Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning may have its issues, but it’s still as edge-of-your-seat, gorgeously and hauntingly filmed as it’s ever been, with an ever-evolving and expanding cast of characters. While it may stumble from time to time, laboriously making sure everyone is caught up, it never veers off into outright boredom. Or maybe I’m such a mark for Hayley Atwell that I don’t care. Who knows?
Christopher McQuarrie’s latest, and likely last, Mission: Impossible is everything you want from a Mission: Impossible movie minus the crackling dialogue. Don’t misunderstand, the script isn’t badly written, it merely lacks perfect self-aware lines delivered by characters with a deadpan manner in such a way to have you giggling.
Written by McQuarrie and Erik Jendersen, The Final Reckoning is a love letter to the franchise while also a reminder of what Hollywood spectacle used to mean. A visual delight, it’s a fun, sexy time at the movies. However, the script is overburdened with exposition and, unlike other installments of the franchise, the breathless monologues don’t feel as tongue-in-cheek. Though at one moment in the film, a character, Grace (Atwell), asks a question only to have Benji (Simon Pegg) reveal that the table they’ve been using is in actuality a hyperbaric chamber, still in the box from the store!
Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is back with the old team, Luther (Ving Rhames) struggling with cancer but always the dedicated tech guy, and Pegg’s Benji who seems poised to have a team of his own. Only this time they are joined by Atwell’s wily Grace, Pom Klementieff’s lithe Paris, the sexy but deadly assassin, and newbie Theo (Greg Tarzan Davis) who often feels like a sixth wheel but manages to carve out a niche for himself in the sprawling cast.
Shea Whigham returns, but sadly in a much more truncated role; the same goes for Henry Czerny. Still, Elias Morales is back as the mustache-twirling, black hate wearing villain Gabriel, who will stop at nothing to get back into the Entity’s good graces. The Entity, by the way, for those who haven’t been keeping up, is an AI program that has infested the internet and turned the world into a powder keg of half-truths and lies, leaving us on the precipice of nuclear war.
The Final Reckoning continues the commentary of the first one about the dangers of AI, but adds the caveat that the real danger is the people who think they can be trusted with absolute power. Hunt is a character straight out of a pulp fiction serial, fitting as the character was crafted in 1960s television. But even he recognizes the power of the Entity can’t be trusted to any one person or one state.
I’m going to be straight with you, I could spend the whole review talking about the plot turns, and the cheeky way McQuarrie and Jenderson will spend an entire scene laying out the convoluted plan only to have it come apart instantly in the next scene, but that’s half the joy of the movie. The other half is the spectacle.
The jaw-dropping, how did they do that, spectacle. The Final Reckoning is good old-fashioned movie magic where it combines the real with the fake in ways that leave you spellbound. There’s a scene with Cruise in a sunken submarine that is so wonderfully staged and shot that even if the rest of the movie whiffed it, it would still be worth seeing on an IMAX screen. The scene is a masterclass of filmmaking as it tests how much the audience believes the studio will not kill off Ethan Hunt.
Then of course, there’s the other spectacle of seeing pretty people being framed as if the filmmaker is making the case that they are the most gorgeous, fascinating person alive. A dying art form, but McQuarrie delights in shooting his stable of actors in such a way that you wonder how they’ve never looked this good before. But Atwell and Klementieff come off the best as two who could easily play femme fatales or lead their own action franchise, if the studios weren’t run by a bunch of craven cowards. I still think Atwell would make a great Lara Croft, and The Final Reckoning does little to make me second-guess that belief.
The Mission: Impossible movies are examples of a kind of movie that takes guts to make: the cinema of the preposterous. These are movies that have a thread of internal logic, but only enough so they have something to connect the scenes together. But these movies explode on the big screen because the engine of the Cinema of the Preposterous are the preposterous situations, larger than life, and I’m not talking about Captain America picking up Mjolnir. It’s a kind of cinema that relies on one damn thing after another, roided up, to the point of threatening to destroy the suspension of disbelief.
The Mission: Impossible movies have always imbued themselves with an element of the absurd. But McQuarrie and Jenderson do it with style. Style being a key element, the aesthetic of The Final Reckoning is often breathtaking as McQuarrie will have Ethan walk through a scene merely to show off the hard work of the production design team. The Final Reckoning is a movie that loves movies and, more importantly, loves the work that goes into them.
