Well, it’s finally here, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. This is the 8th movie in the franchise, and it does seem to finish here. We all know, though, if it makes enough money, it’ll be back.
This is my take on the Mission: Impossible movies so far. The first was great, good style and one of De Palma’s best movies. The second one was a great action movie, but a terrible M:I movie, too much style over substance. The third one brought it back a little, but again, a little too styled.
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is where it started hitting its peak. It’s the one with the Kremlin bombing and the windstorm in Dubai. Rogue Nation is great, and sees Christopher McQuarrie take the director’s chair and introduce the Syndicate. Fallout was the one where Henry Cavill ‘cocks’ his arms. 4 – 6 are the best of the series.
In 2023, Dead Reckoning came out, and I can’t deny that I rated it on the first watch. However, having seen it a few more times, it is good, but it’s not great. The AI bad guy was a little too much for me, and the movie was just too long.
We now have Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, and the end of the series. Overall, it’s good, but again, far from great. There’s no point in listing the cast, but I will mention them as I go on.
The Story
The story carries on from Dead Reckoning:
Our lives are the sum of our choices. Tom Cruise is Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.
In this one, the AI wants to destroy all life on Earth, it must have spent 10 minutes on TikTok. Ethan (Cruse) needs to trap the AI on a USB stick and then purge it. That’s the simple version, I found the story got to a point where it was overly complex, laughably so at some moments.
Ethan has to get a hard drive from the submarine in Dead Reckoning; Luther (Rhames) has created a ‘poison pill’ on another USB stick to kill it. To get to the sub, they have to get the coordinates and then meet up, Ethan under the ice, the gang above it.
The AI seems to know exactly what’s going to happen, which is shown in flashbacks, well, flashforwards. How does it know all this? It’s AI, it just does, don’t think, just consume.
Once Ethan has the hard drive, he has to give it to Gabriel (Morales), who will attach Luther’s poison pill. The AI will have all the nuclear codes from around the world, it will then hide in a bunker and kill everyone. Are we still following?
The Pros
The Mission: Impossible movies have become about the stunts and about Cruise being an action hero. Hat’s off to him, because the guy is a nutcase! When you see him hanging off a plane, you know it’s him hanging off a plane.
From that side of things, this movie is a spectacle to behold. Some of the set pieces are amazingly done, and you know it’s Cruise in the middle of it. We all know he’s a bit ‘odd’ in real life, but credit where credit is due, the guy does act well, and he’ll put his life on the line for a shot.
The Final Reckoning does finish the series off nicely, although it’s still a little open-ended. What it also does is tie things up while throwing in some nostalgia bait.
The Cons
There are a few things wrong with this movie, so I’ll have to break them down into sections.
The Story
Again, the story starts to get overly complex. Here is my version of Benji (Pegg) explaining what Ethan will have to do if he were going to make a cup of tea:
“In order to make the tea, Ethan will need to get to the kitchen through the living room. There are many obstacles in his way, toys, things with wheels and small bits of Lego. When he’s in the kitchen, that’s when things get tough.
There are three jars, one containing sugar, another coffee, and the third tea. Ethan won’t know which one is a tea, so he’ll have to make the correct choice or the cup will be ruined.
He’ll have to fill the kettle and put it on. That water can get up to 100 degrees when boiling and if any spills on him, he’s dead. Finally, he’ll add some milk and sugar with a spoon, which could blind him if he’s not careful!”
You get the idea, I know this is called Mission: Impossible, but they don’t have to overcomplicate it to the point where just explaining it is a mission in itself.
Nostalgia Bait
There are some people who are in this because they were in one or two of the earlier movies. There is one bit of casting that was really ‘We felt sorry for this guy, let’s give him a happy ending’.
Final Reckoning starts with nostalgia bait from all the other Mission: Impossible movies. Every time something is mentioned, they have to do a flashback to it, I guess, for the stupid members of the audience.
There is also another tie-in to the original movie that I really rolled my eyes at and then laughed to myself.
The constant throwbacks started to get on my nerves after a while, and they just kept going, right up until the end.
Minor Plot Holes
The AI has to get into a secure bunker where electronic waves cannot get in or out. Well, they can if the door is left open. I think this was explained by them setting up a link to the outside, but I got the impression it was the door left open.
One guy has been living in the Arctic for the past 20 years with his indigenous wife. He’s learned her language, but she’s not picked up a single like of English. Also, this guy seems to know how to defuse a bomb, how? I don’t know, just unscrew some stuff and have a crack.
The AI knows everything that’s going on ever and can predict what’s going on at every turn. Yet, it’s still outsmarted by Hunt.
Planes that start to go into a roll, but always seem to end up upside-down and stay there.
External torpedo tube doors that open magically.
If the AI is hacking nuclear codes, how can there be a countdown to when it has done it? There’s a clock that seems to know how long the hack will take, and in what order.
Girl Bossing
Sigh. Tom Cruise is an older, middle-aged white guy, so we can’t have him do all this on his own. Mild spoilers, but let’s do some tick boxes:
- Black female president
- Female commander of an aircraft carrier
- A female saves the president from a white male gunman
- There’s a black guy who’s in charge of a submarine
- A female indigenous person who saves the day
- Numerous times that Grace (Atwell) or Paris (Klementieff) save the day
- They kill off the black guy
- A female Navy crew member who saves Tom
- Who is also the best diver in the world
Yep, everything covered here for a Hollywood movie. Again, the eye rolling didn’t stop.
The Direction
Overall, the direction for this Mission: Impossible movie is very good, but with some issues.
There are several instances where there are fights going on, and they intercut them. In Return of the Jedi, you have Han and Leia on Endor, Luke taking on Vader, and Lando in the Falcon. In ROTJ, the intercutting of the fights is paced out; there’s an exciting bit, it calms down, so back to Luke and Vader. They have a moment, and it calms down, over to Lando. It’s all edited well.
Here, there is one scene in particular, where there are two fights going on, and the cutting between them was just bad. Sometimes it almost felt like it was mid-punch, it was very off-putting.
The Stunts
There is nothing wrong with the stunts in this final Mission: Impossible, but man alive, are they too long. The whole plane bit, at the end, got boring after a while. Honestly, I really started to get bored with it.
“Yes, I know it’s Tom hanging off that plane…he’s been doing it for 10 minutes now!”
The underwater stuff is very cool, but they say the submarine is about 500ft down. While Ethan is in there, it rolls and starts to head even further down. Ethan escapes by just swimming to the surface, in ice-cold water, with a layer of ice on top.
Overall
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is a good end to the series, but it’s a bloated one. I reckon you could cut out about an hour and still have a solid movie.
The overall movie is too schmaltzy to be enjoyable. There are too many ‘remember this’ moments, to the point where it just got annoying!
In fact, the overall direction was just too stylised for the entire movie. It’s not as bad as M:I2, but it’s very overly done in places, again, to a distraction. There’s more style over substance.
When you add how stupidly complex the story gets, it just doesn’t make that good a watch. I’ve seen it, but I don’t think I’ll get through it again on streaming. It’s just too darn long (that’s what she said!).
My rating for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning has changed while watching it and after seeing it. I was middle of the road through most of it, but it does deserve some love for what they were trying to do: entertain the audience. They do that, in spades, but overall, it’s still bloated and too long.
I’m giving Mission: Impossible a middle-of-the-road, but generous, 2.5 stars out of 5. It’s a solid end to the series, but not the best of the series, by a long shot. There’s a lot of passion in it, but then Ed Wood had that.
