The new – allegedly last-ever – Mission: Impossible film – is an absolutely wild ride, from its jaw-dropping stunts to its unwieldy script.
If this truly is the final mission for Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his IMF team, then I doubt we’ll ever see anything like this remarkable movie again. Truly, no one is putting life and limb on the line quite like Cruise for the sake of entertainment.
However, I think I want to like Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning more than I actually do.
The action and stunt set pieces are flawless, from Cruise diving 500 foot underwater in arctic conditions to visit a submarine, to Cruise dangling off the wing of a biplane 10,000 feet in the air.
Heck, director Cristopher McQuarrie even throws in a classic running shot of Cruise as he races over a deserted Westminster Bridge, no big deal, despite that being the headline sequence that wowed in 2002’s 28 Days Later.
The Mission: Impossible films have never really taken themselves seriously, and Final Reckoning leans into the camp, self-aware comedy, such as when Hunt takes down a roomful of adversaries in brutal and gruesome fashion, which the audience experiences only through the winces and eyebrow raises of his pickpocket ally Grace (a reliably gung-ho Hayley Atwell).
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That’s a deliberate gag, but sometimes the dialogue – always taking a second seat to the stunts, as freely admitted by tight-knit collaborators McQuarrie and Cruise – is so basic, clunky and on the nose that it’s funny by accident.
The same could be said for the actual plot too, as Hunt and his team race to stop vague villain Gabriel (Esai Morales) from obtaining the full power of AI baddie ‘the Entity’, in a continuation of Dead Reckoning’s storyline. All you really need to understand though is the stakes are higher than ever – again – and Hunt is the only man able to save the world (again).
And that’s pretty helpful when it’s somewhat difficult to reorient yourself in the narrative between flashbacks and where we are now for the first 30 minutes or so.
If you have the patience for exposition though, we do also get some tongue-in-cheek ridiculousness when the team are trying to absorb Hunt’s increasingly preposterous ‘play’ for his deep-sea diving mission – which relies heavily on US military submarines and the American President (Angela Bassett, on fine mouth-acting form), as well as huskies and an inflatable decompression chamber.
Final Reckoning really returns to silly, and that’s saying something for a franchise that relies on flesh-like face masks, which are of course deployed here too. There are other nice callbacks to earlier films in the franchise as well, especially with a surprise character who returns from the 1996 original film in a neat and reasonably cohesive way.
Hannah Waddingham and Severance star Tramell Tillman are other new standouts, understanding exactly the type of movie they are in and running with it, while returners Simon Pegg as Benji and Pom Klementieff as ex-baddie Paris also build a nice rapport.
With all his boundary-pushing stunts – truly the reason these films will always be worthy of the ‘impossible’ in the title, which I assume is his particular delight to disprove – Cruise is in incredible shape for any age, let alone for a man now aged 62. And so, obviously, he spends a fair chunk of his screen time in a tiny pair of shorts.
After nearly 30 years making these films, it feels like the point at which Ethan Hunt starts and Tom Cruise finishes is virtually non-existent – but I’m not sure that really even matters? Now more than ever, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning proves Cruise is the last of a dying breed, so utterly committed as he is to his calling as a movie star to thrill audiences. If this is the end of the road for this franchise, I don’t see anything like this coming around again.
Well, until Cruise and McQuarrie release their next film together that is.
It’s just a shame that the balance between silly and spectacle, which was nicely traversed and tied together in the series’ high point last time around with Dead Reckoning, is somewhat missing.
Even if the stunts have never been better anywhere, ever, the film deserves more than it has in terms of story to hold everything together.
As this film insists in its tagline, ‘our lives are the sum of our choices’ – it’s just a shame that Final Reckoning couldn’t have been greater than the sum of its parts.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning screened at Cannes Film Festival. It releases in UK cinemas on Wednesday, May 21, and in the US on Friday, May 23.
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