Greg Fraser returns as McQuarrie’s cameraman, and he once again reminds us that the best special effect cinema has to offer is the human face. Or in the case of Klementieff, a striking face and killer abs. Fraser and McQuarrie understand how to light every face, frame every scene with such panache that even if the actor is trying not to get lost in explaining what happened before-or what is going to happen, it’s impossible not to be somewhat enthralled.
But it’s how Fraser and McQuarrie, along with editor Eddie Hamilton, sew it all together, playing with the over-the-top maximalism. It’s one thing to have Klementieff’s Paris being transported in cut-off tee, jeans, and heels. But it’s another to show a flashback of Ethan stabbing her in the gut and cut to her bare torso, showing the knife wound. There’s a commitment to the bit that is refreshing when you realize how few commercial blockbusters go through any trouble at all to set up a shot, much less an edit.
Yet, Fraser, takes the opportunity to go big, with a good chunk of The Final Reckoning taking place underwater, and the scenes taking on an almost Lovecraftian eeriness as Ethan, a lone figure, swims through the black void of the ocean. The Final Reckoning feels so epic even while the main drive of McQuarrie and Jendersen’s script is the characters.
Perhaps that’s why, even while the dialogue loses some of its snap, The Final Reckoning still works. Because McQuarrie has assembled some of the best faces, but also damn fine actors. Cruise, in particular, a veritable statesman for the theatrical experience, carries the film on his back with such grace as to be reminded what a movie star really is.
But what makes Cruise so fun to watch is how generous he is. His scenes with Atwell’s Grace are filled with a taut tension and compassion. An early scene has Atwell trussed up in a collar and chains like an old school Pulp novel damsel, only to have Ethan toss her some picks, and she rescues herself. The scene also has a great gag where she stands in stupefied awe as Ethan battles a henchman off-screen, their grunts and screams echoing over the speakers, only to end with Ethan coming into frame, sweaty, shirt ripped, chest heaving, and smeared with blood.
Or moments when McQuarrie and Jendesen make clever callbacks to the very first Mission: Impossible, with Rolf Saxon and his magnificent beard, returning as the poor CIA analyst William Dunloe. Dunloe was exiled to the Arctic because of a young Ethan Hunt. Saxon’s face, full of exhaustion, wit, and pragmatism, is a perfect fit for the IMF’s rag-tag team of Irregulars. His Inuit wife Tapessa (Lucy Tulugarjuk) does more than tag along as she turns out to be an invaluable Girl Friday.
Underneath it all, however, is the dead earnestness of the franchise. Ethan Hunt cares about what happens to both people he knows and to people he doesn’t. For all its over-the-top theatricality, there’s a real sense of humanity and desire to live in a better world that gives The Final Reckoning an almost melancholy feeling.
Part of what makes Angela Bassett as President Erika Sloane so compelling is that unlike so many Presidents in these movies, she attempts to genuinely weigh the impossible situation she finds herself in. She, too, must have faith in not only Ethan but in humanity itself, and few actors could do as much as Bassett does with her role. It doesn’t hurt that she’s surrounded by the likes of a mustache-less Nick Offerman, Holt McCallany, Mark Gatiss, Janet McTeer, and Charles Parnell. Fantastic faces, every single one, and all of them look amazing, dripping in sweat as they sit in shadows, trying to convince President Sloane not to take our missiles offline.
Katy O’Brian shows up for a very hot minute and shares a bro moment with Cruise that left me annoyed she’s not in the movie more.
If you are concerned with being lost, or feeling like you should skip out because you haven’t seen the other Mission: Impossible movies. Don’t be. McQuarrie and Hamilton have taken on the Herculean task of editing scenes from the prior movies to help you understand the importance of the current ones. Almost as if McQuarrie understands there’s a tome’s worth of mythology to sift through, and it would hardly be fair to the audience to expect them to spend their free time having to do homework for a movie that is supposed to be fun escapism.
Mission Impossible-The Final Reckoning is a rip-roaring good time, that traffics in nostalgia but is never beholden to it. McQuarrie makes every frame a feast for the eyes, often taking simple action beats and crafting them into evocative visuals. I can’t wait to see it again.
Images courtesy of Paramount Studios
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