Anyone who has binged classic TV shows from the 1960s to the '80s will be familiar with the concept of recapping the first part of a two-parter at the beginning of part two. Such recaps often ran for as long as 10 minutes, eating into the running time and thus keeping the budget down. Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning has no such budgetary concerns, and yet it spends an inordinate amount of time recapping not only its immediate predecessor, Dead Reckoning: Part One, but previous entries, as far back as the first movie from 1996. There are so many "Previously on Mission: Impossible" flashbacks that at times it resembles one of those dreaded "clips" episodes we used to get in TV shows, where a main character would fall into a coma and think about all the fun adventures they had over the course of the show's run.
A quick glance at my watch told me 90 minutes had passed before the movie offered its first substantial action scene. Up to that point we're forced to endure scene after scene of exposition as the movie tries to lay out what is ultimately a rather simple and very dumb plot. Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt and his IMF team are once again on the trail of a MacGuffin. Nobody watching these movies ever cares about the MacGuffins, as they're simply a device to build wildly creative and jaw-dropping set-pieces around. But writer/director Christopher McQuarrie seems to think otherwise. His movie spends a spirit-crushing amount of time trying to legitimise what is the silliest plot this series has ever devised.
As you'll recall from the previous movie, an Artificial Intelligence called "The Entity" is trying to take over the world. It's a plot more suited to a Marvel superhero smackdown than a Mission: Impossible movie, but it was kept enough in the background of Dead Reckoning that we didn't give it much thought as we basked in that movie's car chases and Buster Keaton-esque destruction. Here The Entity is front and centre, with this instalment entering the realm of dystopian sci-fi. The trouble is, despite our real world concerns around the rapid rise of AI, Final Reckoning can't make its villain remotely believable. The Entity is no more convincing than the evil supercomputer of Superman III. (Speaking of Superman III, at one point Ethan interacts with The Entity and there's a suggestion that doing so might corrupt him, which makes me wonder if an earlier draft featured an evil Ethan at some point.) Cruise and McQuarrie clearly aren't fans of AI, and probably rightly see it as a threat to their industry, but their superficial portrayal of the perils of AI is unlikely to make anyone who matters take its threat more seriously. For every awkward question we have regarding The Entity, such as "Can't you just unplug it?", the movie has three leaden scenes of exposition to explain why it's not that simple.
Exposition has always been a part of this franchise, going right back to the '60s TV series. Before every set-piece we've always gotten those scenes of Ethan and his buddies figuring out how they're going to pull off a seemingly impossible feat, but the previous movies always had a tongue-in-cheek self-awareness in such moments and played off the chemistry of Cruise and his co-stars. The Final Reckoning is laughably self-serious and sombre, so such scenes here are a chore to sit through, and Cruise's under-rated comic talents are never called upon this time out.
There's probably at least an hour of footage you could cut out of this movie without making much difference to the overall narrative. There are entire extended scenes that add nothing, like a sequence on an aircraft carrier that seems to exist solely because Tom Cruise has access to the full resources of the US Navy. The movie largely has the po-faced tone of a Christopher Nolan Batman movie but occasionally adds a misjudged comic interlude, like a particularly cringy bit involving Hayley Atwell's Grace and some sledge dogs (don't ask). The only comedy that lands comes courtesy of Pom Klementieff's assassin-turned-ally Paris, a force of nature who behaves like a sexy French cousin of Animal from The Muppets. Paris's impatience to cut the talk and get to the action reflects how we feel as viewers.
Several subplots are introduced that add little to the main story and serve merely as cheap fan-service, with ret-conned callbacks to previous entries in the series. This unfortunately means that when you watch certain moments in the earlier movies you'll now forever be reminded of this mess. A revelation of a new character's relationship to a figure from the past is unveiled in especially clunky fashion and ultimately goes nowhere. Ethan's ret-conned dead girlfriend Marie (Mariela Garriga) pops up during a hallucination, which makes us wonder why Ethan is thinking about this woman we never met rather than Michelle Monaghan's Julia or Rebecca Ferguson's Ilsa (boy, is Ferguson's presence missed here). Despite having a total of five seconds' screen time, Garriga gets her own title card once again and is billed higher than the likes of Angela Bassett, Holt McCallany, Shea Whigham, Hannah Waddingham and Nick Offerman: she must have one hell of an agent, or else she's the granddaughter of L. Ron Hubbard.
If 80% of The Final Reckoning is a chore to sit through, it's ultimately somewhat redeemed by a gripping climax that cuts between three distinctly fraught scenarios ala Return of the Jedi. One of these is the heavily publicised biplane set-piece, which once again sees Cruise risk life and limb for our entertainment. The film's other major stunt sequence, which takes place in a sunken submarine, is an undoubted technical marvel and an impressive physical feat for a man in his sixties to pull off, but underwater sequences were always a bore in James Bond movies and this one doesn't have any swelling John Barry music to keep us awake. But when Cruise hits the skies the movie finally begins to soar and no piece of software will ever replicate the thrill of seeing a lunatic risk it all to send us out on a high.
I found myself quite bored and unengaged throughout most of The Final Reckoning and yet the closing scene got me excited for more adventures of the Impossible Mission Force. Cruise can probably keep doing this into his seventies, but I fear audiences won't have the patience to stick with him much longer.
Directed by: Christopher McQuarrie
Starring: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Vanessa Kirby, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Shea Whigham, Hannah Waddingham
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