Josh Reviews Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

I never watched the original Mission: Impossible TV series, but I’ve been a fan of the Mission movies ever since seeing the first one, directed by Brian De Palma, back in 1996.  With the exception of the hiccup that was the second film (which had a great first 30-40-ish minutes but then, to borrow a phrase from Suzy Eddie Izzard, “slowly collapsed, like a flan in a cupboard”), I think the movies got better and better with each one, culminating in 2018’s Fallout, which stands tall as my favorite of the bunch.  I was somewhat underwhelmed by the previous film, Dead Reckoning Part One.  (I thought it was cool to have a two-part Mission: Impossible film, but after Part One somewhat underwhelmed at the box office, they decided to drop the Part Two from this new film’s title.)  Dead Reckoning Part One had some incredible action sequences (the tense airport sequence early in the film, the much-ballyhooed motorcycle jump, and the jaw-dropping train sequence in the climax), but I thought it was too long and too confusing, and that they erred by holding off on giving us many key pieces of important character motivation (such as what happened in the past between Ethan and Gabriel, or why Shea Whigham’s character Briggs hates Ethan).

When Dead Reckoning Part One failed to light the box office on fire, and then the strikes and other production issues delayed work on Part Two, I’d hoped that perhaps Tom Cruise, writer/director Christopher McQuarrie, and co-writer Erik Jendresen would have the time to reconfigure their plans for this next film in order to get back to the formula that had worked so well in Fallout and Rogue Nation.  

I’m not sure what changes from their original plans did or didn’t happen, but while I found Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning to be a fun time in a movie theater, I’m bummed that I was again underwhelmed.

This movie has two incredible sequences that are, easily, worth the price of admission: the Sevastopol submarine sequence, and the biplane chase.  These two sequences are extraordinary!!  This is big-screen movie-making at its best.  Both sequences are inventive and thrilling, mostly because they demonstrate Tom Cruise’s continuing determination to put himself in peril in order to capture these jaw-dropping stunts.  These sequences deserve to be seen and enjoyed on the biggest screen possible, and it’s worth seeing this movie just to enjoy them.

Unfortunately, I found that the rest of the movie had the same main flaws as Dead Reckoning Part One, perhaps even more so.  The film is too long and too confusing, with too many characters, most of whom are flat.  I like every one of these actors (there are some great familiar TV faces in the ensemble this time!!), but I didn’t really care about any of their characters.  The film didn’t give any actual development to any of them.  That could be excused if this film was a thrill-a-minute ride, but for a Mission: Impossible film, I was actually surprised that there wasn’t more action.  There are long stretches (particularly in the rough first hour) of talking and more talking, and I didn’t much care about any of it.  There’s a lot of plot but not enough actual story or character development.  I didn’t feel the “Entity” or the human Gabriel were interesting villains, and the film continued the Mission: Impossible trend of keeping Ethan’s relationship with the female lead surprisingly chaste.  (I couldn’t believe Ethan and Ilsa didn’t kiss during the Vienna sequence in the previous film, and I couldn’t believe Ethan and Grace didn’t kiss here after she revives him and they’re snuggling close together in the tiny decompression chamber.)

I did enjoy the experience of watching this film in the theater!  It’s fun!  It’s just very surface level.  In considering this movie afterwards, I had to ask myself: is this the second worst Mission film?  Mission: Impossible II is clearly the worst.  What’s the next-worst?  The second half of the Brian De Palma’s first Mission film isn’t nearly as good as the first hour, but there’s still so much I love in that first film.  Some have criticized Mission: Impossible III as looking and feeling like a TV movie, but it has a lot of great sequences and easily the series’ best villain.  Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation are both terrific, and as I’d noted above, Fallout is my favorite.  Dead Reckoning Part One is wobbly, but I think it’s better than Final Reckoning (at least that’s my impression after a first viewing)…

OK, shall we dive in deeper??  Beware SPOILERS ahead!!

I was wondering how this film would open; it’s clearly the second half of the story, even though the marketing has tried to position it as a stand-alone film and not a Part Two.  I was hoping we’d kick back into things with a rocking action sequence, but nope.  Instead, we get a ton of exposition and a slow re-ramping up of the stakes, even though we already got all of this setup in the last movie.  I know they needed to remind audiences what happened in the previous film which came out a few years ago, but there has to have been a better way.  Why not launch us into a big action scene and catch us up from there??

