Review: 'Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning' lets Tom Cruise deliver the stunts, in a bloated story propped up by callbacks to past installments
Like a good magician, “Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning” does a very good job of misdirection — of putting so many spectacular stunts and cool set pieces in front of the viewer that they will be tempted not to notice the flimsy framework that is barely holding it together.
The eighth installment of the movie franchise, started 29 years ago when star Tom Cruise was a mere lad of 33, is a nearly three-hour effort to wow audiences. It’s also a brazen attempt to gaslight the audience, to make them believe that the three decades of these frenetic, disjointed movies were following some kind of master plan.
It’s breathtakingly impressive that director Christopher McQuarrie, who will now be known for directing the last four movies in this franchise, and his co-writer, Erik Jendresen, have cobbled together enough callbacks and returning characters to create a grand facade of continuity. But if you think movie buffs are going to buy the idea that past franchise directors Brian De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams and Brad Bird were all conspirators in a grand cohesive narrative, you’ve got another thing coming.
The new movie picks up pretty much where the last movie, subtitled “Dead Reckoning,” left off — with Cruise’s intrepid Ethan Hunt in a bind. An AI program called The Entity has taken over cyberspace, manipulating people’s information, and making them believe the world’s great powers are at each other’s throats. It’s also inspired a doomsday cult that has infiltrated law enforcement and government agencies everywhere. And The Entity’s next step is to breach the security systems of nuclear arsenals in the nine countries that have them. If it weren’t so creepily close to current events, it would be comical.
Ethan is also on the run from, well, everybody — and has gone into hiding in London’s Underground. The only person with enough juice to get a message to him is the president of the United States, Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett), who, incidentally, been in office since 2018’s “Fallout.”
Ethan has a daring plan to stop The Entity, a convoluted plot that involves retrieving a box with The Entity’s original source code, pairing it with a digital “poison pill” devised by tech genius Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames, the only actor besides Cruise to appear in all eight movies), and downloading it into The Entity.
There are numerous problems with this plan: The box is inside a sunken Russian sub at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean; Sloane and her top advisers want to keep Ethan locked up; and one of The Entity’s human operatives, Gabriel (Esai Morales), is out for revenge on Ethan. (None of these are spoilers, as they were laid out pretty clearly in “Dead Reckoning.”)
But even getting through this set-up seems to take an eternity — it’s 23 minutes before the title credits appear — in a movie that clocks in a bit shy of three hours. McQuarrie weighs down the exposition with a ton of callbacks, mentioning everything from Jon Voight’s character in the first movie to the bombing of the Kremlin in the fourth, “Ghost Protocol.” There’s one callback that’s actually quite charming, involving an actor named Rolf Saxon, who appeared in the first movie in 1996 and hasn’t been seen since.
All those references to the previous chapters are meant to serve a purpose, to invest Ethan Hunt’s endless lone-wolf battles against evil with an air of destiny — a word that’s overused in the movie’s ponderous dialogue, with many scenes of other characters telling Ethan the fate of the world is, again, on his shoulders.
The story puts us back with Ethan’s support team: Tech expert Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell), French assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff), and cop-turned-ally Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis). Each gets some interesting bit of business, though they’re mostly there to give Cruise’s Hunt what he needs at the exact moment he needs it to save the world.
When McQuarrie and Cruise dispense with the blah-blah-blah, they move into a series of dynamic set pieces. There are some smartly executed hand-to-hand fight scenes on a U.S. submarine and an Arctic outpost, a nifty bit with Cruise in diving gear on that Russian sub, and a climax involving biplanes that — as the movie’s marketing has already shown us — features Cruise himself hanging on a wing and getting his face whipped by the onrush of air.
The action sequences are a reminder that the “Mission: Impossible” movie franchise isn’t a cerebral cat-and-mouse game, the way Bruce Geller’s ‘60s TV series was. It’s a stunt show, which has seen Cruise morph into a do-it-yourself action performer in the spirit of Jackie Chan. Pretending otherwise wastes the filmmakers’ time and the audience’s patience. Cruise and McQuarrie have a mission, which they’ve chosen to accept, to pump up the intensity and letting logic self-destruct.
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‘Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning’
★★★
Opens Friday, May 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence and action, bloody images, and brief language. Running time: 169 minutes.