For those concerned they won’t remember everything from Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, there is no need to worry. The half-hour preceding the credits of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning (confusingly not titled Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part Two) serves as a handy exposition download packet.
Flashbacks from across the series’ nearly three-decade history flicker past while the dialogue equivalent of flashing arrows points towards this plot device or that insight about the character of one Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). Yet again, Ethan Hunt is the restive yet do-gooding chaos agent whose actions seem to be cannonballing the world towards an apocalypse only he can avert.
A gargantuan, exhaustive, and exhausting ticking-clock thriller that tries so hard in so many ways that are simultaneously charming and browbeating, Christopher McQuarrie’s fourth film in the Mission: Impossible series feels like a challenge to the ever-lazier antics conjured up by other franchises to keep their machinery going. The draining trainwreck that was Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning sent the series into a cul-de-sac where Hunt and his IMF crew had exhausted all human villainy and were left battling the genocidal AI known as “The Entity”.
Possibly realizing this was an inert way to structure a thriller, especially with such a blandly threatening AI whose line readings came off like some down-on-their-luck hack stuck opposite Roger Moore’s 007, Christopher McQuarrie and his co-writers quickly push the Entity off stage. The replacement human villain, Gabriel (Esai Morales), is no more interesting. He spends most of the film off-screen as Hunt and his allies try to stop the Entity before it can take over the arsenals of every nuclear power on the planet and launch an annihilating war. This allows the filmmakers to do what they really want: Run Hunt through the ringer.
Part of this is physical. Throughout Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Hunt hurls himself into seemingly certain death so many times that one wonders if he wants to survive. His eagerness to save the world is presented as a crusade with nearly religious overtones: the film’s main McGuffin is a cruciform key, Hunt is described as “the best of men in the worst of times” as well as “the chosen one”, and at one point nearly dies before being resurrected.
Besides Hunt’s physical trials, he is also subjected to running analysis by other characters, mostly the frustrated band of American authorities who angrily realize that the ever-rule-breaking Hunt is their last best hope. “That’s the pattern, isn’t it?” muses CIA director Kittredge (Henry Czerny), one of the characters from the first film who makes a valedictory appearance here. “You refuse to sacrifice the ones you hold close.”
Luther (Ving Rhames, scorchingly good) reassures Hunt, “You’ve always been on the right side, brother.” Secondary characters also take a turn on the couch, with one looking to avenge a wronged father from an earlier film and others working out their clearly co-dependent relationships with Hunt. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning sometimes resembles a therapy session interrupted by near-death escapes and chase scenes.
Despite this film’s desire to serve as a Mission: Impossible series capstone while also wrestling with and complicating Hunt’s legacy, much of this goes … nowhere. Even after it is intimated that Hunt’s actions are responsible for at least some of the threat the world is facing, he does not reflect on what that means. Instead, he asks the American president (Angela Bassett) if he might borrow an aircraft carrier. “Trust me,” he says. She agrees. Because while she might be in a room full of square-jawed generals and cabinet officials, she is still in a film talking to Tom Cruise, and he’s using that twinkle in his eye.
There’s a nearly charming belief here in the power of cinema and heroics which does not depend on giving a wink to the audience, ala Fast & Furious. Most action films allow their heroes’ fallibility and a streak of human vulnerability. John McClane spent the first Die Hard movie barely escaping one scrape after another through sheer luck. In Fast & Furious, Dominic Toretto registered as a hyped-up hot-rodder who could drive like the devil but was still in over his head.
Whenever these franchises reach their fourth or fifth iteration, audiences must accept that the heroes pushing the machinery along are magic. Mission: Impossible is no different.
When the series started with Brian De Palma’s slick 1996 film, Hunt was a very mid-period Cruiseian hero. He was charming, a trickster, and fast on his feet. Less a fighter than a thinker, he survived Mission: Impossible‘s many bang-up set pieces—all cobbled together in the way of 1990s action films, which often had the whiff of things constructed via conference call by anxious executives worried about DVD sales and opening weekends—by being fast on his feet and able to outsmart his enemies.
Though helmed by a revolving door of directors (John Woo, J. J. Abrams, Brad Bird), the first set of sequels largely maintained that presentation of Hunt as a thinking man’s globe-trotting super spy. Even as the Jason Bourne films introduced the now-dominant strain of unromantic, jittery camera, down-and-dirty action, Hunt kept sprinting and driving sporty cars through European capitals captured in gleaming lens-flare beauty.
When Christopher McQuarrie took the reins for the second quartet of Mission: Impossible films that started with 2015’s Rogue Nation, the series settled into an ever-more fantastical mode of plotting paired with a cloudy atmosphere of apocalyptic doom. Whereas earlier films gave Hunt discrete enemies to vanquish, the McQuarrie films turned into a non-stop stream of ever-spiraling threats. The sprawling network of deep-cover world-ending fanatics he was up against in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and 2018’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout had a frightening vaporousness to them; capture or kill one, and five more pop up, ready to deliver grave villainous speeches about the pointlessness of Hunt’s brand of selfless heroism.
That propulsive combination of high-gloss Bondian travelogue and high drama came apart in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, which didn’t have the confidence of its predecessors. Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning has that same desire to up the stakes and pile on one calamity after another, since apparently having one of cinema’s most proven stars facing off against a world-devouring evil AI can’t be trusted to hold people’s attention these days.
Some set pieces work, particularly a ravishingly shot IMAX-worthy biplane chase scene. Hunt’s vertigo-inducing wing-walking has a buoyant Indiana Jones flair that’s missing from the rest of this often grim endeavor. Others, including multiple bomb disarmings and a ruthlessly dragged-out underwater sequence, have a box-checking feel.
Too often, the answer to getting Hunt, and by definition humanity, out of danger is not cleverness or trickery (the one scene using hyper-realistic face masks is perfunctorily slotted in), but a willingness to absorb pain. An unsentimental team of editors could have excised a good half hour, including a couple of subplots and exposition, and delivered a sleek speedster of a film.
There is too much passion and too little cynicism in Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning to dismiss it entirely. The filmmakers also resort too often to piling on more things we have seen elsewhere rather than doing what the audience expects Hunt to do: find a clever way out.
Editor’s Note: A version of this article was previously published on Medium.