fantastic and just about everyone on that submarine could make new additions to a new team and I wouldn’t mind were the franchise to evolve and continue.
The Final Reckoning’s set-pieces, while great, take a backwards step. The aerial combat echoes Fallout almost beat for beat; and the implausibility that runs through it all is stretched thin to ultimately, carefully and kinetically staged action sequences that feel perfectly timed and interspaced with wonderful gunfire. The comedy is there early on – I love the off-camera beatdown that Ethan dishes out to his would-be captors that we see through the eyes of Hayley Atwell’s Grace, brilliantly traumatised. It’s this pace that despite its length, The Final Reckoning somehow feels shorter than Dead Reckoning – when it cooks it really cooks, as the kids say.
Gabriel and Ethan are Tom and Jerry recreated better than any live action Tom and Jerry movie could ever do, and it has the same thrill as watching a Buster Keaton film. It’s hilarious at times in the most insanely implausible way where you can’t help but laugh. Christopher McQuarrie commands these set-pieces brilliantly but lets his worst tendencies as a director shine through; and that’s what drags it down. The need to at the end of the day, feel like a franchise slop cripples The Final Reckoning before it can arrive. Lots of threads they pull on leaving you questioning whether they have the juice but it’s backed up by some of the greatest people talking in room scenes ever put to action.
It feels probably best to end America’s best action series here as heartbreakingly flat and empty The Final Reckoning is. The change of pace cripples this film by limiting it largely to a boardroom drama than a “rogues on their own” mission – and explains why the franchise has stuck to that in the past, because it works so much better. It’s wearing thin, and I think McQuarrie and Cruise know that. There can only be so many times a franchise can produce all-time classic after all-time classic of the genre before something has to break. Even the good scenes are beaten into the ground by how often they’re used – and how often McQuarrie lingers on them. Finally, after eight films – after EIGHT films – they made a bad one and ended the streak of the most consistent franchise in the game. I don’t think I’ve been more heartbroken that I didn’t love this, especially after watching 4-7 in cinemas in a back to back all nighter in preperation, in a while.