Everyone seems to like at least one Mission: Impossible movie, and no one seems to agree on what makes them likable. Maybe you’re a snobbish aesthete who insists the only good one is Brian de Palma’s, maybe you think the series lost a step after it stopped being an auteur showcase, maybe you think it actually got better when Christopher McQuarrie took over full-time director duties. People love posting their series rankings on social media once a year. I’ve never seen two lists exactly alike.
So let me begin this review by laying out my priors. My favorite Mission: Impossible film is the fifth, Rogue Nation, McQuarrie’s first. The film is wall-to-wall spycraft, lies and masks and plots, getting its big splashy stunt out of the way in the cold open and growing smaller and smaller in scale as it goes on. It starts with Ethan Hunt clinging to the side of a massive airplane, and it ends with a footchase and a knife fight. Its pivotal opera sequence is a marvel of moving pieces and escalating complications and double-triple-quadruple crosses, outdoing (sorry not sorry) de Palma on his own turf. That opera sequence is Mission: Impossible to me. At their best, these films pivot around setpieces not of traditional action but of deception, not beating the bad guys in a fight but tricking them with clever misdirection. Ghost Protocol has a great one of these; while Ethan climbs the Burj Khalifa, the team uses trickery to make two targets believe they are meeting each other in the same room, when in fact each is meeting one half of the team on different floors of the hotel. Fallout has a fun one too, where the entire crew plus director Alec Baldwin put on a show for traitorous John Lark and trick him into confessing his secret identity. It’s why the second and third films fall flat for me despite their particular qualities. It doesn’t feel right for Ethan Hunt to solve problems with shootouts. At their best, these are zippy capers, more Ocean’s Eleven than John Wick. Villains have never mattered much to Mission: Impossible because the real villain is always the situation—a problem that must be solved or an item that must be retrieved, and the escalating complications that get in the way of that goal.
Dead Reckoning, the franchise’s last film and former Part One, was a letdown so crushing it stayed with me for hours afterwards. The bizarrely bleak tone, the plodding pace, the endless talky exposition scenes that only increased the space between action beats more sparse than ever….Dead Reckoning was a dead fish: flabby, mushy, unpleasant. You can’t win me over with Brian de Palma imitations. I don’t even like the real Brian de Palma very much. And as irrelevant as villains are to the series, the Entity and its right-hand man Gabriel were a major whiff. The Entity itself is only intermittently frightening, all its threats (to truth itself and the nature of reality) abstract and unexplored. One standout moment has the Entity imitate Benji’s voice on a radio directing a sprinting Ethan in exactly the wrong direction. An interesting notion for a series about lies, but the film never seemed interested in exploring it.
The Final Reckoning starts promisingly where this idea is concerned, though. Two months after the last film, the entire world has fallen apart due to the Entity spreading fake images and videos and ideas across the internet. No one is living in the same reality anymore, and the division this has caused has led to protests and riots and martial law. The Entity has also started a doomsday cult whose worshippers are seeded around the globe. When Ethan (who starts the film disavowed and on the run, of course) is spotted by agents at a party, he tries to throw them off: “Are you sure it’s really me?” For years the IMF has relied on targets being unaware of what’s real and what isn’t. Now, deception has gone global. That the Entity is Ethan’s fault is true in more ways than one (brace yourself for the looniest of the film’s several insane callbacks to previous entries; we’ll get to those in a bit) but it’s more interesting as an idea—the implication of a genie let out of a bottle—than as a literal fact.
The last film left us on a literal cliffhanger: Escaping from the plummet of the Orient Express into a canyon, Ethan finally retrieved the key he’d been chasing (and talking about, interminably) and learned that it unlocked something in a sunken submarine that could destroy the Entity for good. But would it surprise you to learn that The Final Reckoning takes over an hour to get Ethan even in range of that submarine? The Final Reckoning begins with a major Dead Reckoning hangover. Where the series used to be chock-a-block with setpieces, The Final Reckoning swaps in more humdrum chatter, a setup to a setup to a setup. It’s nearly halfway through this three-hour behemoth when it feels like the story really starts. It’s a bewildering posture for McQuarrie, who was once so good at pacing these movies that he had to talk Tom Cruise into keeping the opera scene in Rogue Nation. Into keeping it! Yet The Final Reckoning is, for a while, as committed to monotony as its predecessor. McQuarrie keeps things moving more successfully here, such that it took me longer to notice how little had happened. In retrospect, though, it’s a wasted first act. You might as well show up to the theater an hour late. You won’t have missed much.
