Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning starring Tom Cruise is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
Despite an increasing sense of hegemony in contemporary blockbusters, the Mission: Impossible franchise has maintained consistent quality through practical effects and humanist convictions. It’s too early to tell if the eighth entry, The Final Reckoning, is indeed the franchise’s alleged swan song, but it’s an engrossing picture regardless. While not free from flaws, its jaw-dropping action, indomitable protagonist, and surprisingly timely themes make it the popcorn entertainment many desperately crave.
Following on from where the previous film, Dead Reckoning, ended, IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) now holds a crucial key. This unlocks the source code to a malicious, highly advanced AI programme called The Entity, the hard drive of which is located in a missing submarine in the Arctic Ocean. The Entity has since spread globally and is taking control of the planet’s nuclear arsenals one by one to incite nuclear armageddon. Thus, it’s a race against the clock as Ethan and his team scramble to find this submarine and utilise the source code to destroy The Entity, despite the desires of numerous countries and disavowed Entity acolyte Gabriel (Esai Morales) to control it for their own ends.
The stakes could not be higher, so writer-director Christopher McQuarrie and his team up the ante through the franchise’s steadfast dedication to authentic thrills, which is the very thing that cemented these films’ place in the zeitgeist. In the silent picture days, before digital effects, committing to death-defying stunts was often the only way to capture scale or stakes in a story. It was arguably reckless, but such a willingness to create something genuine is why we have immortal images like the train stunts in Buster Keaton’s The General or Harry Lloyd dangling off the clock in Safety Last. By channelling that same energy, committing to genuine stunts as much as legally possible rather than basking in CGI overload, Cruise, McQuarrie, and the rest of the crew are championing what cinema is capable of when real passion and the desire to exhilarate are in the driver’s seat.
Awe-inspiring action is born from this, and The Final Reckoning has plenty of it. Razor-sharp editing and fluid direction keep the spectacle in focus, immersing us in its sheer audacity. Smaller moments – such as the splicing of three separate fisticuffs together – do a lot to highlight the urgency of the story and the lion-hearted nature of the characters, but two sequences stand out in particular: a midpoint submarine sequence and the climactic biplane fight plastered on the movie’s marketing. Each is a crucial culmination of the story’s stakes, designed to leave viewers on the edge of their seats. The submarine sequence utilises no soundtrack or dialogue, only eerie sound design and inventive camerawork to heighten the peril as Hunt navigates what is essentially an underwater coffin. It could be its own short film.
Meanwhile, the biplane sequence not only features sweeping cinematography, heart-pounding music and wire-tight editing, but also the jaw-dropping intensity of the action is amplified by the tenacious, borderline-psychopathic stunt work that Tom Cruise has consistently demonstrated.
Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt, Hayley Atwell plays Grace, and Simon Pegg plays Benji Dunn in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.
It’s in the creation of such nail-biting adrenaline that the film is able to explore its themes and showcase its characterisation. While Ethan Hunt may not have the household status of Bond or Bourne (Hunt and Cruise are arguably synonymous with each other), his defining characteristic has been his refusal to let others die, a sentiment tested throughout the picture. Where others would abide by a cynical “you can’t save everyone” mentality, Hunt’s belief in what’s best for everyone, be it his team or millions of people he’ll never know, is what makes him such an engaging, resilient protagonist. Cruise gives a commendable physical performance, with standout supporting performances helping to ground the emotional undercurrent of the story. Highlights include Hayley Atwell, Rolf Saxon and especially Angela Bassett as ex-CIA director turned US President Erika Sloane, whose arc consists of learning the value of Hunt’s philosophy.
Hunt’s steadfast belief in humanity and how that informs the narrative and action paves the way for rich, compelling themes. Part one of this story, Dead Reckoning, conveniently came out when AI saw a spike in usage. The Final Reckoning continues this exploration of humanity versus technology, namely, how humanity’s determination and shared understanding are always better than the cold apathy of machines, something the lack of on-screen gadgets and gizmos this time around may allude to.
Given Ethan’s desire to eliminate rather than control The Entity, regardless of what that does to many countries’ sense of power, there’s even something quite anarchist about the film’s convictions – that unrestrained power is better left untouched than obtained, even if it means destroying the status quo and starting again. They’re timely observations that only add gravity and suspense to the eye-popping action.
There’s a lot to admire about The Final Reckoning, all of which makes it an astonishing, epic experience. But it unfortunately takes a wee while to get there. In the first act, the film feels a bizarre need to connect various elements of its plot to the previous films in the franchise. The son of a character from the first film and the recontextualising of a MacGuffin from the third film are just two examples of this. For a franchise that has continuously stood out for its singularity in the contemporary scene, watching it succumb to the Marvel-esque need to connect everything is disappointing.
That it repetitively uses flashback footage from previous films to highlight these connections makes this issue stand out like a sore thumb. Although colour-graded to distinguish past and present, these moments are clumsily edited and, frustratingly, demonstrate just how much of the early stretch relies on over-showing. It’s so unlike McQuarrie’s usual visual deftness that one has to wonder if outside influence shaped this first act.
Make no mistake, though, when The Final Reckoning is good, it’s incredible. As much as its bloated first act proves somewhat eye-rolling, the majority of its runtime showcases what Mission: Impossible does best – authentic, breathtaking action, a protagonist whose resilience is his greatest quality and themes that prove surprisingly rich on closer examination. If this is indeed the end for the franchise, then here’s hoping more blockbusters will follow its example and champion authentic thrills over easy pandering. On that front, it’s mission accomplished for this film.
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