Eight is Enough
At this budget a reckoning is likely, but is Tom Cruise ready to cut it out with the impossible missions?
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Director: Christopher McQuarrie • Writers: Christopher McQuarrie, Erik Jendresen
Starring: Tom Cruise
USA • 2hrs 49mins
Opens Hong Kong May 22 • IIA
Grade: C+
I know, right? “Starring Tom Cruise. Surely that’s not the only actor in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning?” No, it’s not, but really he’s the only one that matters. In all honesty I can’t even tell you if there was actually a director on this film. The credits say Christopher McQuarrie, who directed the M:I series high water mark, Fallout, was in the big chair for this but it’s clear that even if he were, he was beholden to Cruise’s whims – who’s clearly been reading his own press again.
Regardless of appearances, I am not a Cruise naysayer. He’s a tremendous movie star, a pretty good actor when he wants to be (Magnolia) and he has a knack for elevating borderline material and making it charming and entertaining (looking at you, American Made). And let’s face it, the ol’ boy (going on 63, but in tremendous shape, just ask him – and look at the semi-nekkid scenes here) is fun to kick around. But The Final Reckoning is the ultimate vanity project; an exhausting, convoluted, bloated celluloid (fine, DCP) temple to himself, the man that saved the movies; Top Gun: Maverick was the billion-dollar baby the industry needed after COVID in case you forgot. The Final Reckoning is the most punishing paean you’ll ever see and with a staggering (alleged) US$400 million price tag (suck on that, James Cameron) Cruise is going to have to walk on water to make this a hit. Yes, it’s anchored by two incredible set pieces – one on a rotating sunken submarine and the other a biplane chase in Blyde River Canyon in South Africa – but is spectacle enough to eclipse the other 140 minutes of mediocrity, in which characters we’ve come to like are sidelined until Ethan Hunt/Cruise needs them?
He’s waving them off for a reason
I gave up trying to make sense of the first what, 60? 90? minutes of The Final Reckoning early on, when it became clear it was going to be an endless stream of unintelligible exposition propped up by gobs of praise and “Save us Ethan” whining, with a chaser of self-reflective “This is all my fault” angst that propels Ethan Hunt (Cruise, if you didn’t know, and if you didn’t Cruise gonna be pissed), leader of the defunct but not defunct Impossible Missions Force – not the International Monetary Fund – back into action. It’s… minutes? Hours? Days? After the thingamajigger from Dead Reckoning, the AI called The Entity, is loosed upon the world (?) and proceeds to eat all the data (??), infect cyberspace and set the world on the precipice of the Third World War. Not only is this all Hunt’s fault, he’s the only one who can fix it and pull humanity back from the brink. Our gurl Erika Sloane (Queen Angela Bassett) has gotten a promotion from CIA director in Fallout to President (I wish!) and sends him a self-destructing Entity-proof VHS tape, begging – begging – for his help defeating The Entity and the dude Gabriel (Esai Morales), for reasons. Hunt is, literally, the Most Important Man Alive. I shit you not. This is the backbone of the story.
So Hunt goes to see Luther (Ving Rhames) in his dungeon hospital room-slash-lab (what, now?) to get some malware to stop the Entity. But it only listens to Gabriel (huh?), so Hunt needs a proto-Entity software from a sunken Russian sub to fuck it up. So he and Benji (Simon Pegg) hit up the chick from the Venice alley, Paris (Pom Klementieff) and the dude who defected to the IMF, Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) to get him a hyperbaric chamber for when he comes up from the ocean floor in the Bering Sea. While this is going on, thief-turned-IMF agent Grace (Hayley Atwell) runs the Iditarod to get some floppy discs from the poor bastard who Hunt got banished to a low level intelligence station in Alaska thanks to his antics in Mission: Impossible. Yeah. William Donloe (Rolf Saxon) is back. Even though Tramell Tillman (Severance) appears as Bledsoe, the captain of a rescue sub, there is no music dance experience. And I’m done with this fuckin’ plot, but believe me. There’s way more before the IMF crew disappears into a crowded street, perhaps for the last time.
This is Cruise’s amusement park. We’re just visiting. You’ll dig the rides or you won’t. To suggest The Final Reckoning is sloppy or badly made is simply horse shit. This is peak Hollywood machine at work, paying top dollar for an overqualified supporting cast (Twisters’ Katy O’Brian, Mark Gatiss, Shea Whigham, The Amateur’s Holt McCallany, The Menu’s Janet McTeer, Nick Offerman and The Fall Guy’s Hannah Waddingham all show up as high-powered political or military types, as does the movies’ GOAT jerk, Henry Czerny as Eugene Kittridge); flawless (and pricy) practical effects; authentic location shooting; and intricate, death-defying stunts by the leading man (for a guy who’s rebranded himself as a movie lover he sure does love taking jobs away from actual stunt pros). And major props to Cruise, McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen for only paying lip service to thematic undercurrents about fate, destiny and one’s chickens coming home to roost. No one cares, and they know it. Instead they’ve wisely glommed onto AI anxiety just in time to make it the necessary villain, and in so doing have dodged any real politcal stance in a spy thriller. The third act tension of The Final Reckoning pivots on the world’s nuclear powers opening their silos and taking aim, yet the movie somehow sidesteps any editorialising. Amazing, when we’ve all been reading fresh American aggression, isolationism and neo-fascism into everything from Wicked to Moana 2. Then again, Hunt/Cruise has managed to remain apolitical as well as sexless despite “sparks” with Nyah Nordoff-Hall (Thandiwe Newton), Jane Carter (Paula Patton), the dear departed Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and a marriage to nurse Julia Meade (Michelle Monaghan) along the way. It’s all part of a carefully constructed persona and career – larger than life yet somehow accessible – wherein all roads have led to The Final Reckoning. And that may be the most compelling thing about it.