What you will have missed includes the aforementioned loony callbacks. The Final Reckoning is a self-obsessed film, inexcusably wrapped up in its own mythology. The film opens with a lengthy montage of moments from all the previous films under a monologue from Angela Bassett about how Ethan is the coolest and smartest and most heroic guy in history. Even for a series which tends to deify the character, this lays it on a little thick. Not content, the film repeats this moment later on, doing a near-verbatim replay of the briefing scene from the Dead Reckoning prologue where new characters played by Holt McCallany and Nick Offerman grumble in astonishment at Ethan’s record (which we see clips of yet again, in case we’d forgotten). Then we get a shriek-worthy explanation of a forgotten MacGuffin’s relevance to the current plot, and an equally hysterical reveal of one character’s secret familial relationship to an old character. The latter actually makes Ethan cry what I suspect were genuine tears Cruise’s part, and it only makes it feel more absurd.
It’s frustrating that he and McQuarrie are so insistent on unifying the series this way. The last film introduced core concepts about the IMF which fit awkwardly with what we’ve seen of the organization before, namely that all its agents were once captured criminals and a corny bit of pablum called The Oath that gets recited ad nauseam in both Reckonings. I don’t mind a little inconsistency (that the Director of National Intelligence in Dead Reckoning has never heard of an organization which was the subject of Senate hearings a few years prior is hand-waveable nonsense) in a series that thrives on switching things up between entries. That’s exactly why it’s so bothersome that these last two films try to put everything that came before under one big umbrella.
The back half picks up nicely, though. A shirtless knife fight on a submarine is intercut with a house-destroying shootout on land, and while this kind of action has never been the series strong suit, it’s a shot in the arm when the film sorely needs it. The subsequent bit which has Ethan exploring a sunken submarine is a genuine return to form. It’s a totally wordless sequence of escalating dread as Ethan moves from room to room inside the corpse-ridden submersible, with every hatch he opens taking the rushing water to the next room with him. Once more, the villain is the situation, and the complications intensify.
Under McQuarrie, Mission: Impossible has become a stunt showcase, each new film introducing a new we-did-it-for-real bit of action to build the marketing around after Ghost Protocol’s Burj climb resurrected the franchise’s image. It’s strange to look back and see the batting average, though. McQuarrie punted on Rogue Nation’s big stunt as part of that film’s unique structure. Fallout’s HALO jump was cool in theory, but slathered in so much CG that you’d never guess it was done in the actual atmosphere and not in front of a green screen. Dead Reckoning’s bike jump had a “that’s it?” quality, exacerbated by its omnipresence in the marketing and the CG cliff painted over the ramp. These bits tend to play better in behind-the-scenes videos; in the films, they barely register. It was a welcome surprise, then, that the biplane stunt featured in the trailers turned out to be excellent, a marvel that beats all predecessors (including the Fallout helicopter chase on which it’s modeled) for vertiginous thrills. The CG is tastefully hidden here; for once, McQuarrie has figured out how to make a real stunt actually look real. He has also appropriately placed it at the climax of the narrative, something which somehow eluded every previous film in the franchise. And unlike his previous stunts, it doesn’t just come and go. It’s a real stunt sequence this time, drawing out the danger and layering on inconvenience after inconvenience. It’s a breathtaking scene. The screen throbs with adrenaline, the first hour’s tedium is forgotten. For a time, it feels Mission: Impossible is finally back from hiatus.
But is it really? The Final Reckoning’s biggest sin is its total abandonment of the spycraft and deception setpieces that used to be the series’ signature. Ten minutes in, Ethan and Benji use masks to break new team member Paris out of prison, and it’s the last time we ever see masks in the Mission: Impossible franchise. What a depressing thought! The opening writes checks with its talk of the Entity rewriting people’s realities and making lies the new status quo and so on, but it refuses to cash them. There’s no trickery, no misdirection, no double-crossing, no disguises. Ethan asks the government for what he needs to complete his mission, and he gets it all. Consequently, the film feels adrift and lacking identity. McQuarrie doubles down on his de Palma affectations, and they seem even more aimless when there isn’t any spycraft on screen. The soul of the series isn’t present in The Final Reckoning, which makes its attempts to reframe the previous films as having all been leading up to it feel insulting. It brings me no joy to report this: This just isn’t Mission: Impossible.
When I think about The Final Reckoning, all that comes to mind are missed opportunities. There could have been deception setpieces in place of tedious exposition. The Entity could have been a menacing villain rather than playing almost no role in the story. Gabriel’s zealotry could have been explored rather than just dropped. They could have reversed one of the worst narrative decisions made in Dead Reckoning instead of leaving it as a permanent, hideous stain on these final entries. They could have cooled their heels on the flashbacks to previous entries. They could have made a normal Mission: Impossible movie. Instead, McQuarrie and Cruise made something else, something bloated and awkward and lore-obsessed and, admittedly, possessed of two series-highlight adventure-slash-stunt scenes which no one in their right minds could not enjoy. That makes it, for a while, a fun time at the movies. It also makes it a poor Mission: Impossible film. Then again, Mission: Impossible seems to mean something different to everyone who watches these films, and The Final Reckoning may hit on everything that someone else loves about this series. We’re all in the Entity’s reality now, and we cannot trust that all of us are seeing the same thing.