BIG BAD FILM

As its title suggests: there’s a sense of finality to Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, for better or worse. The eighth (and by far longest) entry in the Tom Cruise spy saga sees the methodology of four-time M:I director Christopher McQuarrie finally hitting a wall. He and Cruise are known for laying tracks directly in front of their charging production train, which results, in this case, in a strange and often disjointed film that stands apart from the rest of the franchise. However, the strengths of the Cruise-McQuarrie enterprise have long outweighed its faults. After repeatedly testing fate with their improvisational filmmaking, and their larger-than-life spectacles, the gigantic series finale is their final reckoning too, and they miraculously emerge the victors.

At nearly three hours in length, The Final Reckoning spends almost its first hour in flashback mode, with montage upon montage recapping not only the last movie (Dead Reckoning – Part One), but the series as a whole. Each of these is interspersed with some semblance of character and plot, things that have long been central to the franchise, but which take something of a backseat here. This allows the series’ swan-song to firmly establish itself as a victory lap, after three decades of dominating the Hollywood action scene with brazenly practical stunt-work. 

Some of the movie’s recaps come courtesy of the last film’s malicious, all-powerful A.I. — known as the Entity — showing protagonist Ethan Hunt (Cruise) numerous possible futures, from inside a coffin-like structure, while also recalling key moments from the past. Other flashes are run-of-the-mill memory montages triggered by dialogue. Some are even dream sequences, caused by Hunt nodding off while traveling between locations (he’s nearly a senior citizen, after all). It’s a fever-dream first act where time and space no longer seem to exist, with dialogue scenes cut awkwardly and obliquely so they can soon give way to a greatest hits album. A number of newly-shot scenes recall images from throughout the series’ thirty-year history. But when the film finally gets going on its own terms, it’s damn-near unstoppable, culminating in a breathtaking climax for the history books.

The broad plot is, on one hand, shockingly simple. The Entity is on the verge of controlling all the world’s nuclear arsenals, hastening humanity’s approaching self-destruction, unless Cruise and co. can find a way to thwart it. However, the mechanics of doing so are about as dense and complicated as Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, further imbued with rising stakes at every turn. As the U.S. President (Angela Bassett) and her various melodramatic advisors react to the Entity’s advances from their war room, Hunt and his makeshift IMF team — Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg), Grace (Hayley Atwell), Paris (Pom Klementieff) and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) — must find a way to outsmart it through hare-brained schemes that have only the most minute chance of working. Complicating matters further is the fact that the Entity’s chilling human envoy, Gabriel (Esai Morales), now seeks to usurp his digital master, introducing the question of whether Hunt will team up with the murderous psychopath.  

Explaining the setups to each complex set-piece tends to take extraneously long, and even then, keeping track of the “who,” “when” and “why” can be a headache. Sometimes, it’s best to lean back and let the images wash over you. This isn’t the series’ usual MO, but here, it yields some of the most jaw-dropping action scenes to grace the silver screen in years (McQuarrie is nothing short of a master at twisting and tightening screws). At one point, Cruise descends upon the wreckage of a submarine teetering at the edge of an undersea cliff, in order to recover item X for purpose Y, involving inserting drive A into slot B at exactly the right moment. But these logistics melt away when McQuarrie presents Hunt as a selfless angel with wings made from undersea flares — a messianic figure capable of saving humanity from itself. What follows is a long and winding fetch-quest where each and every decision proves utterly nail-biting.

This element of choice is of prime importance to the movie. It’s what separates human beings from the algorithmic Entity seeking to determine the Earth’s fatalistic destiny (with its Biblical claims of “It is written”). The antagonists constantly place our heroes within living Prisoner’s Dilemmas and Trolley Problems, wherein making a decision feels impossible, resulting in hair-raising tension. This human element of free will also becomes a key part of the action aesthetic. While some initial connective tissue and exposition feel fragmented, the hand-to-hand combat retains a marvelous fluidity, all while ensuring enough clarity to convey minor character beats in the middle of fight scenes. Even amidst the chaos, characters are constantly glancing left and right, considering the outcomes around them. Every bit of action feels like a distinct and motivated choice with serious consequences.

Similarly, the way these fight scenes are edited and cross-cut is of vital importance. The matched movements between beats and stunts separated by hundreds (if not thousands) of miles spiritually supports the movie’s “everything is connected” credo, in a way its numerous nostalgic callbacks often fail to. The Final Reckoning features several returning characters and plot-threads that feel unnaturally contorted in order to fit some larger illusion that the Mission: Impossible franchise has long been a Marvel or Fast & Furious-like saga built on existing plot threads and connections. This has seldom been the case, and despite the Entity’s simultaneous foreknowledge and omniscience, few of these attempts to connect past and future dots remain satisfying, or even necessary. Some are downright coincidental, while others remain vague and confusing. Either way, the Entity has surprisingly little to do with any of them, removing even the most convenient in-world excuse for the series’ sudden fan-service penchant.

In recent years with films like Mission: Impossible and Top Gun: Maverick, Cruise has used his cultural cachet to remind Hollywood that human ingenuity is much more valuable than anything a computer could spit out on its own. This makes the Entity a perfect final foil for Hunt, at least in concept. While the film has several direct (and hilarious) rebukes of encroaching digital domination — including, at one point, Cruise repeatedly kicking an Entity acolyte in the head while yelling “You spend too much time on the internet!” — the sense that the mysterious A.I. has wormed its way into everyday thought is merely a suggestion, rather than something the movie meaningfully explores. 

However, when it comes to the movie’s known quantities — i.e. the existing relationships and character dynamics — The Final Reckoning is an emotional wallop. Luther in particular, now an invalid agent fighting the Entity from his deathbed, becomes the center of some of the most meaningful exchanges with Hunt, as a character who has been by his side since the very first entry. In this and other, similar ways, McQuarrie grounds the world-ending stakes in the kind of genuine, unironic (and if anything, anti-ironic) human connections that have long made these movies tick. The film is often a mess, but it’s the kind of deeply human mess that righteously flies in the face of mainstream Hollywood’s increasingly sanitized and algorithmic action filmmaking — resulting in an overstuffed finale bursting at the seams with non-stop intensity, and elevated by Cruise’s beautifully self-destructive desire to put himself in harm’s way for our entertainment. Mission: Accomplished. -SA

Siddhant Adlakha is a New York-based film critic and video essay writer originally from Mumbai. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Variety. the Guardian, and New York Magazine. 

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