When the idea was first mooted at the back-end of the 20th century, making a big-screen adaptation of the hit 1966-73 show Mission: Impossible smacked of studio IP-grab desperation, the kind of lazy thinking that, at around the same time, gave us The Saint (1997), a film now best forgotten and humbly described on Rotten Tomatoes as merely “watchable,” mostly by fans of the late, great Val Kilmer. Production troubles on that first M:I were legendary, since it went into production without a script that anyone could agree on and, more perplexingly, starred Tom Cruise at a time when his stock was rising as a movie star in serious, glossy Oscar-winning movies, not pulpy American TV reboots.
Thirty years later and here we are: Tom Cruise is the biggest Hollywood movie star in the world bar none, the M:I franchise has beaten its primetime namesake’s seven-year winning streak three times over, and his character, Ethan Hunt, is the poster boy for the whole kaboodle, even though there was never anyone by that name in the original series. At the same time, the golden age of the action thriller is fast disappearing in the rear-view mirror: Don Simpson died four months before the first M:I was released, and the kinds of audiences he and Jerry Bruckheimer once drew have been dropping off incrementally ever since, as evidenced by the disappointing turnout for George Miller’s Furiosa.
It’s hard to pinpoint quite why things all worked out so well for M:I, but something Brian De Palma brought to the first outing was a visual style that put the emphasis on the visceral. This dedication to the image started to fluctuate in the films that followed, and, notably under Brad Bird (M:I3) and J.J. Abrams (M:I4), a lot of expository rot set in, spending too much time on plot (cut down in the first movie by Commander Swanbeck’s withering line, “This is not mission difficult, Mr. Hunt”) and stopping for chat where John Woo (M:I2) would have revved up a monster dirt bike and chucked in some doves.
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If, after those radically varying four, Christopher McQuarrie hadn’t rocked up, it’s hard to know whether the eighth instalment would be getting the attention it’s getting now, what with a worldwide rollout and a prime spot at Cannes for a film that is, essentially, the fully extended second half of the last one. Surprisingly, though, The Final Reckoning holds up as a stand-alone feature; the callbacks and in-jokes require a fair bit of knowledge, since they span the franchise’s whole lifetime in unexpected ways, but it’s pretty easy to pick up all the jigsaw pieces and, when it really gets going, immediately forget all about them.
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Inevitably, there is an air of doom and gloom pervading, since the world was not in a good place the last time we saw it, in 2023’s Dead Reckoning. The sinister AI villain known as the Entity is still bent on taking possession of the world’s nuclear superpowers and preparing for Armageddon. The Entity is not putting any smiley face emojis on its missives either, announcing that “the world is changing, truth is vanishing … WAR IS COMING!” Some people are quite happy about that, mind you, and the Entity is being cheered on by a headbanger doomsday cult that — in a truly mind-blowing instance of art imitating life — has infiltrated the U.S. government and is causing chaos therein.
The world needs Ethan Hunt, obviously, but Ethan Hunt has — surprise, surprise — gone rogue (again). So rogue, in fact, that, to bring him back, the president (Angela Bassett) has to call him herself, since he “won’t reply to anyone else.” And she doesn’t half lay it on thick: “Though you never follow orders, you never let us down,” she says. “You are the best of men in the worst of times.” But Ethan has no time for flattery; the world is about to destroy itself, which we can tell from the thunderous incidental music alone, once such a joyous riff on Lalo Schifrin’s funky intro, now like a shouty gothcore version of the Austin Powers theme.
In scenes that take up so much more screentime than is strictly necessary, Ethan gets back on the trail of Gabriel (Esai Morales), the Entity’s duplicitous sidekick, who aims to bring it under his control once its plan gets underway. The only way to stop the Entity is to find the program’s source code, which, as we saw in Dead Reckoning, is now at the bottom of the ocean, in the ill-fated Russian submarine Sevastopol. Gabriel, however, has a very zen attitude to this; knowing that there is a second cruciform key, which has fallen into Ethan’s hands, he is prepared to sit back and let the Americans do the hard work, then steal the source code later. The Americans don’t have much choice, since the Defcon clock is ticking, and there are just 72 hours to go before it’s annihilation o’clock.
The search for something as nebulous as a source code, to finish off something as intangible as an AI supervillain, obviously has the potential to be, well, a bit kind of boring, and at times it kind of is, but the wonderfully portentous tone of McQuarrie’s film always keeps us glued to it, always insisting that there will be serious repercussions. The death of a loved one, or loved ones, is a threat that’s repeatedly used to torment Ethan, and an imaginative fight scene early on — represented offscreen by darkly funny sound effects, a series of almost comically horrified expressions on co-star Hayley Atwell’s face and paid off with a seriously bloody aftermath — helps soften us up for that very possibility.
There is a key death, and, obviously, it would be churlish to reveal who, why and where. But The Final Reckoning isn’t quite as final as the promotional ballyhoo might want you believing. Fake news, you could say, and perhaps the only major disappointment here is that McQuarrie and scriptwriter Erik Jendresen don’t really lean into their storyline and its concerns about the way AI reconfigures truth. “Are you sure it’s really me?” says Ethan early on, suggesting a whole world of funhouse mirrors, with spies pulling rubber face masks off of rubber face masks off of rubber face masks. Annoyingly, it plays things quite straight after that (though the globe-trotting timeline does start to get trippy).
After 90 minutes of this, however, including a huge chunk of time spent with the IMF in the Arctic Circle, you get to see the kind of film you want to pay good money for, with action that even the most jaded film bore can’t say they’ve ever really seen before, arguably topping Dead Reckoning’s train scene. The first takes place on the Sevastopol, as it teeters on the brink of underwater oblivion. The second happens in the skies, in a biplane chase so spectacular that it erases all memory of the nonsense that got you there, from tech-bro gobbledygook to a bit of a good old-fashioned red-wire/blue-wire bomb-disposal stuff.
In the meantime, McQuarrie does a good job of pretending we think that the Impossible Mission Force is, like the three/four musketeers, a one-for-all-and-for-one kind of outfit, but, although certain IMF members (like Simon Pegg’s Benji Dunn) have their moments, the crux of the matter is the martyrdom of Ethan Hunt, who, thanks to some smart retconning, bears more responsibility for the rise of the Entity than he knows — and he needs to make things right.
How will he do it? Daniel Craig’s final Bond outing set a high bar in that regard, but The Final Reckoning takes a less obvious road to Hunt’s redemption, offering surprisingly little in the way of romance and dwelling instead on the hero’s burden in a way that recalls one of Paul Schrader’s very serious God’s Lonely Man movies. Subtle religious undertones are teased but tantalizingly unfulfilled; at one point, Cruise is told that he is The Chosen One and that Gabriel has been “cast out” (a hint, perhaps, of the M:I movie Martin Scorsese might have made?).
The more pressing question, however, isn’t anywhere near so existential: Is this really the end? It’s certainly an end, wrapping up seven films’ worth of storylines with a showman’s flourish. What it doesn’t do, though, is rule out another. As Cruise breezes into his mid-60s, it’s hard to imagine him pulling off anything like the high-wire act he achieves here. But the door is still open, and the challenge is there, should anyone else choose to accept it.
Title: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Festival: Cannes (Out of Competition)
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Screenwriters: Christopher McQuarrie, Erik Jendresen
Cast: Tom Cruise, Esai Morales, Hayley Atwell, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Angela Bassett
Distributor: Paramount
Running time: 2 hr 49 min