Well, that’s it, folks. Mission: Impossible is over. On the one hand, it feels hard to believe that this latest instalment of possibly the most successful action movie franchise of the last 30 years is truly the last. On the other hand, the stunts and set pieces can only get so much more spectacular with each new film, and the seemingly indestructible Tom Cruise isn’t getting any younger, despite his astounding on- and off-screen endurance suggesting otherwise.
To the credit of the marketing department, the publicity for The Final Reckoning, the appropriately titled eighth entry in the franchise, has been very effective in promoting it as event viewing, an explosive culmination of all the preceding films, made especially for the IMAX screen (a point Cruise helpfully brought home by scaling the roof of London’s BFI IMAX earlier this month) on an eye-watering estimated budget of up to $400 million. So, is it worth the hype (and the whopping £24 IMAX ticket, plus booking fee)?
The Final Reckoning picks up right where the last movie, Dead Reckoning, left off. Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, agent of the Impossible Missions Force, is pitted against a malevolent AI entity known as, er, “the Entity”, which is spreading misinformationacross the globe and threatening to plunge the nations of Earth into nuclear war.
Ethan’s mission, should he choose to accept it (spoiler alert: he does), is to use the Cruciform Key he salvaged at the end of Dead Reckoning to unlock the Entity’s source code – which he has to fish out from the wreck of a Russian submarine at the bottom of the North Pacific – to destroy it and save the world. Together with reformed pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell), ice-cool and imaginatively-named French assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff), faithful computer whiz and franchise stalwart Benji (Simon Pegg), and stoic technician Luther (a poignant turn from Ving Rhames, the only cast member other than Cruise who’s been there since the first Mission: Impossible film back in 1996), Ethan sets off on his final assignment.
For all the teasing of a spectacular finale, in some ways, The Final Reckoning feels oddly restrained. The lead-up to the large-scale action (barring some lower-level punchups with henchmen) is a slow burner, albeit eventually leading to an impressive biplane chase with thankfully minimal CGI. The finest sequence is towards the end of the second third, when Ethan undertakes the scuba dive from hell to reach the submarine wreck. It feels and plays out more like a thriller than an action movie, and brilliantly ramps up edge-of-your-seat tension, although a bit of suspension of disbelief is needed for the climax.
The main downside of The Final Reckoning is that the plot (which admittedly is pretty secondary to the action, as you should expect from Mission: Impossible) is pretty convoluted, and the exposition surrounding the Entity and how to destroy it is extremely dense, often leaving the audience none the wiser. At times, it does also lean a bit too heavily into bringing back characters and plot points from earlier in the franchise, as nice as it is to see some old faces and feel a sense of the franchise coming full circle.
On the whole though, Cruise ably carries the film once more with nothing less than a completely committed performance, plus a hell of a lot of running. The Final Reckoning is ultimately a fitting conclusion to Mission: Impossible. As an action movie, it’s great fun, but it’s also tinged with sadness, for something more than the franchise. This feels like the end of a certain type of old-fashioned, crowd-pleasing, (mostly) practical effects-oriented blockbuster, and Cruise representing a kind of film star that seems to have all but disappeared. Can it make a recovery? That is Hollywood’s mission, should they choose to accept it.
