‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’ Review

Concluding a film franchise in a way that both pays tribute to the movies that came before while standing alone as a satisfying installment in its own right is a challenge. Even more so when the given film franchise consists of seven movies, spanning thirty years, garnering critical and commercial success all powered by one of the biggest stars in Hollywood history.

‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’, tries to master this delicate balance but, despite some typically bravura action set pieces, it buckles under the weight of its own legacy, devoting too much time to exposition and ponderous self-mythologizing while failing to deliver the kind of end to end high octane energy that has become a hallmark of the best films in this series.

‘The Final Reckoning’ is a direct sequel to ‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’, picking up where that film left off with Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) in possession of two halves of a cruciform key needed to access the source code for the destructive AI system known as The Entity. Ethan needs to track down Gabriel (Esai Morales), a highly trained assassin who has been working for The Entity, in order to find out where the source code is located and how to access it, all while avoiding his own government which doubts Hunt’s allegiance. To accomplish his mission, Ethan brings together his team, filled with faces old and new, to save the world and each other.

Does that plot sound absurd? Did you roll your eyes every time I mentioned The Entity? If so, you’ve keyed in on the biggest issue with this film. As a direct sequel to ‘Dead Reckoning’, ‘Final Reckoning’ was saddled with the most absurd villains in the entire franchise. Yes, this franchise is called ‘Mission: Impossible’, and it is filled with characters and events that challenge credulity, but the villains have been persistently grounded as real world threats. Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Sean Harris, most notably, brought to life world threatening villains with true gravitas and rationalized philosophies that challenged Ethan’s own worldview. As threats, they felt substantial and terrifying with a compelling amorality, while The Entity and Gabriel feel aimless and silly. What is The Entity’s endgame? What happened in Gabriel’s life to drive him into servitude for a genocidal Windows screensaver? We don’t know, and the movie is all the worse for it.

The film opens with a montage of scenes from the previous ‘Mission: Impossible’ films, with accompanying voiceovers from the wide range of characters that have populated this universe. It is the first sign that director Christopher McQuarrie and crew are concerned with paying dutiful homage to the series at large. Unfortunately this results in a frustrating amount of franchise rewriting, aimed at weaving the action in this film into the grander fabric of the past thirty years worth of ‘Mission: Impossible’ films. Gabriel? He was the reason Ethan joined the IMF! The Rabbit’s Foot from ‘Mission: Impossible III’? That was actually The Entity! It’s absurd and the movie knows it, wasting so much energy trying to explain and make sense of the increasingly convoluted lore, all to artificially manufacture dramatic weight for this specific film’s flimsy premise. The desire to make this film a worthy sendoff for the entire franchise is further undermined by the increasingly large cast of characters making up Ethan’s team, most of whom were just introduced in the previous film. I like Hayley Atwell as Grace, she is a charming performer. But do I really buy that she has become the most important person in Ethan’s life after just a single film? Not really. By saddling such new characters with so much of the emotional weight, the dramatic stakes of the climactic scenes are diminished in ways that could have been avoided had we stayed primarily with the legacy characters with whom we have such deep histories.

Despite all of these structural flaws, despite its slow start and onerous length, when the time comes to deliver action sequences ‘The Final Reckoning’ carries on the franchise’s proud legacy, delivering the kinds of masterful set pieces not found in other mainstream action movies. Whether deep under the Arctic, soaring through the sky on a biplane, or aboard all types of terrain in between, Tom Cruise continues to put his cinematic death wish on the screen to deliver impactful thrills. He sprints his way through the streets of London and the grasslands of South Africa, demanding the viewer take this film seriously if only because he takes it so seriously himself. The same can be said for the entire cast, they give their all to imbue action and dialogue with grit and drama, even as they are forced to regurgitate lines about the ridiculous Entity.

With masterful action craft, committed performances, and world spanning thrills, ‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’ provides enough excitement to justify its title. While it never quite matches the highest peaks of the franchise, there are still enough scenes during which you will hold your breath, transfixed by the kind of action moments that are increasingly rare in the movies. And for that simple pleasure, I’ll forgive having to spend three hours wondering what The Entity does with its time between acts of terrorism.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence and action, bloody images, and brief language.
Running Time: 2 hours and 49 minutes

Director Christopher McQuarrie
Writers Christopher McQuarrie, Erik Jendresen
Stars Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Henry Czerny, Angela Bassett
Rating PG-13
Running Time 169 Minutes
Genres Action, Adventure, Thriller