Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning review: 'good old-fashioned movie magic'
With his willingness to take on death-defying stunts, 62-year-old Tom Cruise throws down a challenge to the rest of the film industry to raise its game, writes Alistair Harkness
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (12A) ★★★★
Thirty years on from the first Mission: Impossible, Tom Cruise is back for one last hurrah as IMF agent Ethan Hunt, ready — nay, destined — to save humanity yet again. Picking up several months on from the previous instalment, Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning concludes not just the two-part story begun in that film, but, apparently, the series as a whole, going to great lengths to create the illusion that it’s had some kind of overarching continuity all along.
Clearly it hasn’t, but that doesn’t stop returning director Christopher McQuarrie (who’s helmed the last four films) from flashing back through the franchise’s greatest hits, throwing in some deep cut references to the first film, and cheekily adding some out-of-nowhere reveals to link hitherto insignificant supporting characters to Ethan’s past. He even retrofits this two-parter’s malevolent AI villain, the Entity, with a backstory of its own, connecting it to Mission: Impossible III in order to make Ethan more culpable in this new threat’s existence. If Cruise and McQuarrie brought the series to an organic end point with the spectacular Mission: Impossible — Fallout (the sixth film), think of these final two movies as a very long encore or victory lap.
Cruise’s own self-styled status as the saviour of big screen entertainment has also been baked into the plot this time, not just in the outlandish, turned-up-to-eleven acts of insane derring-do he performs for real for our viewing pleasure, but in the fact that Ethan’s now achieved messiah-like status. Characters refer to him as “the chosen one” and he’s plagued with visions and premonitions after the Entity gives him a Matrix-style glimpse of the future. There’s also a death-and-resurrection scene, and, in lieu of a loincloth and a whipping, he gets embroiled in a smack-down with a knife-wielding bad guy while stripped down to his pants.
That the film is thoroughly ridiculous goes without saying, but as with previous instalment Dead Reckoning, its self-serious tone can sometimes make all the relay-race exposition scenes a slog, particularly in its early stages as the film glumly lays out what’s at stake as its truth-distorting AI villain’s destabilising effect on the world pushes it to the brink of nuclear annihilation.
But for all its narrative flaws, clunky dialogue and failure to explain why Simon Pegg’s goofball tech-nerd Benji has been elevated to the franchise’s second most important character (especially when Jeremy Renner was right there waiting in the wings for two movies), Cruise’s own willingness to go all out to make cinema truly exciting eclipses any deficiencies.
A huge set-piece on a sunken submarine is a masterful mix of practical and digital effects and good old-fashioned movie magic, but it’s the well-publicised biplane finale that really kicks things up a gear. The most outrageous thing he’s done in the series to date, the stunt is a franchise high that sees the 62-year-old crawling over (and hanging off) the wings an analogue plane mid-flight as if it’s a jungle gym. And he’s not just showing off either. The vertigo-inducing close-ups and medium shots of Cruise giving a proper performance while hanging on for dear life reinforce the film’s anti-AI themes while also throwing down a challenge to the rest of the industry to raise its game in the face of artistry cannibalising tech. There’s no substitute for the real deal. Cruise’s career is the proof.
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is in cinemas from 21 May
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