Hal Kitchen
God, writing any Mission: Impossible movie’s title is a punctuation nightmare! All franchises abuse the colon but Mission: Impossible already has a colon there in the series title!
Anyway, now that I’ve got the one single thing I have to say about Mission: Impossible out of the way: Misson: Impossible – The Final Reckoning has finally delivered us a trailer and with it, a series of promises from its creators. That Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning would be awash with the most high-octane action set pieces that Tom Cruise’s insurers’ cardiologists would allow, there was never any doubt. However, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning also makes another more specific promise to its audience: it promises to be the final Mission: Impossible movie. It’s called “The Final Reckoning” after all. You don’t put “final” in your title and think you can cheat your viewers out of a definitive conclusion and with its indispensable star half way through his fifth decade of movie stardom, you might think that hanging up the safety harness he never uses might have been an inevitability. Of course the Mission: Impossible franchise predates Cruise’s involvement, but it will not outlive him, assuming all goes well on set. Nowadays Mission: Impossible is synonymous with Cruise’s star power and unlike James Bond, there’s no precedent for the series’ headliner passing the torch onto someone who still has cartilage to spare. Without Cruise, Mission: Impossible will be as dead as Ilsa definitely is.
So Mission: Impossible joins the annals of movie franchises with two-part endings, the Twilights, Harry Potters, The Hunger Games etc. We all knew that Dead Reckoning: Part One was part one, and I’d like to thank the creators for the transparency on that score as I side eye the producers of Dune and Wicked, but it still did feel a little anticlimactic. To me at least, I know that’s a minority opinion. There were some undeniably fantastic scenes, some hilarious gags (I think people under-appreciate how funny these movies are at their best) and some phenomenal performances. However, the film’s non-ending did feel flat, and its efforts to tie its big-bad into Ethan Hunt’s past felt like a cheap and forced way to get some additional emotional stakes in there, and not in a way that felt at all necessary really. The “your life will always mean more to me than my own” scene (the best scene in any Mission: Impossible movie) did enough of that already. With the film leaning almost solely on this element to give its human villain a sense of character, you end up with one of the more forgettable series antagonists. However, a movie being mostly setup isn’t wholly a bad thing, if you can deliver the payoff. So, what have Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise been cooking?
Opening with a series of shots of various types of transport including freight planes, prop planes, trucks, ships, submersibles, helicopters, a dogsled, and of course, Cruise’s patented size sevens, all set to tense brass notes, we’re immediately given the impression of disparate groups from across the globe converging. We then start to get intense voice-over from Kittridge (Henry Czerny) summing up Ethan Hunt’s (Tom Cruise) whole deal, setting up The Final Reckoning as the latest in a the series string of apparent trolley problems in which Ethan’s going to have to find another loophole allowing him to save everyone, and avoid making that unthinkable choice. There’s more action sequences in a variety of exotic locales, Ethan skin dives under pack ice for some reason, Ethan chases after a plane taking off, evidently then climbs aboard, and then transfers from that plane onto a different plane in mid air, you know…a usual Tuesday.
In fact, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning seems a little too much like business as usual, as long term series fans will begin to notice. Aside from the handful of bespoke set pieces, this trailer could almost have been pieced together from clips of any of the last five movies. It’s full of visual referents to not only its immediate predecessor, but many other earlier films in the series. It looks suspiciously as if it’s going to take things back to the beginning and double down on that villain tying into Ethan’s past. It looks like there’ll be some kind of flashbacks with digital de-aging involved, or maybe Cruise can just do that with his face himself. Despite not appreciating this plot element in the last film, I’m not opposed to this film fleshing it out now that is has been established. If given some more development for his motives and more building up as a real nemesis, Esai Morales’s Gabriel could still potentially be a villain on the level of Sean Harris’s Solomon Lane or Henry Cavill’s Walker—though I think Hoffman’s Owen Davian may still be a bridge too far. The more interesting antagonist is the Entity itself, the disembodied AI program holding the world hostage against its own survival and independence. It’s a fascinating antagonist straight out of the worlds of Isaac Asimov and one which Dead Reckoning‘s subtext hilariously associated with a literal deity Ethan has decided to kill. People conceptualize the Mission: Impossible franchise as being a flimsy and plot heavy pretext for nail-biting set pieces and for adrenaline junkie Tom Cruise to show off the extremes he’ll go to for our entertainment, but this kind of emotive and ambitious subtext about the nebulous systems controlling our lives is what really lent the last movie some substance. More than anything I hope to see The Final Reckoning double down on the whole “humanity’s champion setting out on a mission to kill god” angle, and as long as we get plenty of that epicness, I can forgive a little franchise self-mythologizing.
Death to our inevitable AI overlord!
