Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning fumbles where most of its predecessors didn’t – it assumes we care more about its plot than we do. Christopher McQuarrie again directs, but this instalment is so clunky, so dull, so committed to everything but its wow factor, that it often feels like the work of a much less capable filmmaker. For starters, the exposition is exhausting. It’s sporadically compelling, but McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen are so bent on tying The Final Reckoning to every other Mission: Impossible entry that they completely neglect comprehensibility.
Picking up months after Dead Reckoning, The Final Reckoning finds Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and co. scrambling to stop the near-omniscient AI The Entity from obliterating humanity. The dastardly Gabriel (Esai Morales) seeks to control the AI, echoing the hate and hubris of nearly every other action movie villain as he murders his way to what he perceives is his destiny.
Cruise’s latest – and ostensibly last – turn as IMF agent Ethan Hunt carries weight without any finality, no doubt a symptom of Paramount’s reluctance to bid its danger-magnet of a protagonist a serious goodbye, which in turn renders ‘This is it’ marketing completely meaningless.
Cast-wise, it goes about the way you’d expect: Cruise is nuts, Simon Pegg is goofy but competent, Hayley Atwell emotes circles around her co-stars, and Ving Rhames, ever the emotional anchor, is oddly sanguine about their predicament. Among the newcomers, Tramell Tillman is a standout, snatching focus from every one of his co-stars (including Cruise) and again proving his chops as a bona fide star.
Cruise’s misguided, indiscriminate showmanship is as fascinating as ever. Whether it’s conscious or unconscious, calculated or off-the-cuff, the guy’s antics – and our expectations for those stunts – define this franchise. Cruise will probably include a ‘Human Vegetable’ clause giving McQuarrie express permission to launch his comprehensively paralysed body from a cannon or use it as a flail in an action sequence.
That’s not to say The Final Reckoning is completely devoid of thrills. Two-thirds of the way through, as Hunt navigates the wreckage of the Sevastopol submarine, he finds himself in a small room clogged with ready-to-go nuclear missiles. It’s an unbelievably tense sequence that marks a high point for Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey’s mostly forgettable score.
The best that can be said about Ethan Hunt’s alleged swan song is that it seems to be having more fun than Dead Reckoning. The worst is that it’s bloated, silly, and shoddily constructed around a hollow promise to definitively conclude Hunt’s adventures. This series deserved a great ending, but The Final Reckoning isn’t it.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: THE FINAL RECKONING is in cinemas from May 21st.
