Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning
When I was a kid my dad would drive us around in his 1969 Triumph loudly blaring Music From and Inspired by Mission: Impossible 2 on CD. He had the car converted from its original automatic transmission to manual because it was “more fun to drive” and while I think the reasons for this and his music choices lay in masculine self-exploration, it made it more fun for us kids as passengers, too. We would scream along Stirling Highway, windows down and Limp Bizkit’s ‘Take a Look Around’ assaulting the ears of people going the speed limit.
A dusty old photo of our girl at the shop.
It was the best of times, it was the silliest of times. And it’s a feeling that came flooding back one last time while watching Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning at Thursday’s packed screening.
Two years after Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning launched as Part 1 of the end, the gang returns for (what is allegedly) the final chapter in Tom Cruise’s highly profitable and decades spanning franchise. We open with an extended series of flashbacks to the previous installments; the iconic suspension in the CIA headquarters, Tom free soloing a rock, Philip Seymour Hoffman being a baddie, Tom on the outside of the Burj Khalifa, Tom on the outside of a cargo plane, Henry Cavill reloading his arms, Tom BMX-ing off a cliff, the endless running…
It’s all to catch us up on the exploits of (say it with a straight face) the Impossible Missions Force from 1996 to this point. Every up (Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation, Fallout), every down (John Woo’s low point of the series) and every formulaic good guy vs terrorist group plot is summed up for those who haven’t been paying attention over the last 30 years. After what seems like half an hour, The Final Reckoning gets going.
It’s been two months since the world caught wind of the Entity - the silly AI threat from Dead Reckoning - and it’s been causing a ruckus. Facts are being obscured with convincing AI manipulations of the narrative and tensions are rising between nuclear powered nations. POTUS Angela Bassett tasks Ethan and co with locating old mate Gabriel (Esai Morales) because he’s the closest lead they have for finding out how to kill the Entity. Unfortunately for the IMF (and the world), Gabriel instead wants to make like Isildur and take control of this destructive force. Missions ensue.
And that’s really all the synopsis you need; like every previous Mission of the Impossible variety, there’s a lot of explaining from characters like Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames) along the way. There are also the obligatory disguise masks, self-destructing messages, cross continental antics, red wire bomb disarmaments and the thing we all come for – death defying action set pieces performed by a 62-year-old man who is fitter than us all.
Such set pieces are the basis upon which most of the real judgement falls for each new film and The Final Reckoning features some of the series’ best. Fans of treacherous diving and underwater catastrophes will stare, mouths agape, at a sequence involving the sunken Russian sub from the previous film and a near nakey Tom Cruise facing off against freezing temperatures and the bends. He also really does float in zero G between the wings of a biplane thousands of feet above South Africa, a fact McQuarrie revealed in a deep-dive talk recently at Cannes to rapturous applause from the audience and a look of “I almost died” from Cruise.
Despite the many, many characters the film introduces and re-acquaints us with it manages to adequately flesh out each, with new highlights including Tramell Tillman, Katy O’Brian and Hannah Waddingham all getting a decent chunk of screen time. But the star of the show is and has always been Tom Cruise and The Final Reckoning ensures we are amply reminded of his leading man quality. As mentioned, Cruise is partly unclothed for some of the film and in any other case it might appear as vanity; here, his physique only reinforces what he’s become known for in his insane work ethic and discipline.
While the franchise gives us great set pieces, properly explored new characters and the overall feeling of being thrilled at the cinema, that’s not to say it is beyond reproach. At 170 minutes it is a girthsome beast indeed and not all of the time goes unfelt. It relies too heavily on flashbacks, not just in the opening sequence but all throughout, not trusting its audience to remember key plot points or perhaps not trusting its storytelling to drum them in. I’ve always found the AI angle a bit too silly, even for a series that has historically asked us to suspend a lot of disbelief, and I don’t think this film or its predecessor pulls off the Ethan/Gabriel backstory, especially when the flashback is a present day construction that was never mentioned before.
The last thing to mention is the US military propaganda angle, a talking point stemming from Cruise and McQuarrie’s last outing in Top Gun: Maverick and likely to continue here. Like that film, The Final Reckoning makes the defence force and associated vocations look cool. Planes are cool, subs are cool and Tom Cruise being an American hero and saving the world multiple times in a row is inherently cool. In other news, water is wet. While that argument is going to be made and I’m not going to refute its validity, I’m also not personally susceptible to American military propaganda as a 30-something Perth woman who works in marketing and writes movie reviews. The most it’ll make me do is jokingly share this gif, just like I do when I see Glen Powell in anything.
All things considered, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is a super fun franchise-ender and an overwhelmingly worthwhile trip to the cinema. It’s not the best in the series - for me that honour is shared by Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation and Fallout - but I enjoyed it more than Dead Reckoning and probably more than the rest.
As an INFJ type I will always go with feeling over logic. It’s why my brain logged driving around in a vintage lemon blasting the worst Mission: Impossible film’s soundtrack as a core memory, and it’s why I will always forgive flaws in the pursuit of immense fun. To fellow thrill seekers whose dopamine levels are highest after witnessing a well-performed stunt than reading “a good book”, leave your practical worries at home and go see the film.
Verdict
☆☆☆☆
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is in cinemas now.
