The eighth and final (?) entry in the franchise makes for the lowest quality film since the franchise’s second entry.
The fact that a well-known action film franchise hasn’t spurned one spinoff while producing eight films over nearly threedecades with its main star attached to all eight entries is remarkable. And aside from the director of the most recent four films (Christopher McQuarrie), including this new entry, the majority of the cast and crew have been swapped out for new ones with every mission we the viewers embark on. But Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is a continuation of 2023’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, and seemingly is the final entry in the franchise. As we have seen in the film’s marketing, Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt tells someone to trust him, “one last time.” With a sense of finality in this entry and the world on brink of disaster, the expectations for The Final Reckoning should be high. While the film does what you expect it to do in terms of delivering thrilling action, its convoluted plot and talkiness brings down this otherwise fairly entertaining summer blockbuster.
After being left with a cliffhanger at the end of Dead Reckoning: Part One, we find Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his IMF team with keys to help stop the artificial intelligence we know as “The Entity.” Having discovered its whereabouts in a submarineat the very end to Part One, thanks to Paris (Pom Klementieff), it’s a race to stop The Entity from executing its main purpose while thwarting human antagonist Gabriel (Esai Morales) as well. Taking us on another globetrotting entry, Ethan and his team try to outmaneuver anyone and anything that prevents them from stopping total and utter destruction of mankind.
With a plot like this that feels like a definitive end to such a good action franchise, it’s odd how much time is wasted in overstuffing this film for an otherwise simple A to B plot. We already knew what was at stake from the previous entry that was not even released two years ago. And yet writer/director Christopher McQuarrie and writer Erik Jendresen spend the first act of the film showing more of the same trickery from the artificial intelligence and explain things with even more detail that we already are familiar with. The film’s first act, which takes up roughly about the first third of its nearly three-hour runtime, is very talkative, with every person involved in the situation laying out what all needs to be done to prevent the artificial intelligence from achieving its ultimate goal. And by the time things actually get going at the beginning of the second hour, it becomes painfully obvious that so much of the previous hour was a wasted opportunity for more than just its boisterous score from Lorne Balfe, which does give the film a level of gravitas for what seems like the grand finale for Ethan Hunt and his friends.
Thankfully, however, things do get considerably better from the second hour up until the credits roll. We could go on and on about the action sequences here, which, face it, is what everyone most people showed up for. And yes, they do thrill at the highest of levels–from literally being in the sky with a two-plane action sequence in South Africa to an underwater sequence involving a submarine in the Arctic. Of course, the best way to see this action in all its glory is IMAX, where you feel as if you’re there with Tom Cruise himself. And it goes without saying that we can always count on Tom Cruise, one of Hollywood’s few actual mega stars, to sell us on his commitment to these action sequences and this franchise as a whole. Cruise’s cast of usual suspects deliver the goods, from Simon Pegg to Ving Rhames,and especially Henry Czerny. But two other cast members help add intrigue and sparks to the film in Tramell Tillman (Severance) as a commander of a submarine, and Rolf Saxon, who returns from the very first Mission: Impossible film to play a pivotal role in The Final Reckoning.
If this truly is the end of the franchise, The Final Reckoning could have better accommodated viewers who came for the action and dangerous consequences with a simpler plot or a considerably shorter runtime. However, I’ll still take this film’s final two-thirds over most action franchise sequels any day of the week. On top of that, I think it’s worth pointing out that there is no telling how much has changed in both this film and its connected predecessor given all the delays the films were plagued with due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the dual strikes by writers and actors that hit Hollywood. Quite frankly, it’s a miracle both of these films made it across the finish line during the past couple of years. But ultimately, two things can be true here. First, there’s no denying that this mission certainly disappoints when you stack it up against the rest of its franchise. And second, without Tom Cruise, and especially in The Final Reckoning, this franchise would be lost at sea like the submarine at the center of the story. But like his character Ethan Hunt, Cruise finds a way to show us why his commitment to delivering movies for the people is beyond incredible – even if films like this one can’t meet lofty expectations.