Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning: Flabby and Oh, So Blabby
By Liz Braun
Rating: C
Not to put too fine a point on this or anything, but Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is an interminable slog.
The film runs just under three hours; most of that seems to be exposition, not counting a couple of complicated action sequences and the usual bits with Tom Cruise running very, very, very, very fast.
It feels mean-spirited in the extreme to criticize this film, given that it’s one of the great hopes of the summer season and given that Mr. Cruise singlehandedly resurrected movie theatres with Top Gun: Maverick a few years ago.
Nonetheless, Final Reckoning is a dud.
The final mission sees Ethan Hunt and his posse come together once again to save humanity and prevent the end of the world. The Entity, that evil bit of artificial intelligence, has turned the world into a cesspool of lies, hatred, and paranoia. Timely.
But once the talk turns to the original source code of the Entity and the Doomsday Vault and how villainous Gabriel (Esai Morales) now wants to control the Entity and how Luther’s (Ving Rhames) “poison pill” means Luther is in trouble and how the Entity demands Ethan Hunt is now the “chosen one” and on and on and on, the storyline quickly becomes unintelligible.
Moreover, the film is also some kind of Ethan Hunt’s greatest hits, so time is devoted to recapping many of our hero’s amazing past exploits. An hour passes. There are flashbacks.
Grace (Hayley Atwell) turns up. There’s a fight. Ethan Hunt takes his shirt off. There’s a bomb. There is bombast. Ethan Hunt runs very, very, very, very fast across a city — an Uber wouldn’t have been quicker? — and it’s all so discombobulated that even the most avid fan of the franchise begins to feel a soupçon of despair.
(Those who ascribe to the Hot Tub Time Machine method of scientific explanation — “Hey! It must be some kind of hot tub time machine!”— will be especially disheartened at the amount of time devoted to explaining the inexplicable, the inconsequential, and the inane.)
When will this thing get going? a viewer asks herself, but Final Reckoning never really ignites.
The Entity begins overtaking the nuclear facilities (and capabilities) of various countries, putting the entire planet at risk. Angela Bassett shows up as the U.S. President. Tom Cruise leaps from a plane into the freezing Bering Sea.
What follows are a couple of terrific set pieces, one a tense, complicated underwater mission undertaken in the cold and dark, and the other a daredevil aerial battle, but it all comes too late for much audience emotional investment.
What else? Simon Pegg, Pom Klementieff et. al. do their thing. Trammel Tillman and Katy O’Brian are memorable in their roles. The grand finale is preachy and weird. Flashbacks touch upon all manner of characters from previous M:I movies and pains are taken to connect people and places with the stories that came before this one.
You won’t care.
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. Directed by Christopher McQuarrie, written by Bruce Geller, Erik Jendresen and Christopher McQuarrie. Starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Simon Pegg, Angela Bassett, Ving Rhames, and Esai Morales. In theatres May 23.