I have looked madness in the eyes and come away questioning my sense of reality. Does this madness have a name? Yes, and it's Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. This is a truly baffling film that is awkwardly reverential of the past entries and its leading man, yet forgets what made them so beloved in the first place. Much like how Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt straps on an AI mask that curses him to see a maddening future, the experience of watching this final film in the action franchise is most akin to enduring increasingly painful psychic damage for nearly three hours. Playing like a greatest hits album that's somehow overstuffed and undercooked, it's an inescapably ludicrous closing chapter with an initially fun starting energy that soon gets lost.
Though it picks up not too far after Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, this sequel launches us into a wildly different and oddly dull world. For what feels like an eternity, we get heaps of exposition about how the artificially intelligent force known as The Entity from the previous entry has begun rapidly taking over the nuclear arsenals of various countries and driving everyone toward the brink of all-out war. The only one who can stop the end of life on Earth as we know it is, of course, Ethan and his team of merry maniacs who are the Impossible Mission Force. While this sounds like it could all just be another familiar Mission: Impossible movie, it's the scattered and borderline anarchic execution that sends everything completely flailing all over the place.
From the extended monologue that throws out most everything the series had going for it to the long stretches that feel like we are still just waiting for the actual movie to finally start, it feels as though we are being pranked by returning director and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie. Surely there are more than just two big action sequences that last for more than a few seconds, right? Unfortunately, the reality is most of the film is entirely about setting things up. The experience is most defined by a sense of sweatiness as it strains to establish all the many moving pieces that it ends up doing very little with in the end. The last movie was more dexterous in how it built its action around getting two halves of a key, but this one is about finding one person to get another thing to find some info here before actually getting anywhere. It's all accumulating contrivances and callbacks that are sporadically chaotic fun for a good run there at the beginning due to how ridiculous it is, but it eventually just runs entirely out of steam.
This comes despite the best efforts of the supporting cast as almost all of them are wasted in the film's emphasis on bowing down to Cruise. When we are repeatedly told how his character is the greatest, most moral, and courageous to ever live, it all starts to cross over into being a parody of itself. Cruise does get a couple of thrilling action sequences near the end: one a genuinely tense and well-shot descent into a sub, while the other is a Looney Tunes-esque sky battle that's a true achievement of stunt work. But they aren't enough to save the film. Where the delightful prior entry was tightly focused and built itself around several well-crafted set pieces that were memorable because of how they were given room to breathe, this forced finale feels like we are trapped in the mind of a teen who has downed 20 energy drinks and isn't stopping. The film moves faster than any Mission Impossible has before, but this is all to disguise how little earned momentum it has.
Whether this is actually the end for Cruise and the IMF remains to be seen as the climax of the film plays with empty world-ending nonsense without offering much in the way of closure. While the writing was never the standout of these films, this one really struggles to create any real emotional payoff amid the noise, marking a new low for the franchise that only rarely rises above rock bottom as Cruise ascends to the skies. It moves so quickly that it takes a bit for you to notice how it is crashing and burning before you, but once you do (and the novelty of seeing a careening car crash wears off), all you're left with is the cold, dead wreckage that Cruise — even when risking his body for it — is never able to give life.
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
Rated PG-13
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
Starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg
