Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

The title of the latest Mission: Impossible film can be applied to the ultimate result of producer/star Tom Cruise's decision to abandon this series' distinctive quality of having a different director and writers for each installment and instead quadruple down on his collaboration with his current favorite writer-director, Christopher McQuarrie. Not that McQuarrie isn't a capable filmmaker, but the ill-advised change in the Mission: Impossible series' most distinguishing production aspect robbed it of playful uniqueness. M:I was poised to take the place of the James Bond films when that long-running series became overly serious and fell victim to the allure of franchise-universe-serialization. This approach to blockbuster filmmaking aims to make movies feel bigger and more exciting, as the stories are no longer confined to the running time of a single feature film. But in fact, all these expanded narratives do is make movies feel like overlong TV episodes. Of course, Marvel-style serialization has worked its magic at the box office more often than not. Still, the connection between storylines and character threads from film to film did no favors for 007, and it's been even more disappointing for Mission: Impossible.

Rather than setting out fresh each time on a new mission of adventure with our hero Ethan Hunt, the M:I films now must spend an ungodly amount of time reminding us what happened in the last film and what happened before that. This is accomplished with lengthy expository scenes in which actors look at each other grimly and explain things at each other, while McQuarrie and editor Eddie Hamilton flash-cut to images and snatches of dialogue from past films. This is not visual storytelling, folks, and it's not cinematic storytelling either. It's lazy, amateurish storytelling. These preposterous info dumps are broken up by repetitive fight scenes and other visual razzle-dazzle meant to distract us from the absurdity of all the verbiage. Honestly, does anyone pay attention to this stuff?

The result has been that each instalment helmed by McQuarrie has grown longer and longer, while the entertainment value provided has significantly diminished with each new chapter. The first McQuarrie M:I, Rogue Nation, was a solid piece of blockbuster entertainment with three first-rate action set pieces and a star-making turn by Rebecca Ferguson. The next film, Fallout, was a bland, rehashed continuation that did little to justify its existence. Then came Dead Reckoning Part One, which provided perhaps the best showcase for the series' then 59-year-old mega star's penchant for doing his own stunts and the director's delight in crafting practical stunt sequences with him to wow audiences, but the story was overwrought and goofy as hell. Worse, it had a self-serious tone that seemed to imply that this rather mindless popcorn movie had something significant to say about society at this point in history and technological development. It may have posed some amusing metaphors for how algorithms and cowardly shareholder service are taking over the film industry, but it did not offer any insight into the state of our world.

Picking up where Dead Reckoning left off, Ethan and the IMF team are still searching for a dreaded AI known as the Entity. This super-intelligence has infiltrated global spy networks and now seeks to gain control of the nuclear arsenals of the world's superpowers to launch a simultaneous strike that will wipe out the human population but keep itself safe. Only Ethan has a plan to stop this from happening because all of the world's leaders are total idiots, except maybe the US president (Angela Bassett). For Ethan to stop the Entity, he must not only confront it on its terms, but he must deal with his pesky past, which is always creeping up on him.

As each of these films has grown longer and longer, the stunt set pieces haven't become more abundant. In fact, we have to wait until the very end of this latest movie to get a major stunt set-piece that feels worthy of the precedent set by the seven prior pictures. There's a big underwater sequence about halfway into this story, in which Ethan finally reaches the downed submarine that sank at the beginning of the previous film. While this is a grander and more amped up sequence than Rogue Nation's underground water vault, it's far less impressive because it relies on CGI rather than practical stunts. We know Cruise isn't holding his breath for the entirety of this sequence (I'm not sure he's even in real water).

In lieu of impressive stunts, the first two thirds of this movie feature scene after scene of Cruise looking gravely at his scene partners, saying something akin to, "I know you've got no reason to trust me, but you have to give me this one last chance," which they invariably do. These scenes, and scenes of other characters saying versions of, "we have one chance in 100,000 to pull this off," or "if you don't do X, Y, or Z, it will mean the end of all life on Earth," (seriously, this is said six or seven times), are maddeningly contrived. This wouldn't be so bad if the film possessed the lighter tone of its best entries. I mean, the M:I series was always even sillier than the James Bond series, carrying many elements over from the 1960s TV show it's based on. Having the fate of the entire world's population rest on a guy who puts on rubber masks to disguise himself as other people and dramatically pulls them off, as if he were unmasking a villain at the end of a Scooby-Doo episode, is just silly. But no matter how goofy your material is, I guess, when you tell a story of such epic length, in which an audience has to wait two or more years between installments, you need to make the stakes as high as they possibly can be.

Such is the folly of films like this. When every movie and every sequence in every movie involves the fate of the entire world, the stakes feel meaningless not more and more meaningful. It's why I stopped watching Star Trek: The Next Generation—it seemed that that show had a mandate that the entire crew of the Enterprise had to be in jeopardy in every single episode, even if it was just the C-storyline of a character-based episode. If you look at the best 007 movies, most of them were not about obtaining an objective in which failure would result in the end of all life as we know it. In fact, only the silliest of the Bond films are like that. Thus, no suspense is created because we're not really worried about the fate of the world, nor are we worried about our hero's life, because he's clearly indestructible. Ethan Hunt has survived literal death so many times that he must be some kind of supreme being.

Of course, the same can't be said of everyone on his team. Some of them have been given death scenes in past films, and this is no exception. But these scenes are unworthy of even our minimal connections to the characters, because we've seen them and Ethan get out of many situations that seem far more perilous than the one that ultimately does them in. It's the other big problem with treating death so flippantly as movies like this do. If you then stop and want to give a beloved character a meaningful death scene, you can't because death doesn't have much meaning in your film universe.

The one time we truly feel the possibility of death is in this film's climactic action sequence, in which Hunt and the main villain face off on, first one then two, biplanes. The narrative need for these antiquated flying machines is well justified, and seeing Cruise, the last old-school movie star, engage in the 115-year-old cinematic tradition of aerial stunt work filmed on real planes in the real sky with real people is indeed a thrill. And, like many of the best sequences in the M:I series, it connects these films to Hollywood's history while simultaneously providing something spectacular that feels like something we've never seen on screen before. But even this satisfying set-piece does not pay off well, and even if it did, it wouldn't make up for the sloppy, messy 2+ hours that precede it. The Final Reckoning is probably the weakest entry in this series (I can't remember the one John Woo directed very well). If it is indeed the final M:I movie, it's not a very satisfying finale.