Rating: 1.5/5
The ‘Mission: Impossible’ franchise has put Tom Cruise through the wringer since 1996. He’s scaled skyscrapers. He’s leapt out of planes. He’s broken bones. And yet, despite this pathological desire to risk life and limb in the pursuit of mass entertainment, it’s starting to look like Cruise’s most difficult job yet will be impressing viewers with the last installment of the franchise ‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.’
The previous offering ‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’ did not exactly proceed as anticipated. The movie was initially slated for release in 2021, only for Covid to shut down production twice. And then, when it did eventually make it to screen, people stayed away in bafflingly large numbers. As things stand, ‘Dead Reckoning’ became the second lowest-grossing entry in the franchise after 2006’s Mission: Impossible III.
The task now facing the final offering is, well, extremely difficult. Why, you ask? Because ‘Final Reckoning’ isn’t just a normal ‘Mission: Impossible’ film, but a direct sequel that was made in the retrospectively wrongheaded belief that everyone would go bananas over its predecessor. So now the question remains – has ‘Final Reckoning’ got what’s needed to reverse the fading fortune? I don’t think so. Hear me out before you go guns blazing to curse me.
After eight films, the gigantic steroidal humungousness of the M:I franchise has finally rolled over me like a tank. This deafening fantasia of internal and external combustion delivers outrageous action spectacle magnificently divorced from the rules of narrative or logic. There is one shot where Cruise performs a helicopter stunt without a parachute, and it is pointed out clearly by another character that he doesn’t have it. But Cruise ends up landing safely with the help of a parachute, I really don’t know how. The transition between one scene to another, one angle to the next, is so sloppy that I still can’t figure where that parachute came from, and if any of you have figured it out, please fill me in (Giving them the benefit of the doubt I’m guessing I was just too bored watching the film that I didn’t notice it. Yes, the film is badass boring).
The previous movie was all about Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), one of the best cinematic spies to ever exist, acquiring the ‘cruciform key’, an important element that can stop the truth eating parasitic AI ‘The Entity.’ We’re warned at the beginning of the movie whoever controls ‘The Entity’ can control the truth, because the AI is fiercely eradicating what’s real all over the world with lies and deepfakes. The world is changing, truth is vanishing, and war is coming.
At such perilous times, the fate of the world depends on Hunt, who has never followed the rules but also has never let anyone down when it comes to completing his impossible missions. He was always the best of the men in the worst of the time.
So, here he is again trying to stop the evil metastasising AI brain – who has gained control over most of the world’s nuclear arsenal, sparing a few countries – with his team including Grace (Hayley Atwell), Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg), and a few more old faces (won’t spoil who). Time is running fast and Hunt places the fate of the world in the ‘blink of an eye’ move, if they miss the timing, it’ll be Doomsday for the world.
The gang is back for another bout of deafening and magnificently silly, gravity-defying action, leaving plot logic in the dust. There’s a lot of narrative mouths to feed, on top of the legacy characters and the film’s solution is to cut frantically through half a dozen subplots at once.
Like every ‘Mission: Impossible’ film, ‘Final Reckoning’ wages into high-octane stunts, trying to balloon into a blockbuster, a junk-food binge of world-saving, city-razing international spy missions never imagining a crash that can’t be survived or a dilemma that a nitro-boost can’t solve.
But it is merely reduced to the type of bone-stupid enterprise where locations are established first by characters saying they’re going to London, and then we’re already at the landmark specified by the title “LONDON” in giant, screen-filling letters. There’s no problem with that but at least make the transition appear fit for the big screen. It felt like the film editor at ‘M:I’ submitted their first draft and someone didn’t even bother watching it before sending it ahead as the final cut.‘The Final Reckoning’ has the kind of screenplay that explains a lot in dialogues and monologues rather than explicating the plan equally in action.
The movie is a bit overextended, and the action runs out of steam in the final battle, but that’s not to say it doesn’t deliver some bangs and laughs. Cruise, who is 62, did not leave any stone unturned to nail the action for your buck, but the problem is that it doesn’t leave an impact. What began three decades ago as a high-octane spy thriller has morphed into arguably the best action-movie franchise of our times. Which makes me wonder how did this happen? How did we reach here with ‘The Final Reckoning’?The one thing you wouldn’t expect from the violent breakdown of society would be for it to be an utter bore. Yet that’s the big twist at the center of this action thriller. Even Earth’s destruction seemed like a slog.
The editing is frenetic, the dialogue dreadful, the stunts ludicrous, the running time extravagant, and the lack of consequences appalling – how can you care about people who can crash and blow up everything they touch without harm to themselves or anyone else? Many scenes start and stop without much sense, never gathering the kind of momentum that the movie is supposed to provide. Also, there’s a major death involved but this unfortunate event is simply forgotten: because there’s no impact.
Everyone who loves action and cinema owes Tom Cruise a very great deal. But for me this is a passion project without passion: a bloated, boring and bafflingly shallow film. It’s simultaneously hyperactive and lifeless, lumbered with some terrible narrative, which achieves neither the texture of analogue reality nor a fully radical, digital reinvention of existence. The penultimate part of the ‘Mission: Impossible’ franchise combines a weak plot with high action and a charming lead. The film is full of clunky dialogue with cardboard characters just explaining stuff to each other, and the way their plan is executed is terrible.
Final Thoughts:
This ‘Mission: Impossible’ movie is not high art – even if the latest instalment is being shown at the Cannes Film Festival. The dialogue is laughably clunky, the acting is often functional at best, the plot developments are soap opera-level. Christopher McQuarrie is the director who gave us the Oscar-winning ‘Top Gun: Maverick,’ an estimable film. But this is one to forget: a muddled, tonally misjudged, badly executed, uncertainly directed and frankly dubious drama, something that falls into the so-bad-it’s-bad bracket.
I am baffled how this Tom Cruise-led franchise’s end could be so flat and boring. The conclusion is utterly preposterous. I don’t like to spoil specifics, but I guarantee that many viewers will cry “that’s it?” at the film’s final scenes. There are some good people in this awful film, whose talents have been wasted. And sadly the only thing to do now is forget all about it.
To all the die-hard fans, who will hate my opinion, “This review will self-destruct in 5 seconds.”
