mission: impossible- the final reckoning [launch]
As stated in great detail last week, I am an enormous Mission: Impossible fan. Eight entries over the course of almost thirty years, and each and every single one is exciting and worth going back to all these years later. So, when Cruise’s big farewell to the franchise via a big finale was announced and started to materialize after four long years of development, I became extremely excited to see how one of my favorite franchises would conclude. My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to put into words my difficult relationship with this movie.
The Final Reckoning takes place directly after Dead Reckoning and continues its main plot thread of an omniscient artificial intelligence program called the Entity attempting world domination. After a fairly heartwarming but overlong love letter to the franchise with clips and flashbacks of all Ethan’s past adventures plays, audiences are introduced to the world-ending and larger than life stakes and how it ties into the political nature of the film. However, it takes a little while to get into the action, as the jumbled pacing of the first twenty minutes routinely trips over itself to fast-track to the traditional opening credits montage. Unfortunately, the momentum it then develops afterward is routinely interrupted throughout the bloated 2 hour 50 minute runtime.
Even though I was intensely bored during, and extremely anxious to overcome, the sequence on the submarine, the movie essentially restarts afterwards and becomes much more enjoyable. The best part of these two final films, bar none, is the insane production value and dedication to stunt work. If you watch any interviews with Cruise, it's electrifying and heartwarming to see the spark in his eyes when he talks about practical stunts. The dedication and master craftsmanship behind this movie and its spectacle is remarkable. This time around, the big stunt revolves around a biplane dogfight in the air, soaring through a ravine, as Ethan climbs in and around and clings onto the outside of a plane mid-flight. The setting and proximity to the ground makes it tense and exciting, and gets more and more jaw dropping as the planes slowly rise higher and higher. I was quite literally on the edge of my seat when Ethan was falling through the air, attempting to put the two Maguffins together, in a way that's hard to explain if you hadn't seen it on the big screen.
My favorite movie in the series is 2006’s Mission: Impossible III (which I actually just rewatched last night) and one of the key aspects of the film that I love is that the main Maguffin, the Rabbit’s Foot, which has intensely personal stakes in the film due to Ethan being forced to retrieve it in exchange for his wife's life, is never explicitly described. We never find out what was in the canister and are forced to decipher its contents based on the film’s stakes and nature. It made me very happy, then, as an MI 3 fan, that it got so much love and attention in this film as it was revealed early on that the Rabbit’s Foot was the budding prototype of the Entity all along, and that Ethan was the one to unleash it to the world. That is an amazing callback, especially since it sprinkles some personal stakes into the world-ending ones. Unfortunately, though, the connections to previous installments didn't stop there. There is also a lot of MI 1 love, and it is lazily revealed that a minor character is the son of Jon Voight’s Jim Phelps from MI 1 for no discernible reason. Another extremely minor character, William Donlow, whose name I did not know prior to this film’s release, is brought back as a main player in an assumed scramble to find somebody who survived the first film that they could bring back. Sometimes the film’s callbacks and worldbuilding is exciting and for the best of the story, and sometimes it's half-hearted and quick nostalgia-bait for characters we don't remember.
I discussed in my Gladiator II review how much I despise when legacy sequels (or big finishes, in this case) lazily play clips of the original movie, which nearly always looks completely different due to directorial styles, camera angles or film vs digital. This is That: The Movie. I don’t mind the montage at the beginning, since it’s seen through the Entity’s eyes and is meant to be a transition from the real world and our memories of the films into an actual story, but the clip-playing and flashbacks throughout the rest of the film were constant and unceasing. It felt like the film was bashing you over the head, saying, “remember this? Remember that?” and it was entirely too frustrating- I paid to see a brand new film in the theaters, you know? Another nostalgia-focused thing that kind of gave me a headache was the overutilization of the Mission: Impossible theme. I get it, it’s iconic- it’s one of my favorites, and I don’t think I’ll ever truly be sick of it, but watching Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning so close together made me realize these films are just five total hours of blaring the same Lalo Schifrin theme over and over again in any instance, small scale or large. It dawned on me that score-wise, these films are cut like trailers, which is fine for two minutes- not three hours.
There is also far, far too much exposition in this film, much more so than the last one. It takes up a not-insignificant portion of the runtime, and it's fair to expect a film in a series as fine-tuned as this to trim the fat to a reasonable level, especially if we're expected to have seen the previous film. In that regard, it feels like the filmmakers don't trust the audience to have remembered the plot and world building details of the last film, which isn't a great sign for a film focused on plot and doesn't signal much confidence.
The cost of making a movie has gone up drastically over time, and will continue to so for one reason or another, so Mission: Impossible- The Final Reckoning had an astronomical budget; therefore a higher break-even point, and hence a higher expectation for box office performance. But even with a Memorial Day release, three Memorial Days after Cruise’s magnum opus and one of the greatest high octane blockbusters of all time, Top Gun: Maverick, and the word ‘Final’ in the title drumming up interest, this movie will not make its money back. And maybe that’s for the best. All good things must come to an end, and despite the fact that I do believe this was a satisfying conclusion to Ethan’s character, many elements of this film scream that it’s time to call it quits. You can't keep one-upping yourself forever, and Cruise isn't getting any younger (or any less egotistical) either.
Mission: Impossible- The Final Reckoning is a good movie. It's tense, exciting and has the production value and cinematic effort you'd expect from this franchise. However, it's also a bloated, 3 hour ego trip that relies on nostalgia and flashbacks of a franchise few watch for the characters and lore. I wanted to like this more, I really did, but I don't believe it reaches the heights of the others. I think it's fair to say that the first hour is a slog to get through, but by the end, you're on your feet and ready to believe in movies again.
This review will self-destruct in five seconds.
