Jason Bailey
The new Mission: Impossible film is subtitled The Final Reckoning, a have-it-both-ways solution to the fact that it is the direct sequel and continuation of the 2023 entry, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One. Apparently, some brain genius over at Paramount or Skydance decided that the (comparatively, for this series) disappointing critical and commercial response to that film was because of the “part one,” not because a) it was too damn long, b) it took itself a bit too seriously, c) it needed one more big action set piece, and/or d) they (spoiler alert) killed Ilsa. But “part two” would be an appropriate title for The Final Reckoning, since it has all of the same flaws (except for d, obviously). It also has many of the same virtues: it’s handsomely mounted, well cast, and frequently fun. At least you can’t say you don’t know what you’re getting into.
It’s sort of amusing, not only that they’re making a full-on direct continuation of the previous movie, but that it’s one so loaded to the brim with shout-outs to everything that’s come before. As the lights went down, I wondered how they’d handle the cliffhangers of Dead Reckoning; would they fully embrace its origins as a TV series, and kick things off with a “Previously on Mission: Impossible” sorta situation? The answer is, well, kinda; we hear echoing, overlapping dialogue snatches from the previous picture, and then clips from the earlier films, all of them, as we hear a message from Angela Bassett (reprising her role from Fallout, and promoted from CIA director to president) thanks him for his 35 years of service. “You have always been the best of men in the worst of times,” she says. “I need you to be that man now.”
Copious connections to the earlier (even pre-Christopher McQuarrie) entries are spread throughout The Final Reckoning — a clever explanation of III’s Maguffin, a fine return for a bit player from the first film, a familial connection that feels like one too many trips to the well — which is quite a turn from the franchise’s initial M.O. of handing each entry to a new auteur, who would make it their own style with little regard for the overall series. (After all, only Cruise and Ving Rhames have appeared in every entry.) That started to shift around the fourth film; in this one, there are so many references to, and snippets from, the earlier outings that it almost play like a clip episode of Friends or something.
Anyway, the plot. Dead Reckoning, as you may recall, was a movie somewhat ahead of the curve in its villain, who is not an evil mastermind but The Entity, a dangerous force of Artificial Intelligence, infecting cyberspace and filling it with misinformation and hallucinations. (Imagine that.) When we last left our heroes, they had acquired both halves of the “key” that unlocked the Entity’s source code. Now, Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his team must retrieve that source code from the Russian submarine that sank in the previous film’s opening sequence, pair it with a “poison pill” designed by hacker mastermind Luther (Rhames), and trap it within “The Doomsday Vault” in South Africa, a self-contained and air-gapped computer archive of the world’s essential information.
As usual, the plot is both needlessly convoluted and utterly unnecessary, existing as it does primarily as a clothesline upon which writer/director McQuarrie hangs action sequences and (to a lesser extent) personal relationships. At this point, one of the best things about the series is the warmth and camaraderie between Cruise’s Ethan, Rhames’s Luther, and Simon Pegg’s Benji (Luther greets Ethan by drawling, “It’s always good to see you on the right side of the grass”), and our knowledge of the characters, even newer ones, turns the film’s sole mask pull sequence (they always get me with those, somehow) into a crackerjack piece of character comedy, less about the kicks and punches than the wordless exchanges of explanation and compromise.
But the funniest moment comes from Hayley Atwell (who remains a valuable addition to the cast, adding a welcome sense of play and mischief), when McQuarrie lets the climax of an especially grisly fight play out off-camera, left for us to interpret solely from the vivid sound effects and Atwell’s facial reactions. It’s a great bit of physical comedy. (A submarine sequence adds two more welcome faces to the cast: Love Lies Bleeding breakout Katy O’Brian and Severance’s Tramell Tillman, who has a delightful way of putting a conspiratorial purr into his dialogue.)
Meanwhile, the world is on the verge of full-on apocalypse; The Entity has taken control of several nuclear arsenals, and we have only 72 hours until all the world’s nukes are under its control – including ours. (The ticking clock is literal — a big countdown to doomsday on the wall of the gigantic government command center.) Propulsion is necessary, as McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen indulge in even more (a bit too much) of their ornate Dead Reckoning exposition. That said, McQuarrie indulges in some entertainingly intricate intercutting, sending Hunt on his way while interspersing the explanation for what he’s doing, slicing it in during the mission instead of before. Their various plans, of course, involve the kind of impossible odds and hyper-precise timing that all of the series’ great sequences depend on — that, and the shrugging all-purpose strategy of “We’ll figure it out!”
As mentioned, The Final Reckoning takes too damn long to get where it’s going, and is a bit too self-satisfied when it gets there, though there’s an exquisite and moving final patch of dialogue from the last person you’d expect to deliver it, and Cruise does some genuinely fine, non-verbal acting as he’s listening to the final voice-over, a message that will, of course, self-destruct when it concludes. That last bit of narration feels deeply, immediately political, in a way the series has always shied away from before — it’s not cringe, and it’s not direct, but it certainly seems to speak to this moment, and where we are at, as human beings, right now.
It feels, in other words, like an ending, a real ending, the series coming to a conclusion; the entire picture has that same sense of finality. And that might be for the best. Even its highlight sequences directly echo other, and frankly better ones, in the series (Hunt’s sub swim recalls the chip exchange in Rogue Nation; ditto the biplane chase to the helicopter chase that ended Fallout). Who knows if Cruise’s ego will even allow him to hang it up, at this point—remember how Jeremy Renner’s appearance in Ghost Protocol was supposed to tee up his takeover as the central character? But if that’s the case, well, I’d like to point out that Pom Klementieff returns for The Final Reckoning, and is, again, absolutely electrifying. Just spitballing. I’m sure they’ll figure it out.
“Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” is in theaters this weekend.
