Well, the eighth Mission:Impossible film is here and while it has its moments — with Tom Cruise in control, how can it not — it is perhaps the dullest entry in the series, which has been on a non-stop mission to defy physics and define action movies since its reinvention in Mission:Impossible - Ghost Protocol.
That doesn’t mean that the action in Mission:Impossible - Final Reckoning is any less exhilarating or the death- (and physics) defying stunts that Cruise’s Ethan Hunt performs are any less jaw-dropping. It’s just that the film, directed by Christopher McQuarrie, is a little dreary at times as the expositions keep coming while Ethan and his team hunt a rogue AI called Entity who seems to be taking control over all the nuclear power countries around the world. The aim? Cause an armageddon and annihilate human existence. And the only one who can save the day is the man IMF wants to probably put back into the prison he was taken out of all those years ago.
Final Reckoning begins two months after the events of Dead Reckoning, with Ethan in possession of the cruciform key that can open the vault that holds the source code for Entity. Only time is running out as it takes over one nuclear superpower after another, forcing the president of the United States, Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett), to take some difficult and unpopular decisions, one of which is to give Ethan what he wants so he can kill the Entity instead of handing control of it over to the US.
But the Entity isn’t the only one Ethan and his modified team (RIP Ving Rhames as Luther) — old Benji (Simon Pegg), newly acquired members we met in the last film like Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Paris (Pom Klemetieff), newly-minted Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), and blast-from-the-past William Donloe (Rolf Saxon) — are hunting and being hunted by. There is the menacing, by-the-book villain Gabriel (Esai Morales) who wants the Entity so that he can control it.
As people on the surface inch closer to an all-out nuclear war, below it — mostly in underground tunnels, submarines and the deep sea — Ethan is running, sometimes out of danger, mostly towards danger and always out of time. And the clock’s ticking on more than one bomb.
To make the impossible possible, Ethan has to find the coordinates of the submarine destroyed in 2012 that contains the source code of the Entity, for which they need to find the only radio that may have detected the destruction then. He will then have to go deep sea diving (there are fisticuffs before that with Cruise in tight black underwear), get the source code, swim back up (Cruise held his breath for an insane count of six minutes at a time to shoot the sequence) and hope his friends find him on time so he doesn’t die. But that isn’t the end of it. The whole plan hinges on neutralising the source code with a “poison pill” that Luther created, which for some reason Ethan left in the pocket of his dying friend, for Gabriel to find.
Into the picture comes Cruise once more hanging mid-air, this time from a biplane, as it does aerial acrobatics (I have stopped counting the number of lives he has, it is definitely more than a cat’s).
All of this is great, except for the choppy editing to get around loopholes. And the flashbacks (though exciting the first time) get a little tedious, as does the ponderous orchestral music that has replaced the thrilling background music, and the fact that everyone, in some form or the other, gives Ethan the lifetime achievement award for making the impossible possible.
Final Reckoning may have been touted as the last Mission:Impossible film, but with a new team in place and the authorities finally grateful to him for saving the world, it’s unlikely that Ethan, or Cruise, is running out of fumes anytime soon.