Instead, the film starts so slowly.  To my surprise, Ethan has just been hiding out for months since the end of the last movie!  That’s not at all what I expected.  I thought he’d have been out there, trying to fight the Entity.  It’s such a strange choice to have him not be doing that.  Also, Ethan is on the run from the whole world, but somehow the IMF and/or the U.S. government can still find him to deliver the usual mission-briefing message on videocassette???  That’s so silly!!  I was not happy to be already questioning what felt like a huge plot-hole, only five minutes into the movie.

The death of Luther (Ving Rhames) was a real bummer.  On paper, the idea of killing off a key member of the team at the start of this movie makes sense; that really raises the stakes.  But the way they handled Luther’s death didn’t work for me at all.  The editing was confusing — why did they chop up this sequence instead of just presenting it to us chronologically?  The out-of-nowhere revelation that Luther is already dying further muddled the impact of his death.  This is a classic case of gilding the lily.  I assume the revelation that Luther was dying anyway was meant to soften the blow of his death at the hands of Gabriel… which it does — too much!!  If Luther was already dying, this doesn’t feel like the tragic surprise they wanted it to be.  It also doesn’t help that Luther and Ethan come off looking extremely stupid for not better guarding the “poison pill” that Luther had spent the final months of his life working desperately to develop.

I liked that this film (which may or may not be the final Tom Cruise-starring Mission film) has a lot of connections to the previous films.  I really liked the scene of everybody in the President’s war room reading about all of Ethan’s previous crazy adventures.  I liked the idea of trying to finally explain what the “rabbit’s foot” macguffin in Mission: Impossible III was.  (Even though, in the context of that film, it was clearly a bio-weapon and not A.I. tech.)  I LOVED that they brought back the hapless pentagon technician, Donloe (Rolf Saxon) from the first Mission movie!!  That was a fun surprise, and I loved seeing what became of this guy, and how he’d actually managed to find a happy ending for himself.  I loved that he was able to help Ethan’s team in the back half of this movie!  That was a lot of fun.

On the other hand, I think the film wastes too much time on building up the legend of Ethan Hunt, and how he’s the savior of human-kind and the only man on planet earth who can outwit the Entity.  That all seemed a little silly to me, and I think they wasted too much time on flashbacks and exposition, especially in the first hour.  I also think one attempted continuity connection that really did not work for me was the revelation that Shea Whigham’s character, Briggs, was actually the son of Jim Phelps.  That revelation felt completely out of nowhere (why was he hiding his real name?), and it had no emotional impact on the story.  They needed this character to have been much more involved in the story.  I really wanted him to be involved in saving the world in the third act, and it would have been a hoot if this new Phelps would have been the leader of the new team at the end, just like the old Phelps was.  Alas, they didn’t go there.

I was shocked that after all the teases in Dead Reckoning Part One, and also throughout this new film, that they didn’t ever give us the story of how Ethan knew Gabriel, of who the woman was who Gabriel shot, and of how Ethan joined the IMF.  What a disappointment that all of this build-up went nowhere!!  I was fascinated by the way Dead Reckoning Part One started making a big deal about how Ethan and everyone on his IMF team was in some sort of bad trouble before being given “the choice” to go to jail or try to redeem themselves in the IMF.  I thought for sure we’d get Ethan’s backstory here in Part Two; that we’d learn what Ethan and Gabriel meant to each other 30 years ago, and what went wrong, and who this apparently pivotal first woman was in Ethan’s life, who he’d failed to save.  But nope.  It’s crazy to me that I’ve watched what’s basically a six-hour movie and they couldn’t fit this in.  Don’t tease this backstory if you’re not going to actually give us the full story!!

Simon Pegg is always a delight as Benji, and I was glad that he got to lead the team at the end.  Hayley Atwell was once again terrific as Grace.  She’s a fantastic addition to the ensemble.  I wish the film had allowed her and Ethan to actually have a real romantic relationship, as opposed to the same vague dewey-eyed longing that Ethan and Ilsa had across multiple movies.  (Speaking of Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa, I am still angry they killed her off in the last film.  There’s room for two great female characters in these films!!  I was hoping she’d have been magically revealed as being alive at the end of this one, but that didn’t happen.)  (I’d also have loved to have seen Jeremy Renner’s Brandt back in this maybe-final Mission film, though I can understand if Mr. Renner wasn’t up to it following his awful accident from a few years ago.  And I’ll ask once again, as I have for every Mission film after Ghost Protocol, why they haven’t ever brought back Paula Patton’s character of Jane Carter??  She was so great in that film!)

