After eight films, Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt remains a man of seemingly superhero physiology. A man who does not know the meaning of the word “impossible” or the word “fear”, or indeed the word “hypothermia”. As the signature stunt sequence in this again shows, he remains forever oblivious to the right way to catch a plane – as in, get inside it before it starts moving. If you are on the outside when it takes off, most would say they’ve missed their flight.
Again, Ethan Hunt does not agree. The much-ballyhooed biplane sequence near the end of this, in which Hunt clambers aboard one moving biplane so he can chase another is the most barnstorming performance by any actor doing his own stunts, ever.
On that basis, alone, if you’ve seen and mostly enjoyed the last seven Mission: Impossible movies, you’ll want to see this, the eighth and supposed last bash for Cruise as Hunt. But it is not the greatest M: I film. That will forever remain the sixth, Fallout, from 2018.
And in some ways, Final Reckoning is one of the weirdest of the franchise in that for much of it, especially the grim, wordy first half, it forgoes the things that gives its predecessors much of their appeal. They were mostly standalone films of single missions in which Hunt and his IMF squad did clever high-tech heist-movie fun – fun! – stuff in between outbursts of Cruise’s derring-do. There was usually a decent villain with a fiendish plan and some international sightseeing to be done.
The Final Reckoning doesn’t have a lot of that, even though it’s a film that is nearly 170 minutes long and which arrives supposedly as the concluding second half of a story begun by 2023’s Dead Reckoning. That one came subtitled “part one” and was just seven minutes shorter. It’s not just that there are only so many times you want to see a 60- something-year-old man attempt a sub-four-minute mile in a three-hour movie. Much of the problem with Final Reckoning is at the beginning. Director Christopher McQuarrie, for whom this is the fourth M: I movie, and the writers sure do take this finale thing seriously.
There is a portentousness that started on the previous movie and gets even louder here, especially as Hunt is called back in by the US President (Angela Bassett) and the top brass to fight “the Entity”, a sentient AI which has expanded from polarising humankind with deepfake media manipulation to controlling the world’s nuclear arsenals.
But he also has to contend with Gabriel, the human villain who wants to put the Entity to his own use and make Hunt help him do it. Played by Esai Morales, not only is Gabriel upstaged by the evil software causing all the chaos, he’s the most boring baddie of the entire franchise.
Some of the previous ones get small flashbacks, as the movie attempts, badly, to reverse-engineer events of early movies as building blocks to this one. One is actually quite funny. The computer guy (Rolf Saxon) in the sealed CIA vault into which Hunt abseiled in the first film, returns. He was posted to an agency listening station in the Bering Sea after that break-in and has been there ever since.
The IMF turns up on his icy island on the way to finding the Russian stealth submarine which sank in the previous movie. It’s got something needed to fight the Entity and Hunt is, of course, the only man with the mad skills to go down to get it. Which he does, delivering a sequence that suggests that McQuarrie and Cruise asked themselves, “What would James Cameron do?”
By which time Final Reckoning has turned a corner from a self-mythologising grind to something rather more ridiculous and fun. And there’s still a firefight or two, yet another nuclear bomb to defuse and that biplane ride to go.
Even in its second half, the film is really a bit of a mess. It’s burdened by a flash-forward to what-might-happen-if-things-turn-to-custard, which, combined with the frequent highlights reels from past films, can feel like the editing is attempting to patch up story incoherence with visual flash. Or was done by AI.
But sticking it all together is, of course, Tom Cruise, who has steered this franchise from its faltering beginnings as a 1960s TV show reboot to the American Bond. He’s had a good run.
Rating out of five: ★★★
Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning, directed by Christopher McQuarrie, is in cinemas now.
