Film review: Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning

My notes on Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning

Supposedly the capper to the series which began with the 1996 Mission: Impossible, this is annoyingly titled – the previous film was Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One … whereas this has dropped the’Part Two’, perhaps because the first half of this story didn’t quite click in the way the standalones which built up to it did, and perhaps because people have stopped caring about the details.  There are summations of the story so far, which is handy since the M:I films have long since ceased to be about their plots – on the model of the 1960s TV series which kicked this all off – and become showcases for Tom Cruise’s Kirk Douglas/Lon Chaney-like commitment to suffering for his art by hanging off rugged peaks, speeding vehicles and impressive buildings.

The original show, which oddly comes into play more in this entry than any other, was an ensemble drama, driven by plot – the actual lead tended to be the villain of the week, whose world was dismantled by the IMF team around him.  The film series is All Cruise All the Time – which is underlined by how replaceable everyone else is … in Dead Reckoning Part One, Rebecca Ferguson was killed off and Hayley Atwell slotted in (these characters have names, but they don’t really register) … and it’s always been strange that after establishing Ving Rhames as the against-type tech guy (in the spirit of Greg Morris in the show – one of the first non-street black characters in US TV) and carrying him over from a first film in which all the other potential regulars get creamed, someone thought it was a good idea to bring in Simon Pegg as a white bloke who isn’t quite as good a hacker but imports a kind of jittery comic relief panicky patter no proper IMF would put up with.  Also on the team is former baddie Pom Klementieff, who speaks little and in French but does action when Hayley needs a rest.  Like so many other one- or two-off M:I characters, this crowd give the impression that they could be great in a team movie, but spend most of the time watching the star do his stuff.

The Final Reckoning takes the trouble to bring back Rolf Saxon, who had a tiny bit part in Mission: Impossible, and gives ‘William Donloe’ a satisfying, even moving character arc – this is what happens to all the little bureaucrats and minions left looking like idiots when super spies break into somewhere or steal something (Donloe has literally been posted to the back of beyond).  Angela Bassett, former CIA chief, is now a black woman President – we’re getting a run of these films made when the current situation in the US was inconceivable, which are rendered almost utopian by contrast – and ‘the Entity’, a science fiction AI on the model of Colossus The Forbin Project is the big threat, in cahoots with Esai Morales, who had a couple of good roles in the early 1980s when Tom Cruise was starting out but hasn’t been as well-served by cinema as he might be.  The M:I films have always had a problem with finding baddies who play well against Cruise – whispery Sean Harris and bulky Henry Cavill have worked best – and Morales scores highly on the get-under-Tom’s-smug-skin scale.  Longtime franchise followers will be bewildered by the revelation that Briggs (Shea Whigham) is really Phelps – Dan Briggs (Steven Hill) ran the IMF in the first season of Mission: Impossible but was replaced by Jim Phelps (Peter Graves) from season two on.  And it’s another callback to the plot of the first film, in which Phelps (Jon Voigt) turned bad.

A major issue of the whole series has been a desperate attempt to get us to care about Ethan Hunt – who now has a whole raft of fridged ex-girlfriends and best pals (he gets more in this film) and a generalised IMF backstory which has it that all IMF operatives are former crooks who’ve been given ‘the choice’ between prison and becoming a super-agent.  This might explain why so many IMF agents have turned out to be bad guys, but it undermines the premise – James Bond might be a walking basket case, but he puts himself through hell for queen and country … those Fast and Furious folks are all about ‘family’ … but Ethan Hunt just didn’t want to be the sweetheart of Cell Block #9.  Here, Hunt becomes positively a new messiah – deferred to by presidents, the military, rival intelligence agencies, etc.  He also goes it alone even when the missile silos are open everywhere and the Entity is about to play Global Thermonuclear War with humanity.

The set-pieces are set-piecy – a deep dive in frozen waters to retrieve a doodad from a sunk Russian submarine and some Red Baron business with bright-coloured biplanes (the only bright colours in a rather drab blues-and-greys film).  Yes, Cruise is visibly doing this stuff in medium close-up and the palms get sweaty – but these scenes suffer from a syndrome first observed in Thunderball where a need to top what went before made for bigger and longer in an action climax rather than better and more suspenseful.  The Final Reckoning is bloated at 169 minutes and contains a hell of a lot of scenes in which people sit around earnestly in rooms talking about Very Important Things it’s hard to care about.  Director-writer Christopher McQuarrie joined the series with Rogue Nation and has stayed on for four films – Brian DePalma, John Woo, JJ Abrams and Brad Bird were one and done with the IMF; like the Fast and Furiouses, which are hanging at the moment after a Part One which came out around the time audiences were getting fed up with ‘to be continued’, the M:I series started strong, had a wobble, then got good again by leaning into absurdity, and have frittered the goodwill away with noisy, hard-to-distinguish later entries even as strong competition has come in from John Wick.  Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey get a music credit, but the gig boils down to endlessly rearranging a couple of Lalo Schiffrin tracks – indeed, this series has cannily depended on Lalo for excitement all along.

Unlike the James Bond films, there’s no mechanism in place for succession – even if the M:I premise is far more suited for reboots.  In five years time, whoever’s in the frame – Glen Powell? Michael B. Jordan? Odessa A’zion? – can take over the IMF and Cruise can do a voice-over cameo on the ‘your mission, should you choose to accept it ..’ recording.  I’d kind of like a clever long con plot on the model of The Sting or House of Games – and maybe Rian Johnson to showrun.