Minor plot spoilers ahead.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning has come, perhaps the final bell tolling for those of us who, every few years, go to movie theaters to be wowed by Tom Cruise doing death-defying stunts in service to entertainment, showing the world some of what is possible in pursuit of pushing the limit in filmmaking. The Final Reckoning is built on engaging, startling sequences where an actor—who is now a decorated aerobatic pilot among other skills he learned initially for films—risks his real life to awe us.
Mission: Impossible films are primarily vehicles for Cruise to climb buildings in Dubai, fly off cliffs on a dirt bike, hang off a moving plane, and briefly drown himself from time to time. These are things we need to see because Tom Cruise needs to do them.
The techno-thriller plot is grafted across that need, connecting action set pieces with a poignant discussion of uncontrolled automation technology undermining humanity’s ability to see and say what is true. Perhaps these incredible feats are a sacrifice for Cruise and his hero character Ethan Hunt, but Cruise relishes his daring, and his dedication to film and filmmaking are translated into Hunt’s dedication to his team; the films are a perfect vehicle for his combination of charisma and incredible earnestness.
This film’s heartbeat comes from the relationships that hold the protagonist to his team, the IMF (Impossible Mission Force, not to be confused with the International Monetary Fund) initially composed of Ving Rhames’s Luther and Simon Pegg’s Benji, but gradually expanding. Heavily front-loaded with exposition (blessedly augmented with interesting images), the film may drag for some, but when it grabs hold, it doesn’t let go. There are some silly callback choices, especially in the early going, where we get most of the archival footage, but they don’t sink the ship. And they build to an exhilarating, tense, and finally cathartic final two hours. Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie pulled off another extravagant magic trick with an improvised script.
The film picks up not long after its predecessor, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Martial law has become widespread around the world as social trust has eroded while a rogue artificial super intelligence, notably explicitly limited in its capability to what it has absorbed from humans, threatens to take over the nuclear arsenals of France, India, China, Pakistan, DPRK, Russia, U.K., Israel (whose arsenal is unconfirmed in real life), and the U.S. The artificial super-intelligence, The Entity, has inspired a teleological doomsday cult whose members reach into power hierarchies around the globe.
Ethan and his team recover Paris (Pom Klementieff as the former henchwoman of Esias Morales’s Gabriel) from custody; convince their rival Briggs’s (Shea Whigham) subordinate Theo Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) to join-up; are captured in London by Gabriel—the other archvillain, cast out by The Entity for failure and now seeking to control it—and then are put in position of dilemma and contradictory orders. We meet President Erika Sloane (the CIA director in 2018’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout, played by Angela Bassett), conversing throughout the film with a national security council composed of the likes of Secretary of Defense Bernstein (Holt McCallany), CJCS Sidney (Nick Offerman), DNI Richards (Charles Parnell), Secretary of State Walters (Janet McTeer), NSA director Angstrom (Mark Gatiss), and CIA director Eugene Kittridge (the IMF director in 1996’s Mission: Impossible, he is CIA director as of the most recent film, played by Henry Czerny). Wanted by his own government, Ethan meets them at a crossroads, trying to get them to trust him and help him stop nuclear Armageddon.
The heavy delivery of plot in the first hour can feel convoluted, but the delivery flows, and the core stakes are simple to understand. The Entity has to be stopped, or it is going to destroy the world. The IMF has the team and tools to stop him, but they have to recover some key pieces. The performances are consistently good (with a lot of quiet single tears and welling eyes), though the nature of different character backgrounds and deployments renders some more interesting than others.
Hannah Waddingham’s midwestern accent as Rear Admiral Neely is good, but she’s given pitiable little to do. Tramell Tillman is slightly quirkier, and therefore more endearing, as submarine commander Captain Bledsoe. Tying Briggs back to the first film feels needless, but pays off slightly in the conclusion. I missed Rebecca Ferguson (whose character, Ilsa, I hoped illogically would return) and Vanessa Kirby (whose character probably didn’t need to return but who I liked in the films), but I don’t know where they’d fit.
