Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Nearly everything I can think to say about Final Reckoning sounds like (and is) a criticism, so I guess I should be honest that I thought the film superbly executed in spots and an adequate summer action film as a whole. If I can’t quite shake a feeling of ennui, a sense of dreariness at the state of movies (as opposed to the quality of this movie), I can at least own that it did, in the end, bludgeon me into submission.
My first and principle criticism is that The Final Reckoning falls into the modern post-MCU trap of trying to take disparate movies and fashion them into a metanarrative. This is hard enough to do when you are trying to do (see Phase 5 of Marvel), but it is nearly impossible in franchises such as James Bond or Mission: Impossible where a number of the films already exist as and were meant to be stand alone. Here it is not just an issue that the film suffers from “Shrinking World Syndrome” (connections are suddenly made to something that happened eight films ago) but also that there isn’t really much continuity to “Part I.” This film cares more about being the “Final” reckoning than in being “Part Two” of a story for which I really liked part one.
I guess I thought that Dead Reckoning was, as extravagant as the stunts are, closer to James Bond than Marvel. There are elaborate fights, sometimes atop speeding trains, but that’s a little different from hanging off a flying jet or being able to withstand hypothermia because one has a supernatural tolerance for pain.
The highlight of Final Reckoning is a superb set piece where Ethan (Tom Cruise) has to retrieve the Maguffin Device from a sunken submarine. The timing, editing, and shooting make it easy for the audience to feel the ratcheting tension, and we know from the previous five hours of film what the stakes allegedly are. But it makes the mistake of making that Act II, and the finale has nowhere to go but down. It tries to emulate the Return of the Jedi approach — making the action sequences seem more exciting by having three of them (Ethan hanging off yet another plane, Benji trying to hack the entity while instructing another character how to perform surgery; another bomb getting the diffused; the President of the United States deliberating a nuclear first strike.) This part is much more pedestrian, and it drags.
The final act makes little to no plotting sense given that two characters that have spent the bulk of the movie saying the need the same thing to happen work in conjunction to keep it from happening. It also probably has one twist too many, probably because it couldn’t decide what to give some key franchise characters to do other than sit around and wait.
The missions have gotten longer, louder, and more preposterous over thirty years, and what was once a slightly over-the-top spy franchises grounded in deception, twists, and turns, has evolved into a one that embraces the comic book super-hero zeitgeist of the moment. Just as we grow weary of Marvel, every other franchise struggles to copy it. Oh well. I was happy to trust Ethan “one last time” but I am ready for some new action heroes.
