Pure cinematic spectacle. It’s something Tom Cruise does entirely too well, especially when he risks life and limb to bring death-defying stunts and set pieces to the big screen. Whether it’s scaling the Burj Khalifa, death-spiralling in helicopters, or riding motorbikes off of cliff faces, what Cruise and his most recent collaborator, director Christopher McQuarrie have done with the Mission: Impossible franchise over the last decade is nothing short of pure cinematic spectacle.
And now audiences are invited to go on another white-knuckle thrill ride, this time as stated by the leading man himself, “one last time”, in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.
Leading on only a few months following the events of Dead Reckoning, disavowed IMF agent, Ethan Hunt (Cruise), is forcibly tasked by his government, led by the recently promoted President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett), as the singular man who can infiltrate a sunken Russian submarine which holds the code that can destroy an all-powerful AI known as The Entity, which is imminently about to cause a total nuclear meltdown of the world as we know it.
Suffocated by the compounding consequences of the choices he’s made throughout his career, and his inability to let those he cares about die for the greater good, Hunt’s attempts to be one step ahead of the government, the military, his most personal enemy in Gabriel (Esia Morales), and a world-killing AI, are constantly in danger of being thwarted the closer he gets to accomplishing this impossible mission – something he can only pull off with the help of his team, featuring old timers Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames), and the more recent additions in Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Paris (Pom Klementieff).
” pure cinematic spectacle “
The insinuation of The Final Reckoning potentially being the last Mission: Impossible film is felt early on. The exposition heavy, but necessarily iconic, mission brief recounts many events from previous films that have now been retroactively tied to The Entity being responsible for everything that has led Hunt to this particular mission.
President Sloane’s plea for Hunt to find the kill-code is accompanied by flashbacks to key moments in the franchise as she is describing them, immediately bringing a sense of nostalgia to the film’s tone, which is also something that the movie does not let up on, frequently inserting quick-cut edits of these moments throughout. There is a sense that this story is a reward for the true Mission: Impossible fans who are invested in the overarching evolution of Ethan Hunt, with specific personal connections to the first Mission: Impossible and Mission: Impossible 3 being the most noticeable.
That’s not to say that The Final Reckoning can’t be enjoyed by those either freshly entering the series, or those who are only here to see Tom Cruise do some crazy stuff, but it’s apparent that this is Cruise and McQuarrie’s unabashed love letter to those who have been with this series, and most importantly these characters, for almost three decades.
Cruise’s sincerity brought to Ethan Hunt provides such a strong emotional core to attach to, which is only exacerbated by the chemistry he shares with his team. Hunt’s burning drive to save those he cares about, not just the world, feels impenetrable to the point where despite the dangerous situations he finds himself in, you believe entirely that his motivations will cause him to succeed. Hunt isn’t just a character audience’s have loved for 30 years, but it’s obviously one Cruise cares about too, and that has only felt stronger film to film.
For the first 90-odd minutes of this almost 3 hour affair, the elaborate and, quite frankly, convoluted set-up features many of the expected tropes – fake out mask reveals, multiple prisoner breakouts, rooms full of military and government officials melodramatically explaining the reasons they can’t trust Ethan. In fact, The Final Reckoning, in the similar tonal way seen in Dead Reckoning, is making a slight mockery of elements that were played with more sincerity in earlier entries. The elongated conversations detailing the slim odds in favour of Hunt in pulling off the next extreme, death-defying feat (of which this film has a solid handful) are played more for an enjoyable laugh, as Hunt just shrugs it off with his devil-may-care attitude. The coyness of which those scenes are played with, especially by newcomers like Hannah Waddingham, Tramell Tillman, Nick Offerman, and Holt McCallany, adds to the entertaining humour of it all, showing that they all understood the assignment.
Where films like Fallout and Rogue Nation managed to balance the pacing off their respective films by strategically placing explosive actions scenes like the HALO jump or motorcycle chase respectively in between the mountains of exposition, The Final Reckoning struggles as it focuses more on the set up with a handful of fight scenes or shootouts, that while exciting, don’t feel like they shift the gears enough comparatively. It could be considered that those preceding films provided stunts and set pieces of that frequency and scale just couldn’t be replicated again to make the first half of The Final Reckoning feel just as exciting, but once Hunt gets into a decompression suit to dive in to the depths of the ocean to infiltrate a submarine happens, then that classic Mission: Impossible excitement begins.
And it..… is..… epic. Hunt traversing a cascading submarine as a dense volume of water revolves around him while torpedoes fall from here, there and everywhere is pure, white-knuckle tension. This phenomenal set piece, which was filmed on a purpose built, practical set, is just the beginning as it leads almost directly into the heavily marketed propeller-plane sequence, which over a truly extended period of time, features Hunt manoeuvring his way around the outside of not just one, but two, planes as they fly through beautifully scenic valleys. And as always, McQuarrie’s direction goes out of its way to prove to the audience that, indeed, that is Tom Cruise on the side of that flying plane.
Despite it’s messy narrative flaws, and the unavoidable comparison to the near-perfect previous Cruise/McQuarrie ventures within the series, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is still an incredibly fun time at the cinemas, fuelled by a lot of heart within the characters and unbearably tense action set-pieces, resulting in a worthy farewell to Ethan Hunt and his wild adventures….. for now.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is in cinemas May 17.
