“MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - THE FINAL RECKONING” - EARLY REVIEW
Tom Cruise invites you to come for the reckoning—and seriously, there is so much reckoning! Reckoning for days!—and stay for the final stunt.
After almost 30 years of reckoning since Brian De Palma’s 1996 launch, Tom Cruise says goodbye to IMF superagent Ethan Hunt in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - THE FINAL RECKONING, the eighth (and unfortunately, the seventh best) entry in the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE film series.
Once again directed by Christopher McQuarrie (who has directed each film since the fifth, ROGUE NATION), Cruise reckons with a game cast of familiar faces (Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Angela Bassett, Henry Czerny, and DEAD RECKONING additions Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, and Esai Morales, once again channeling his best Snidely Whiplash), while also reckoning with some inspired new faces (TED LASSO’s Hannah Waddingham, SEVERANCE’s Tramell Tillman and LOVE LIES BLEEDING’s Katy O’Brian are put to great use, along with veterans Nick Offerman, Holt McCallany, and Janet McTeer), who are all well-versed in convincingly delivering passages of covert ops gobbledygook in a plot involving the fate of the world at the proverbial hands of The Entity, an all-powerful, omniscient AI that (of course) only the reckless renegade agent Hunt has the power to stop. The new film immediately follows the events of DEAD RECKONING, but a rewatch of the series isn’t entirely necessary because there are several lengthy clip-show style “previously on MISSION: IMPOSSIBLEs“ to disrupt the momentum—ahem, I mean, catch you up to speed.
Alas, the film’s mission, which it chose to accept, took on the lumbering, unwieldy and unnecessary narrative burden of tying all of the previous missions together into one big fated supermission. Techniques involving long monologues and lots and lots of aforementioned clip reels from the previous films, makes this film’s mission, well, impossible to comprehend (even by M:I standards), with only a modicum of the action and stunts (really, two sequences) that fans pay to see. At almost three hours—only 20 minutes shorter than Cruise’s MAGNOLIA but with less catharsis and no frogs—this surprisingly clumsy film has an alternately intense-but-slow, deadly-serious-but-deeply-silly ramp up to a (mostly) dynamite final hour.
On the other hand, it’s MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, whaddaya want? The two sequences of action that I alluded to (including a 20ish-minute, wordless underwater sequence that plays like THE ABYSS meets RIFIFI, as well as the breathtaking final sequence) are impressive on nearly every level. Tom Cruise owns the screen as usual with utmost unimpeachable commitment to his craft, once again making his case for being the Last Movie Star; a man who, like Hunt, has always played by his own rules, and is unfairly tasked with the burden of the fate of big-screen moviegoing itself.
If anything, for me, the most exciting thing to come out of the movie is to see where Tom Cruise takes his career from here? Will he follow a Paul Newman sort of route, or harken back to his own beginningsand take on interesting dramas once again? His next film will be directed by Alejandro G. Innaritu (BABEL, BIRDMAN, THE REVENANT), which is an exciting prospect. Maybe he teams up with his MAGNOLIA director Paul Thomas Anderson again? Yes please! Or is there a 9th Ethan Hunt adventure? Eh…
Bottom line: your moviegoing mission, should you choose to accept it, may have to just simply satisfy as a trip down memory lane this time around, but if you love the other movies for what they are (and while I say this is the seventh best in the series, there is an admittedly very wide chasm between this and M:I 2), then I reckon that you may have a good time.
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - THE FINAL RECKONING opens in theaters and IMAX everywhere Friday, May 23rd (just in time for Memorial Weekend).
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Zach is a proud member of the Minnesota Film Critics Association (MNFCA). For more info about Zach, the organization, or to read other great reviews from other great Minnesota-based film critics, click here: https://mnfilmcriticalliance.wordpress.com/