The marketing team understood the mission better than McQuarrie and Cruise, and they chose to accept it. They dropped the Part II title, they largely hid the AI and villains from the trailers, and convincingly sold this allegedly final act as a killer, semi-standalone action movie—except McQuarrie and Cruise continued on with their bloated, convoluted story about an evil AI entity (known as “The Entity”) trying to go all Skynet on the world.
Would anyone really have been upset if these two, who gave us the excellent Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and Mission: Impossible – Fallout, had just left Dead Reckoning Part I to its hackneyed cliffhanger and moved onto something better, something more up to the standards of the Mission: Impossible franchise–one of the most reliable franchises in the history of cinema?
Dead Reckoning Part I was easily the worst of the franchise (yes, worse than #2, which is actually easy, breezy fun and a merciful two hours), and The Final Reckoning (there is that marketing team at play, attempting to hide the truth) is just more of the sun, with the same awful villains and plotting that veers beyond the impossible into sheer stupidity. Part I was an unnecessary two hours and 43 minutes, and Part II (sorry, marketing) is six minutes longer for some damned reason. The first hour if not the first half is stacked with tiresome exposition and callbacks to previous MI films, as if we need the final (?) movie to be anything more than just an awesome, well crafted action movie. The thing is just tedious.
There are even moments, as Cruise’s Ethan Hunt desperately attempts to save all his friends, that I expected Vin Diesel to show up and shout “family!” All other problems aside, McQuarrie and Cruise seem to have lost sight of what matters or what audiences even care about. Sure, Simon Pegg is a charmer, but are we supposed to care about Hunt’s romantic ties to whatever the character is named played by Hayley Atwell, who was only inserted into the last movie after the awkward if not downright insulting death of the much more compelling Ilsa (Rebecca Furgeson). Paris (Pom Klementieff) is now one of the good guys because that is what Hollywood likes to do, and I don’t even remember Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), even though his actor’s name is Greg fucking Tarzan Davis.
And despite all this, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning offers a baseline level of entertainment value due to its likable characters and high-grade action sequences. The climactic biplane battle literally makes you sweat. A deep sea submarine mission is utterly suspenseful (at least until McQuarrie nukes the fridge with one of the dumbest moments I’ve seen in a semi-serious movie in ages). There are several other fist/knife fights and other sequences that work well.
It’s just all the connective tissue that sags under the weight of its own preposterousness that makes Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning such a disappointment.
To its credit, the return of a character/actor from the first movie works surprisingly well. And as eye-rolling as the story can be at times, the dialogue is noticeably less cheesy than in Dead Reckoning. Villain Gabriel, while still vapid, is less cartoonish here.
Even a lackluster Mission: Impossible movie delivers a punch, and there is no denying that between big action scenes and Tom Cruise running around and people defusing nuclear warheads all over the world that this latest isn’t a complete waste. It’s just a shame that McQuarrie and Cruise didn’t learn from their mistakes for this second part. Bigger isn’t always better, and The Final Reckoning proves that ten times over.
Review by Erik Samdahl.
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