Hayley Atwell gets second billing in the film after Cruise, and she certainly earns it. She is such a warm and magnetic screen presence, and holds up half the film’s sky, bringing Ethan back from at least two brinks. Rolf Saxon’s William Donloe returns from the first film, having built a life in Alaska with Tapeesa (Lucy Tulugarjuk) after Ethan’s initial iconic heist. Tapeesa is depicted as capable, crafty, and intelligent, rather than just a racial mascot, but this isn’t a film deeply exploring Inuit culture; although we do get to hear Inuit language spoken.
The Mission: Impossible franchise is perhaps the least cynical spy franchise around. The Final Reckoning has an unsurprisingly humanist and only slightly surprisingly pacifist message. This is complicated and confused, of course, by being the first Mission: Impossible in a while to bring the IMF in close, if admittedly brief, subordinate contact with the U.S. military intelligence apparatus. And there’s a longer relationship of cooperation on screen throughout the film (and, therefore, behind the camera) which influences the film’s trajectory of lionizing the U.S. military.
The Final Reckoning is a movie that makes me want to be a better person; it’s also a movie where several pieces could be cut up for Navy recruitment ads. Everyone’s fit, and there are few expressions from the good guys of any sentiment of evil, save a little saber-rattling toward the Russians and some apocalyptic hypotheses about limited global nuclear strikes.
This is very much a respect-the-troops film that obscures ideology through explicitly denying ideology as the basis of any of its conflicts. It is accurate to the plot that the U.S. is not seeking direct conflict with any of the other nation-states mentioned in the film, but it is nonetheless the U.S.—with the biggest, “most secure” nuclear arsenal— that has the responsibility and the right to direct and save the world. The capitalism which undergirds American notions of “freedom” is largely absent, save one moment when “markets” are named as under threat from the Entity. The Final Reckoning reifies the nobility of the American presidency and the commitment to principle and chain of command, which supersedes disagreement with the commander in chief.
A member of military brass who the script sets up, through verbal and body language, and a confluence of plot points, as a prospective traitor, makes a daring sacrifice. Like Captain Marvel, The Final Reckoning is explicitly in favor of the mission of America’s armed forces while simultaneously telling a story that challenges the mission’s preconceptions, effectively communicating that warfighting is a noble profession where you can make a difference, you can be the lone soldier-spy keeping the world safe. Your job won’t be putting down popular movements in the global south or killing civilians in the course of conquering mineral deposits and oil fields. You will be given the flexibility to challenge orders and will be rewarded for your moral clarity.
It’s obviously not an accurate depiction of how the U.S. military works. No one expects historical-political verisimilitude from these films, or other action or spy films. But with no standards or expectations, we accept the larger collective, subconscious effort that reinforces an inaccurate, fantastical idea about the military and intelligence that undergirds complacency in the American body politic. We are inundated with stories and images that reinforce U.S. exceptionalism and the glory and honor of our military. Its utility as U.S. war propaganda is complicated, but it’s not above reproach, marinated in U.S. ideology, as is the nature of U.S. mainstream cinema.
Nonetheless, it certainly succeeds as a spectacle. The Final Reckoning has two of the most breathtaking stunt sequences I’ve seen in years. As in Dead Reckoning Part One, there was one stunt that blew my mind despite being in trailers. But there’s another near the center of the film that you’re set up to anticipate, but which surpasses any expectations. It is part of the technical success of the film that so much of explaining crucial mission details is transparently explaining forthcoming stunt scenes that still deliver amazement.
Deeply connected to Tom Cruise’s drive to save the self-destructive film industry, he and director Christopher McQuarrie are making movies like no one else. You have to see Mission: Impossible to see stunts like these, and you have to go to the theater to see it. For that alone, they’re notable films; that the stunts are worth seeing and strain credulity even when you know they were done practically at great financial expense and personal risk makes them remarkable.
The Final Reckoning has some inelegantly executed exposition, some slightly silly callbacks, and is far more emotionally invested in the American military than its immediate predecessors, but it is still a winning filmgoing experience because of the earnestness, commitment, and execution mostly unmatched across the industry.
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