Mission: Impossible needs a better send-off

This is the end
Hold your breath and count to ten
Feel the earth move and then
Hear my heart burst again
For this is the end
I’ve drowned and dreamt this moment
So overdue, I owe them
Swept away, I’m stolen.

You may wonder — as you should — why a review of a Mission: Impossible film begins with a Bond theme song. Adele’s famous lines for Skyfall, every word of it true for what is said to be the final M:I film, were playing in my head as I walked in to watch The Final Reckoning. When I came out close to three hours later, my mind silently screamed: ‘This CANNOT be the end’.

Despite the conclusiveness of its title, The Final Reckoning is far from the endgame and the salutary send-off for one of the greatest action franchises Hollywood has ever produced. One whose heart and soul has been kept pumping singlehandedly, from one adrenaline-shot action piece to another over three decades, by one man — Tom Cruise.

As Ethan Hunt, the death-defying, gravity-challenging super agent of the Impossible Missions Force, Cruise, to repeat a cliche, has not only taken on the onus of saving the world from adversaries both human and non-human, he has also saved — and also, resurrected, as evidenced by the post-pandemic tonic to theatres called Top Gun: Maverick — cinema on more than one occasion. That remains alive to a large extent in The Final Reckoning, but the franchise (and Cruise) needed more. Much more.

First, The Final Reckoning is the most verbose of all the Mission Impossible films. Which would be justified in a way — it is the end, after all, and recapitulation is a given — but the ‘previously on’ throwback of this 169-minute-long film is stretched way too much. The expository feel — especially in what is undeniably a first hour dull enough to challenge even the most staunch fans of the franchise — takes away from the inherent frenetic pace that has come to define the M:I films.

Nostalgia, of course, plays a significant role in this film, with director Christopher McQuarrie — helming his fourth M:I outing — harking back to the previous films. That not only includes the cast throwing around MacGuffin-like phrases — “Rabbit’s Foot” to “Anti God” (all bow down to the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) to “Doomsday Vault” — but also the return of a crucial character from the past.

But words are all they have for a large part of the film. At one point, with the lines in The Final Reckoning alone threatening to outnumber the total stunts in all eight films, I slid back in my seat and muttered to myself: ‘This film could have been a podcast’.

But thank God for Cruise who gets into all-out action mode soon, and brings in some much-needed vitality to the script. That includes two fantastically choreographed and executed stunts, one of which involves Cruise and two biplanes and the beautiful countryside greenery below; the other, equally jaw-dropping, takes place under water with Cruise engaged in the kind of do-or-die fatalistic action that has come to define Ethan’s ‘run’ in the Mission: Impossible movies. This one is a true nail-biter, with Cruise making a daring, potentially deadly ocean dive to retrieve the Entity’s source code from a sunken submarine.

The plot, to be honest, is nothing much. Working in direct continuity to 2023’s Dead Reckoning, the action picks up two months after the events of that movie. Hunt is still in the hunt for the more contemporary villain called the ‘Entity’, an all-powerful AI tool, which, in reality, is an unremarkable key comprising two parts. Ethan has to race against some of the biggest countries — and syndicates — in the world, all of who want to get their hands on the Entity and harness it for its power. Ethan seeks to destroy it with the aid of his unwavering team consisting of members both old (Ving Rhames as Luther, Simon Pegg as Benji) and new (Hayley Atwell’s Grace and Paris, played by Pom Klementieff).

The scale of the story in The Final Reckoning is sprawling. It sets the grandest, most apocalyptic stakes in a Mission: Impossible film yet, with nothing less than “the total annihilation of humankind” on the table. Like all M:I films, it moves a lot geographically, but unlike the older films, it ends up doing too little.

The number of characters is a lot more than its predecessors and while that doesn’t impede the film as such, it does take away some of the elements the franchise is well known for. Sudden plot twists, double crosses, the classic bait-and-switch climax... we get none of that here. What we also get very little of is the trademark M:I humour, with whatever little of it there is being supplied by Atwell’s Grace. But the script’s unexplained insistence on establishing a deep connection between Grace and Ethan is too far-fetched and in many ways a blatant indifference to the significant position that Rebecca Ferguson’s spunky yet sensitive Isla Faust held not only in Ethan’s life, but also in the franchise as a whole.

It is all good as long as Hunt continues with his stunts, sprints and stares. But The Final Reckoning often tends to fall back on its new-found friend — yes, exposition — with various iterations of how the world stands on the edge of a precipice, that “it was all leading up to this” and that Hunt alone can save the world from doom — being uttered by various characters at various points. But do we really need to be told that? After all, if not Ethan, then who?

If this is, well and truly, the end, The Final Reckoning should have been a big blowout bash. Instead, what we get is a kind of ‘self destruct’-mode finale, as it takes on a ponderous and often gloomy tone. Mission: Impossible needs a better send-off, and so do we. Its leading man may be pushing 63, but if there is anyone — and let’s not look beyond the man who is unarguably the last bonafide movie star — who can continue to make Ethan Hunt both immortal and invincible, it is Tom Cruise. “We trust you.”

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