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Someday, barring any major advances in our current understanding of science, Tom Cruise is going to die. It’s a simple fact of biology and fate. Yet this current era of his career seems to exist as an act of protest against that blasphemous notion — the idea that Tom Cruise could ever stop running, or making Mission: Impossible movies. He certainly doesn’t stop running in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, the eighth movie in the franchise that began in 1996.
It’s fun to remember how all this began with a movie critics largely wrote off as a stylish if nonsensical TV show adaptation: In his review of 1996’s Mission: Impossible, Roger Ebert said “The bottom line on a film like this is, Tom Cruise looks cool and holds our attention while doing neat things that we don’t quite understand — doing them so quickly and with so much style that we put our questions on hold, and go with the flow.” It is a testament to this franchise’s consistency that while so much has changed over the past three decades, Cruise is still looking cool and holding our attention.
However, saying Tom Cruise will never change is incorrect, because Cruise has changed, along with the world. That’s something The Final Reckoning ends up showcasing inadvertently by aggressively calling back to the past, reminding us that once upon a time, this was a franchise about a spy getting into some spy shit. Today, it’s morphed into… something more.
If you don’t remember what happened in the previous movie, Dead Reckoning Part 1, don’t worry, as there’s a full-tilt Previously On… sequence at the beginning of the movie (albeit one with a lot of visual flair). But a quick recap for the purposes of this review: Dead Reckoning introduced a super-advanced AI known as the Entity, which seeks world domination with an assist from its “agent” Gabriel (Esai Morales) — the secret to destroying the Entity is trapped in a sunken submarine, which needs a fancy gold key to be unlocked. At the end of Dead Reckoning, Gabriel has escaped and the Entity is running wild, but Ethan has the fancy gold key — setting up the action to come.
The worst aspect of Dead Reckoning was this nonsensical AI plotline, and if The Final Reckoning had killed off the Entity in the first 10 minutes and instead focused on a more grounded threat for Ethan and his team to tackle, I would have given this movie an A+++. Alas, it’s not meant to be, and the plotting remains just as messy: There are lines and moments dropped into the first half of the movie like they’ll have some significance later, only to not be paid off in the slightest. Meanwhile, big plot moments end up feeling forced into the action.
At least Final Reckoning is more focused on its ensemble cast, with relatively new team members like Pom Klementieff and Greg Tarzan Davis getting their moments alongside mainstays like Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg. Hayley Atwell is as game as ever and gets slightly more screen time than the rest, given her new status as Ethan Hunt’s brunette nuzzling partner. However, the chemistry between her and Cruise is so off that it’s a good thing the movie isn’t dependent on the audience investing in their relationship.
Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning (Paramount)
The stuntwork, at least, remains unparalleled, with the climactic small-plane confrontation playing particularly well in IMAX. (If you see it in IMAX, by the way, keep an eye out for at least one clever aspect ratio transition.) While so much of the build-up around Dead Reckoning revolved around one massive stunt — Tom Cruise drives a motorcycle off a mountain! — the scale of the action feels slightly smaller, but in action it’s clear how much of it is being done practically, and how much of it is frankly mindblowing.
The Final Reckoning is a more successful movie than Dead Reckoning because while Dead Reckoning did have some set pieces that were genuinely fun (such as the car chase through Rome, or the final train sequence), Final Reckoning actually has an ending as opposed to a vague cliffhanger. It even feels just a bit like a swan song for the franchise thanks to how deeply it dives into the past: Without getting into spoilers, the M:I movies you might make a point of rewatching before seeing the eighth film are the first and third installments.
Even if you don’t refresh your memory of what came before, though, you’ll get plenty of flashbacks to remind you about what happened. So many flashbacks. Arguably too many flashbacks. (The only movie that doesn’t really come up at all is John Woo’s 2000 sequel. Maybe Cruise finds that haircut a little embarrassing now.)
However, this aspect also adds to the frustration this movie generates, because it can’t commit to hard choices or real consequences, despite the massive stakes its characters face. Past installments have introduced the threat of armageddon if Ethan Hunt can’t hit the dohicky with the thingamabob, but here it’s explicit to a degree that, combined with its fanciful AI subplot, pushes the franchise into real sci-fi territory, well beyond the light touches of speculative storytelling. Mission: Impossible going sci-fi is not exactly a complaint, but it does stand out as a sign of how far these movies have gotten from their roots.
Prior to Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning making its debut at Cannes, star/producer Tom Cruise told reporters that he didn’t want to discuss whether the movie would be the final one. This is despite the word “final” being in the title, and all of those dang flashbacks that speak to this being the end of an era.
And really, believing that The Final Reckoning is going to be the last Mission: Impossible movie is like believing that The Who really have retired from touring. Cruise wants to keep making these movies until he’s 80, after all, and if this one makes as much money as it seems like it’s going to make, Ethan Hunt will very likely be back, continuing his evolution from spy to super-spy to superhero to, at this point, a full-on messiah figure.
That’s not an exaggeration: In Final Reckoning, the words “the chosen one” are spoken at one point. There’s absolutely no irony attached to them. Because Tom Cruise may die someday, but his ego ensures that Ethan Hunt is the only one who can save us, always.
Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning is in theaters beginning May 23rd. Check out the trailer below.
English (US) · 