I was delighted to see Nick Offerman (Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation!!) as a tense, scowly General, and also Hannah Waddingham (Rebecca from Ted Lasso!!) as Admiral Neely (albeit sporting a somewhat unconvincing American accent).  But while Mr. Offerman and Ms. Waddingham didn’t have much to do in this film, the TV star who really blew my socks off was Tramell Tillman (Mister Milchick from Severance!!) as submarine captain Jack Bledsoe.  Mr. Tillman was delight in this film.  He had some great one-liners and sharp chemistry with Tom Crusie.  And, oh, that voice!!  Fantastic!

Speaking of submarines, did anyone else notice how this movie turned into The Hunt for Red October for about 20 minutes there in the middle?  I mean, Ethan jumps from a helicopter into the ocean in a desperate attempt to board a submerged submarine, which is engaged in a tense cat-and-mouse chase with a Soviet submarine??  That seems familiar!

(This movie also turns into The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Ship in a Bottle” at the end, when their plan for defeating and capturing the entity is revealed.  They even use the “bottle” metaphor when they talk about trapping the Entity in that glowing rectangle!!)

I was thrilled that Pom Klementieff’s Paris, introduced in the last film, had more to do here.  She was great!!  And she was a welcome and unexpected source of comic relief!  I was happy we got more of Henry Czerny as Eugene Kittridge (so memorable from the first Mission movie), and I was delighted that Angela Bassett reprised her role from Fallout as Erika Sloane, now President of the United States!!  Ms. Bassett was terrific!  I liked seeing Holt McCallany (Wrath of Man), Mark Gatiss (Sherlock), and Janet McTeer on the President’s War Council.  Katy M. O’Brian (The Mandalorian) created a memorable character in only a few minutes — she’s the submarine diver whose suit Ethan borrows.

As I’d noted above, the extended sequence in which Ethan Hunt is down in the destroyed submarine the Sevastopol is incredible.  This whole sequence felt like an entirely new tone for a Mission movie to take — it was scary and tense.  (And I don’t think there was any score!)  I loved every second of it.  I was on the edge of my seat.

(I did roll my eyes at the ending of that sequence, though.  Ethan’s somehow surviving his rapid rise to the surface — after having his entire suit stripped off!! — and then drowning, might be the most unbelievable thing in this entire series.  Surely, even if he could somehow survive all that punishment, he’d be in a hospital for weeks if not months afterwards, right??  I guess I’m not supposed to think about any of that.)

While the bi-plane chase was, to me, somewhat reminiscent of the spectacular helicopter chase in the climax of Fallout, I nevertheless bow my head in praise of Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie, and the entire stunt and production team, for executing this incredible sequence.  It was truly jaw-dropping.  The film really came alive in this final sequence, and I loved every second of it.  (I don’t have much desire to sit through this whole movie again any time soon, but I’d LOVE to re-watch this bi-plane sequence many more times!!)

The ending didn’t make too much sense to me — how could an A.I. Entity that had spread itself throughout the global internet ever be contained and captured?  Also, didn’t they tell us repeatedly throughout the film that the entire internet/cyberspace would be destroyed if they killed the Entity??  Sigh.

I’d been wondering just how “final” this Final Reckoning would be.  Would they kill off Ethan the way they killed off Bond?  I’m glad they didn’t go that route.  On the one hand, with a title like The Final Reckoning, I had hoped we’d get something that felt a little more “final” as an ending of this film than what we got.  (This film basically ends the way many previous Missions did, with Ethan and his team happy and at the ready for the next global catastrophe…)  I’d have loved to have seen Ethan reunited with Michelle Monaghan’s Julia.  But on the other hand, this is how I want the Mission saga to end!  I want to know that an IMF team still exists and is going to go off and have more adventures than we might or might not get to see.  That worked well for me.

I wish I was as enraptured by this film as I was by so many of its predecessors, especially Fallout.  But I did nevertheless enjoy it, and I’m impressed by the scale of what this team was able to accomplish, despite making this movie during a global pandemic and two strikes.  I’d be happy to see Tom Cruise and/or Christopher McQuarrie return for more Mission: Impossible films, and I’d also be satisfied if this is the final one.