REVIEW: 'Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning' brings things full circle in uneven finale
When Mission: Impossible hit cinemas in 1996, it was part of the traditional 30-year nostalgia cycle that saw multiple 1960s TV shows, cartoons, and films being remade or rebooted. But for every good revival (The Fugitive, The Addams Family Values, George of the Jungle), there were innumerable less-successful attempts (Wild Wild West, The Saint, Psycho, etc.).
Mission: Impossible stood out by being its own thing; where the TV series centered on team missions masterminded by Jim Phelps (Peter Graves, Airplane!, MiB II), the first Ethan Hunt outing was a tense, noir-tinged espionage thriller punctuated by thrilling stunts performed (largely) by Tom Cruise himself. Despite the controversy from making Phelps the villain (leading to Phelps being played by Jon Voight, and the entire original series’ cast rejecting the film), Mission: Impossible was a blockbuster success, scoring the then-biggest May opening weekend of all time, with $45.4 million. Later entries would eschew atmosphere for stunts and spectacle, but the success of the 1996 film showed that audiences were hungry for Ethan Hunt’s brand of spy-fi.
Thirty years and six blockbuster sequels later, The Final Reckoning brings things full circle to (ostensibly) end the series on a high note. The film picks up two months from the end of 2023’s Dead Reckoning, with malevolent artificial intelligence, The Entity, extending its digital reach across the globe. As world governments race to protect their nuclear arsenals from being hacked, disgraced Impossible Mission Force Agent Ethan Hunt (Top Gun) is on the run, in possession of the physical key that can either cripple the AI or control it. When Hunt and his team get a lead on The Entity’s source code, they will need to draw on all of their skills to accomplish the most impossible mission of all.
Overall, The Final Reckoning is more focused than its slapdash predecessor, with defined– stakes and goals for all the characters injecting tension almost immediately. Some overly-dramatic pontification on the nature of heroism, sacrifice, and, “The end of life as we know it,” aside, the suspense is largely maintained throughout. Sure, nearly every single speaking character—from the President on down—is madly in love with Hunt for some reason, but at least we know what we’re at the edges of our seats for.
If Cruise was starting to show his age in his last two films, he looks downright weathered here—sure, he still looks great, and moves brilliantly in a fight, but we’re getting dangerously close to the point where maybe someone his age shouldn’t be straight-backed sprinting towards danger every five minutes. He is leading a team, after all; surely one of them could use the cardio? In The Final Reckoning, Hunt is forced to confront the consequences of his actions over years—from breaking into the CIA black vault in 1996 (M:I), to stealing the so-called “Rabbit’s Foot” in 2006 (M:I-3), or narrowly escaping the bombing of the Kremlin in 2011 (M:I-Rogue Nation), he’s told that everything has led to this moment. Sadly, nobody ever mentions shooting guns while jumping through the air sideways alongside slow motion doves to the tune of Limp Bizkit (M:I-2), but we digress.
The scene where the US Joint Chiefs of Staff go over Hunt’s (frankly, ludicrous) resumé is actually pretty funny, but the script makes the same mistake as 007’s SPECTRE (2015) in trying to retcon years of standalone adventures into a unified narrative. Not only does this undermine three decades of storytelling, it makes the universe these characters live in seem that much smaller. Sure, you could say that the CIA was warned about The Entity back in 1996, and it was prototyped in 2006, but what purpose do any of these references serve beyond needless fanservice? This movie already has so many legacy cameos, shoutouts, and easter eggs, how many more did we really need?
Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Star Trek) and Ving Rhames (Lilo & Stitch) are back as Benji and Luther, respectively, delivering tech support and comic relief as needed. As Luther, Rhames has a bit more to do here than usual, though the circumstances surrounding his “guy in the chair” role here come somewhat out of nowhere. Given that he’s been a part of the series since the first film, and 80% of the dialogue here is gravely-whispered exposition, it wouldn’t have been too hard to include a line or two about how he got to this life stage. As for Pegg’s Benji, one can’t help but think that Cruise and McQuarrie just like torturing the guy, considering the number of life and death scenarios he’s endured since being introduced way back in 2006’s M:I-3.
Following the senseless death of Rebecca Fergusen’s Ilsa in the previous film, Haley Atwell (Captain America, Agent Carter) continues to be an underwhelming substitute, but she’s at least shown to have graduated from damsel-in-distress status in an early fight scene. Pom Klementieff’s (Guardians of the Galaxy) reformed assassin Paris is back as well, though she’s largely reduced to spouting French one-liners and looking good in action scenes.
The action, of course, is top tier. Despite months of trailers and posters showing Cruise clinging on to the side of a biplane, the new film avoids Dead Reckoning’s mistake of showing the entire stunt across its marketing. That being said, one can’t shake a creeping sensation of déjà vu. Whether this stems from director Christropher McQuarrie (Jack Reacher) doing four of these in a row and constantly needing to top himself, or there simply being only so many ways to hang from a flying vehicle, it honestly wouldn’t hurt to come up with some new stuff for Ethan to do.
Given that these films have now gone on long enough to be part of the 90s kids’ nostalgia cycle, that might not be such a bad idea, especially seeing as most of what Hunt survives here places him on a power level on par with most of the MCU’s Avengers. Just as the James Bond series needed For Your Eyes Only (1981) to counter Moonraker’s (1979) excesses, and Die Another Day’s (2002) self-indulgent sins required Casino Royale (2006) to adopt a back-to-basics approach, now may be as good a time as any to bring Ethan Hunt back down to earth.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning opens in Philippine cinemas on May 17. Watch the trailer below.
