If Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning isn’t the end of the series, it had damn well better be.
To be clear, I’m sure the greater franchise will continue in one form or another. The underlying premise of a team-based espionage blockbuster is evergreen, and it’s been awesome since the original TV show all the way back in the ’60s. But this particular iteration of Mission: Impossible is cooked. It’s been eight movies across three decades, and Tom Cruise is visibly aging past the point where he can do this for much longer. (God knows how many years these movies have taken off his life as it is.)
It’s in the subtitle, it was in all the marketing, and the writing is on the wall: Ethan Hunt has to go. Thank you for your service, thank you for the fun times, enjoy your retirement.
Anyway, where were we? Ah, yes. The Entity.
As with the previous entry, this film concerns the Entity, a rogue superintelligent AI that’s pretty much taken full control over every device with an online connection. What’s worse, the source code for the Entity is housed in a nuclear submarine that went AWOL somewhere in the Arctic. The global intelligence community is incapable of keeping up, now that they’ve been sent back to Cold War-era technology.
At the end of the last movie, Hunt and his colleagues had procured a special key, allowing access that could reprogram the Entity or destroy it altogether. The obvious problem being that every government, corporation, and crime syndicate on the planet is after that same key. Not to mention Gabriel (Esai Morales), an assassin commissioned by the Entity itself to take back the key for its own self-preservation. So now Ethan Hunt and company have to find the submarine and destroy the Entity before anyone else can take the key.
At the top of this most recent film, that was two months ago. And things have only gotten to be more complicated since. To start with, the Entity has gone full-blown Skynet, to the point where it’s threatening to wipe out humanity by taking control over the world’s nuclear arsenal. What’s worse, the Entity has recruited its own honest-to-goddamn death cult, with disciples infiltrating every level of humanity’s government, military, and infrastructure. How it could do all that in two months, fuck if I know.
So, why haven’t Ethan and his team destroyed the Entity yet? Well, that’s not so simple either. Turns out that the Entity has so deeply ingrained itself into Earth’s infrastructure that it can’t be destroyed without also destroying the internet itself. Which means there really are no good options here.
Look, folks, we’re eight movies in and you know the drill by now. There’s a mission so absurdly lethal and convoluted that there’s no possible way it could be done, until our hero and his team find some suicidally batshit way of getting it done. That’s “Mission: Impossible”. It’s right there in the title. And sure, the stunts in this one are suitably impressive. The submarine sequence is absolutely harrowing. That climactic biplane sequence is an all-timer.
Even so, while it’s entertaining to watch Cruise act out a masculine power fantasy as the hero who can do anything and always knows what’s best no matter who keeps on doubting him, I can respect the film for those moments when it downplays that infallibility. This is the second time in as many movies when Gabriel successfully outmaneuvers Ethan and kills off a major character. The filmmakers go to great lengths in impressing upon Ethan and the audience that the submarine stunt could easily kill him.
And then there’s my favorite part, when one character suggests that Ethan could be safely entrusted with the awesome power of the Entity. And Ethan — the trained assassin, the super-spy, the man famously devoid of any self-preservation instincts whatsoever — quite wisely points out that he shouldn’t be entrusted with any kind of real power.
That said, the teamwork aspect has always been the heart and core of this franchise. As before, Ethan is repeatedly dependent on his friends and comrades to be exactly where they need to be. Even better, this entry goes a step further by elevating the teamwork theme to a geopolitical level. It’s repeatedly stated, time and again, that humanity only has a chance if the nuclear-powered nations of the world trust each other enough to hold off a pre-emptive strike. Of course, I’m not even sure why nuclear strikes are on the table when everyone knows it’s the Entity behind all of this, but we’re all going too fast and dealing with too much to ask any questions.
Oh, and let’s not forget the callbacks. The fan service. The characters and plot points from previous films that come back in surprising ways. Even better, they’re all presented with flashbacks to help bring the newcomers up to speed.
There’s good stuff in here. But there’s too damn much of it.
Remember, we’re eight movies in and every one was made with the mandate of outdoing the previous. The lore has gotten so bloated, the missions so convoluted, and the stunts so over-the-top spectacular that doing justice to them all takes nearly three hours’ runtime and a reported $400 million budget. Enough is enough. It’s time to scale back or call it a day.
Case in point: The climax. We’ve got (1) the aforementioned biplane fight, (2) a bomb getting defused, (3) the POTUS (Angela Bassett, reprising a character from earlier in the series) standing on the brink of nuclear armageddon, and (4-5)Benji (Simon Pegg) simultaneously directing two separate operations. Granted, the editing and scripting help to keep it all coherent, but that means taking enough time to stretch out the climax to the point where it’s nearly an hour in itself. That’s too damn much, it’s too damn long, and it’s too damn exhausting to watch.
Look, at the end of the day, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning is a critic-proof movie. If you’ve seen all or any of the previous entries, you’re seeing this one. If you still need or want to get started, you’re not starting here. So the only question that really matters here is whether or not the series should keep going. I don’t think it should.
It’s frustrating how the filmmakers did everything they could to build this entry as the culmination, the bookend, the grand ultimate climax of the entire series, and then left the door wide open for another sequel. Seriously, at this point, what the hell are we doing? Can we please just let this be the high note to end the series?