Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning Review

Somewhere out there is a man, a singular force of nature upon whom rests the sole responsibility for keeping the entire world from tearing itself to shreds through willpower, an unerring belief in the natural grace of humanity and a supreme willingness to hurl himself from great heights armed with nothing but a smile and the understanding that… somehow… all of this will get figured out in the end.

He could be Ethan Hunt, super spy extraordinaire, tasked with regularly saving the world from secret menaces that could obliterate it with nothing but wits and hope and a laundry list of insane stunts to become, as one character once put it, “the literal manifestation of destiny.”

Or he could be Tom Cruise, the actor and producer who has been playing Hunt for the better part of 30 years trying to save the world of filmmaking from the menaces which could it obliterate it, and our own culture with it, using little more than his wits and hope and a laundry list of insane stunts.

It’s become more and more difficult to separate the two, either for the audience or for the filmmakers behind Hunt’s adventures, or even for Cruise himself, as his defining role has become more and more messianic but also more obscure, described only through his requirement to save everyone. Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore, it’s just enough to know that he is out there, somewhere, watching over us.

Except, of course, that it’s not enough. Not for us and probably not even for him. Nothing about Ethan Hunt has ever been particularly clear, by design. He was a chameleon, taking on the accoutrement of the world around him as needed, a man who could be anything to anyone.

Over time, though, that empty vessel starts to look hollow, not mysterious, but either out of necessity or fear, the Mission: Impossible team continues to do their best not to fill it. Instead, like a good M:I team would, they throw a barrage of balls into the air to confuse us and make us forget that we never actually got the thing we were after in the first place – meaning.

And boy, does The Final Reckoning have a lot of balls in the air. In the six some odd months since Dead Reckoning, the covert war against the raging artificial intelligence known as The Entity has become overt, with the planet on the verge of annihilation as The Entity attempts to hack into the world’s nuclear arsenal to destroy humanity with its own weapons.

With the Doomsday clock ticking, Ethan needs to find the sunken Russian submarine from the previous film, which contains the original source code of the Entity he now has the key to, so that he can wipe it out once and for all.

To do that he will, once again, have to get through the irrational members of his government who still want The Entity for their own power, the rational members who correctly point out how Ethan’s high risk, improvisational style keeps putting the world into impossible danger, a doomsday cult which has sprung up AND infiltrated the highest levels of the government and military in six months and the mysterious assassin (Esai Morales) working for the Entity for his own reasons.

It’s a lot. So much so that even after being explained in rapid-fire exposition right at the top, it is repeated in an unexpected, clunky first hour (of three), attempting to set up the plot. We are reminded of the stakes and the myriad connections from Final Reckoning to all of the previous Mission: Impossible films before it, except M:I-2 (so at least we know which installment the producers think is the worst), and the filmmakers hope we don’t notice how deeply repetitive it is to the previous films.

Luther Stickler (Ving Rhames) has some sort of terminal disease and the cure for the entity (maybe), Jim Phelps had a son who hates Ethan (maybe), Kittridge is still doing his own sinister thing sometimes… it’s a lot with, for one of the few times in the series, a tremendous amount happening off-screen and having to be explained post hoc. Mission: Impossible has tended to live by the ‘show, don’t tell’ mantra, but Final Reckoning frequently forgets that.

Some of it, in hindsight, is obvious. Ever since director Christopher McQuarrie joined the franchise as a script doctor and shadow producer on Ghost Protocol, the series has taken on apocalyptic overtones, continually fighting madmen attempting to blow up the world to free it of its problems and start over again, fresh somehow. Even as those have grown, so has Ethan retreated into a void, acknowledging only that he cannot have a personal life because the world needs him too much and ratcheting up his work into a near-religious vow.

It’s been offset through canny uses of humor and happenstance to give at least the semblance of humans being involved, but that began to vanish over the course of the previous film and is frequently absent altogether in Final Reckoning. Modern Ethan’s overriding instinct is earnestness – a strange habit in a spy – as he has stopped chasing Grace (Haley Atwell), an erstwhile international thief, and begun offering it to everyone he meets.

There is something rightfully interesting about an action hero who recognizes the easiest way to solve a conflict is to just give up conflicts and help each other regardless of personal animosity, and keeps trying to do that and inspire others to do the same, even as they keep trying to kill him. And if it were attached to anything like human wants and desires, it could make for a truly original action character of the type the genre usually doesn’t like or understand. But that would require Ethan to have some sort of life beyond trying to save everyone, and he just doesn’t have time for that.

That’s because he does have a lot of set pieces to get through. Whatever problems McQuarrie’s latest iteration has, he can still put together a gonzo action sequence as good as industrial-strength Hollywood can manage. A claustrophobic descent into a frozen submarine rolling down an underwater cliff is as good as anything the series has produced.

Intercut with the rest of the team fleeing a burning science station under Russian military attack, it propels the second act into a tense standoff while succeeding at avoiding pesky questions like ‘why is anyone doing what they are doing?’ Empty shell of a man he may be, Ethan Hunt is still a terrific action hero. And at the end of the day, isn’t that all we want?

Well, no. There is an unavoidable feeling of a franchise running out of ideas and picking over its own past for inspiration. Even the climax feels redecorated from the pieces of more enjoyable films in the series, borrowing bits from Fallout and bobs from Ghost Protocol, and being frequently obvious in the effort. Rather than offering the grand design hinted at in the last installment, the filmmakers have resorted to rifling around in the Mission: Impossible box, pulling pieces out at random and mixing them around.

Looking back, we thought the outcome of Fallout showed a filmmaking team that had cracked the code of the series, hinting at increasing success to come. Instead, we were at the apex and didn’t realize it. It was all downhill from there.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING REVIEW SCORE – 6.5 OUT OF 10

Paramount Pictures will release Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning in theaters on Friday, May 23. The film has been rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence and action, bloody images, and brief language.