Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning

Barring a change of heart in his unimaginable dotage, Tom Cruise gives us one last hurrah for his team of super-spies whose average workday includes falling out of planes, climbing on the outside of a skyscraper, or almost drowning in a gigantic washing machine.

That famous odd-metered theme tune, arguably the only reason people even remembered the 1960s TV show until Cruise got his perfect teeth into it, still carries an undeniable charge when arranged for a big, brassy orchestra, and splicing glimpses of the forthcoming action with the actual title cards still functions as a kind of teaser trailer to affix all our attention on the film’s Rubik’s Cube of spectacular set pieces.

Having introduced an extinction-level AI threat called The Entity in the previous film, now only Cruise’s bland but tireless hero can stop it and its human avatar, in the hissable but one-dimensional form of Esai Morales, before they infiltrate the entirety of the internet and destroy all of civilisation. (In deference to spoiler-phobia, I shall elaborate no further on the film’s plot).

Establishing a nostalgic tone in the first scene, Cruise resorts to the old-school technology of a VCR to receive his self-destructing expository message. Indeed, even Fraser Taggart‘s cinematography has an earthy, undigital look that serves the film’s overstated theme about technology needing the guiding hand of humanity.

Long-term fans of the series will be rewarded as Christopher McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen plug into numerous empty plot sockets from previous movies, like a pair of dexterous phone operators who compared notes during Avengers: Endgame. To their credit, it’s mostly done in order to toss our heroes in a sea of forgotten personal consequences as much as to pat loyal audiences on the head for remembering something from six movies ago.

However, character has never been a priority for these movies, and once again we spend too much time just hanging out with wafer-thin cyphers floating on the meniscus of the actors’ charisma, because we’ve never really had the chance to get to know any of them.
Exposition scenes retain that self-important pomposity common to all movies dealing with some kind of end of the world, but they seem risible in a post-Trump, post-government America, where the ‘intelligence community’ sounds like a contradiction in terms.

There’s also a little furiously unsubtle satire of how spending too much time on social media can make us into idiotic zealots, although it doesn’t really go anywhere except to give the hero a couple more faces to punch. These real-life parallels point towards a vanishing society that still believes in the importance of truth, which is admirable if naïve. In this alternate reality, the President of the United States is none other than Angela Bassett, an actor who exudes intelligence, integrity and gravitas – that’s how far from the real world this story is taking place.

As with the superior Dead Reckoning, the three-hour runtime is generous to a fault, offering quantity over quality in the hope of attracting punters who simply want more bang for their overstretched buck. Writer / director Christopher McQuarrie usually knows how tightly to hold our hand through his Byzantine plots and make them sound important and exciting, even if we’re not a hundred per cent sure where we are; but here he overeggs the pudding both in pacing and detail. Entire characters could be removed, suspense sequences truncated, plotlines ripped out, and we’d still arrive at the superficially thrilling but dramatically disingenuous climax, only quicker.

Tom Cruise and his devotional cronies work their collective gonads off to make this Mission the most Impossible of them all. The actors put on their most serious faces, the composers deploy their orchestra like an army, the editor scores a bullseye with every cut, and the director charges every moment with a sense of peril.

You can’t fault their feeling for the occasion, and if you’re lucky enough to share that feeling then you’ll be bidding this dependably entertaining film series a fond farewell. But if you’re unlucky, you might wander out of the cinema with a slight headache, idly wondering what all the fuss was about.

-Stew Mott-