It’s for the best that the Mission: Impossible movies are winding down. I say that as someone who swears Impossible installments like Ghost Protocol or Fallout have some of the best action sequences ever put on celluloid. However, director Christopher McQuarrie and producer/leading man Tom Cruise’s audacious attempt to close out the saga with a sprawling two-part odyssey has shown that this series is starting to run low on ideas. The homages to older entries are becoming too burdensome. When the past is taking so much precedent over the present, it’s time to go home.
Mission: Impossible- Dead Reckoning began this two-part finale with an engaging mixture of apocalyptic doom and silly fun. This was an entry where characters have ominously resigned themselves to the apocalypse being just around the corner, while other scenes have Shea Whigham and Greg Tarzan Davies playing the Wile E. Coyote to Cruise’s Road Runner. The closer to this pair of features, Mission: Impossible- The Final Reckoning, ramps up both the catastrophic tone (at times it harkens back to Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe) and expository dialogue. It's all too verbose and lore-heavy for its own good. Luckily, the biggest set pieces remain a delight.
The Final Reckoning begins two months after Dead Reckoning, with Ethan Hunt (Cruise) in possession of the two keys that will unlock a key compartment on the sunken Sevastopol submarine. He and cohort Grace (Hayley Atwell) are promptly captured by Dead Reckoning antagonist Gabriel (Esai Morales). Once the loyal henchman of nefarious world-threatening A.I. The Entity, Gabriel has some new audacious plans for both this technology and the world.
Unfortunately, this early Gabriel encounter establishes some of The Final Reckoning’s biggest initial problems. For one thing, too much screentime is dedicated to Gabriel flatly explaining Mission: Impossible lore. This includes a retcon undercutting the enjoyable nebulousness of Mission: Impossible III’s MacGuffin. Secondly, Hunt and Grace are kept in a drably colored forgettable bunker. Even the less refined backdrops of previous Mission: Impossible installments crackled with personality, like the Russian gulag kicking off Ghost Protocol or Fallout’s pristine bathroom for Cruise and Cavill to scuffle in.
In contrast, this Gabriel-heavy scene and other early Final Reckoning scenes take place in too many indistinguishable underground London tunnels. Truth be told, McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen's script could easily have just started roughly 40 minutes in when Ethan tries talking directly to President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) about helping him, and the entire feature would've improved dramatically. Before that point, the imagery's not very compelling. Worse yet, Hunt's largely separated from his pals Benji and Luther. All the while, the script keeps piling on groan-worthy connective tissue between this grand finale and the earliest Mission: Impossible movies.
“We come to this place” (to quote a wise Nicole Kidman) to watch Mission: Impossible movies rife with cartoonishly absurd stakes and characters narrowly saving their necks from certain doom. Deepening the mythos of the very first Mission: Impossible movie is never on the menu. It doesn’t help that these initial sequences establishing the weighty circumstances Hunt and his team must navigate suffer severely from “tell, don’t show.” People talk endlessly about The Entity sending countries into chaos and how martial law is now de facto policy for citizens across the globe. Yet audiences only fleetingly get glimpses of that reality as Hunt barrels through another dimly lit London tunnel.
Not even esteemed character actors like Holt McCallany or Charles Parnell, not to mention Bassett's endless gravitas, can make all this doomsday chatter feel emotionally tangible. Yet, once Hunt meets up with reclusive submarine captain Jack Bledsoe (Tramell Tillman), the movie picks up pace significantly. For starters, it's fun to see Hunt, eight movies in, encounter an archetype he's never seen before: a man just as wildly unpredictable as himself. Hunt’s usually surrounded by people who constantly say “Ethan, that’s insane!” Here, Bledsoe is always ready for whatever mayhem this guy’s got. Plus, Bledsoe’s submarine contains Love Lies Bleeding’s Katy O’Brian as a scuba expert, which also bolsters The Final Reckoning entertainment value significantly.
Beyond these two fleetingly seen characters, though, what really finally gets The Final Reckoning’s pulse racing is that it starts delivering some action. Suddenly, Hunt’s engaging in a hand-to-hand skirmish with a dude in that submarine while Benji, Grace, and Paris (Pom Klementieff) deal with gun-toting baddies in a cabin. Now that the bullets are firing and Hunt’s devising how to turn the objects around him into weapons, Reckoning is indulging in the material that’s always been this franchise’s strong suit. Unfortunately, the overt familiarity permeating this installment still makes it into corners of this set piece. Chiefly, Benji, Paris, and Grace’s fight scene feels too reminiscent of another cabin-set duel from Fallout.
Still, palpable excitement and spectacle have finally taken precedence in The Final Reckoning. Before, Hunt and other characters merely talked about the necessity of defeating The Entity and stiffly explained the world's precarious state. Now, backroom conversations are gone. Hunt has an actual mission to accomplish. People are jumping out of helicopters, diving way too deep into the ocean, and racing across icy tableaus. Showing is now the name of the game, not telling. This inspires the feature’s absolute high points, like a staggeringly suspenseful set piece involving Hunt navigating the inside of a submarine. The constant playful escalation of tension that Hunt encounters on these operations materializes here with the fluctuating water levels within the sub. McQuarrie wrings cheeky fun out of the varying amount of gravity our hero must work with as well as establishing a ticking clock regarding this gargantuan vessel that Hunt’s oblivious to.
It’s a tremendously well-done set piece, as is a climactic showdown between Gabriel and Hunt in a brightly colored pair of biplanes. Everything about this sequence is immensely pleasing to the eye, from the extremely sunny backdrop to the crisp camerawork capturing the airborne confrontation to even just the glider’s vibrant hues. It’s also a hoot how The Final Reckoning fully leans into Gabriel being as subtle as a Team Rocket member in his villainy. In the third act alone, he bellows out phrases like “catch me if you can!” and “bye bye!” to his rivals. Thank goodness Reckoning jettisoned expository jargon for this delightfully fun foe.
When The Final Reckoning leans into just being silly fun, McQuarrie and company are in rare form. This includes enjoyably melodramatic third-act digressions involving Sloane and a bunch of squabbling U.S. generals and agency heads. None of these people can just speak normally. They’re all racing to conjure up a line as incoherently grandiose as Alec Baldwin’s “[Ethan] Hunt is the living manifestation of destiny” Rogue Nation declaration. Constantly cutting away from the principal characters to these superfluous supporting players is an odd choice, no two ways about it. At least it’s an entertaining odd choice, though.
Even in its best scenes, The Final Reckoning is a jagged hodgepodge. The sleek rat-a-tat-tat narrative rhythms of Ghost Protocol or Fallout have been traded out for a sprawling storytelling canvas that McQuarrie struggles mightily to juggle. Unfortunately, hanging onto the side of airplanes turns out to be exceedingly easier for Ethan Hunt than headlining a story whose narrative reach exceeds its grasp. Excessive characters and callbacks leave one yearning for more of what this franchise does best. That bloat especially extends to the runtime. There’s no reason Brian Flanagan's global battle with HAL 9000 should run five minutes longer than Boyhood.
When the focus is on the practically executed spectacle, though, The Final Reckoning finds a fine groove. This title’s high points pleasantly encapsulate the special kind of espionage razzle-dazzle that Mission: Impossible films have consistently delivered over the last 29 years. Happily, Reckoning even winds down its narrative with a welcome emphasis on heroism manifesting through kindness, trusting people, and saving lives rather than just shooting more people. The glaring Final Reckoning flaws make it abundantly clear why Ethan Hunt is riding off into the sunset. But at least the series that gave the world Henry Cavill reloading his fists didn’t go off on a (complete) whimper.