Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
“I need you to trust me, one last time”
For almost 30 years, we’ve watched as Tom Cruise’s daredevil secret agent Ethan Hunt has dangled from helicopters, scaled dizzying heights, and ripped off who-knows-how-many rubbery masks. But now, as the series’ villains so love to say, it’s all coming to an end. We bid goodbye to Ethan and his buddies at the IMF, their high tech gadgets and heists, and those globe-trotting plots that always seem to involve the team being disavowed and going rogue. For one last time, the world finds itself faced with the threat of nuclear war, and its only hope is one lucky adrenaline junkie and his willingness to risk life and limb for our amusement.
Some kind of recap is probably in order. Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning (originally titled Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part Two) is a direct sequel to the excellent but commercially underperforming Dead Reckoning Part One, which introduced a global bogeyman in the form of a media-manipulating, truth-warping “parasitic AI” called the Entity. It was an unusually topical threat for a series that had, in previous entries, kept itself to the world of apolitical post-Cold War spy fantasy. Most of Dead Reckoning involved Ethan and the IMF team trying to get hold of a key and keep it out of the hands of the Entity’s human minions, who were led by the mystery man Gabriel (Esai Morales).
The Final Reckoning picks up some time later. The Entity has infected the internet with misinformation, sowing geopolitical discord and inspiring a doomsday cult. Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett), who was last seen as a steely CIA director in the terrific Mission: Impossible—Fallout, is now the President of the United States. Ethan, who is still in possession of the key, has been lying low in London while the ailing IMF computer wizard Luther (Ving Rhames) works out a plan to destroy the Entity. Said plan will, as one exposition-spouting character puts it, probably lead to the “total eradication of cyberspace.” The alternative, favored by the U.S. government, is to try to control the Entity, which was already revealed in the earlier film to be an American cyberweapon run amok. One can safely assume this is a very bad idea.
Laying on the callbacks, flashbacks, and flash-forwards, The Final Reckoning moves at a hectic pace, but takes a while to set up the stakes. Ethan and the IMF crew—perpetually worried Benji (Simon Pegg), recent addition Grace (Hayley Atwell), and antagonists-turned-recruits Paris (Pom Klementieff) and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis)—must find a Russian submarine that sank in the Arctic, use the key to recover a hard drive infected with an earlier version of the Entity, and use said hard drive to wipe out the AI before it manages to take control of the world’s nuclear arsenals, all while trying to outmaneuver Gabriel, who’s fallen out of the Entity’s good graces and developed some megalomaniacal plans of his own.
Or something like that. Brian De Palma’s stylish Mission: Impossible established the series as an auteur sandbox, transforming as it was passed from one director to another, but the later entries, all capably helmed by Christopher McQuarrie, have turned it into an showcase for Cruise’s crowd-pleaser philosophy, a stunt-filled star text that appears to resist a serious ideological reading. The plots are all easy to confuse, not only because they tend to be filled with double-crosses and disguises, but because past a certain point they are all basically the same plot.
It’s this recycled plot framework that has allowed the Mission: Impossible movies to develop something like a thematic throughline. The villains of these films are arms dealers, double agents, Machiavellians, extremists who want to bring about the end times. They represent some kind of collective cynicism or nihilism that the series has, increasingly, connected to the idea of a technology-dependent civilization. What the IMF represents, as the opposing force, is some individualistic mix of ingenuity and foolhardiness, or whatever illogical drive has repeatedly led Cruise to perform his own stunts. They may have their own arsenal of high-tech, sci-fi gadgetry, but, as one of the series’ more reliable tropes dictates, the gadgets usually end up breaking down, necessitating some improvisation on the part of our heroes.
McQuarrie and his co-writer, Erik Jendresen, aren’t operating in ignorance here. They play with analog nostalgia (Ethan’s signature self-destructing briefing comes on a VHS tape this time around) and anxieties about digitization, and work to connect the plot and characters of this film to earlier entries in the series, going all the way back to the first one. This inspires a little too much dialogue about self-actualization and destiny, which is mostly lost in a script that comes to involve a lot of invented techno-babble, various governmental intrigues, and a doomsday vault that contains all of the world’s accumulated knowledge.
Not that most of us are really watching these films for the story particulars or simplistic subtexts. It’s the awesome setpieces that have made Mission: Impossible into something of an institution, and The Final Reckoning absolutely delivers. Ethan’s trip into the lost Russian sub—a largely wordless sequence that involves some really elaborate rotating sets—is a standout, as is the over-the-top climax, which combines a ticking atomic bomb, improvised surgery, and sleight-of-hand with an extended biplane duel. By the time this sequence ended I realized I had been basically holding my breath for the twenty or so minutes its happening on screen.
There are, as before, gnarly brawls, suspenseful close calls, narrow escapes, death-defying leaps, shenanigans involving parachutes, and knife fights. Over and over, Ethan Hunt keeps asking for one more chance, a little more time, a little faith, like an addict whose fix is saving the world. But somewhere into the nearly three-hour runtime, the movie passes that crucial point where I stopped thinking critically because I simply couldn’t help but enjoy myself. The end is nigh, and it’s a hell of a good time.
