If the title is sincere, and this really is the final reckoning, then it’s been a franchise of two halves.
Mission: Impossible diehards tend to underrate the first half (which ran from Brian De Palma’s brisk 1996 original to 2011’s fun Ghost Protocol) as much as they overrate the second (which launched with 2015’s Rogue Nation).
That approach reaches its apotheosis in The Final Reckoning, but the scaffolding now overwhelms the spectacle.
Is this a Mission: Impossible movie, as advertised, or some M:I-themed podcast?
The biplane conclusion feels more like the M:Is of yore, but chiefly reminds you of Top Gun: Maverick’s superior engineering.
The franchise has been divided if the title is accurate and this is the last reckoning. The first half, which spanned from Brian De Palma’s brisk 1996 original to the entertaining 2011 Ghost Protocol, is often underrated by Impossible acolytes, while the second half, which began with 2015’s Rogue Nation, is frequently overrated. However, the complaints and rumblings coming from public screenings indicate that a disgruntled consensus is emerging around the final installment: that this is a shaky way to kickstart the summer film season and an entirely disjointed way to settle the affairs of Ethan Hunt and his IMF crew. 70 minutes of M:I B-roll are followed by 90 minutes of nothing happening repeatedly.
We must go back to the fuse relighting in order to more accurately diagnose this most recent malfunction in the Hollywood machine. In the wake of the commercial failures of Eyes Wide Shut and Magnolia (1999), the two most trying turns in this star’s career, Tom Cruise turned back to this franchise. In these films, he let himself be shaken and seen to be shaken, but the public and the awards circuit were largely uninterested. In contrast, The Mission: Impossibles would be the kind of 4DX-coded sure thing that audiences have consistently sought out, a creative safe haven, even as the films’ set pieces forced their main character to take on increasingly dangerous tasks in order to keep people in their seats.
As much a martyr and marked man as a savior or secular saint, Hunt was persecuted at every opportunity by filmmakers with equally fervent visions in those early movies. In Ghost Protocol, the former animator Brad Bird had the brilliant idea of turning the series into a live-action cartoon, with Cruise defying gravity and nature alike by hanging off the side of the Burj Khalifa and personally outrunning a sandstorm. Despite the fact that, in hindsight, the motorbike-and-mullet combo of John Woo’s 2000 film M:I 2, set to a bruising Limp Bizkit beat, was bound to date quickly, sensationalist De Palma reveled in the set-up possibilities for spectacle.
However, the last four films are the work of screenwriter-turned-director Christopher McQuarrie, who decided that this series needed a little more dialogue and oversaw the creation of a massive narrative structure that his star could cling to with one hand. When that strategy reaches its pinnacle in The Final Reckoning, the scaffolding now overpowers the show. See Ving Rhames’s bewildered farewell for an example of the much-rewritten incoherence that results from trying to fit eight films together. More concerningly, missions are described rather than shown. We’re left with people conversing extensively in unimpressive rooms; you wonder if the insurers blanched after Cruise sprained his ankle during the 2018 Fallout shooting. Is this an M:I-themed podcast or, as promised, a Mission: Impossible movie?
Nothing compares to the train derailment in Dead Reckoning (2023), which ironically benefited from McQuarrie’s yen for prolonging events. The spectacle, when it is finally followed, is poor quality. We learn during a repetitive underground shootout that world-ending AI generators can apparently be stored in intricate cave systems; a claustrophobic, soggy deep dive offers another (this time depressurized) chamber piece. (How long is the extension cable, for example?) The biplane ending primarily reminds you of Top Gun: Maverick’s superior engineering, but it also feels more like the M:Is of the past. All too frequently, McQuarrie has yielded to Cruise and his worn-out stunt coordinators, which has reduced the number of iconic shots in the series.
