After 29 years, Tom Cruise’s time as the world-saving black ops agent Ethan Hunt is almost over—but there is one more breathless adventure in him yet.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is a direct sequel to Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (formerly known as Dead Reckoning Part One) but feels like it is almost three decades in the making and is as close to perfect as a movie can get.
That’s because Final Reckoning is a love letter to the films preceding it. It will delight fans with moments honouring the seven other films in the franchise, weaving in old enemies and older friends with a distinct sense of purpose.
Picking up a few months after Hunt’s heart-racing escape from the derailed train at the tail end of Dead Reckoning, he and his team comprised of Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) are holed up underground.
With his determination to stop Gabriel (Esai Morales) and his evil AI overlord known as The Entity undiminished, Hunt and the audience soon learn that the world has since fractured as suspicion, false information, and fear have run rife.
He recruits Grace (Hayley Atwell), Paris (Pom Klementieff), and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) to keep the Entity, and a very cool-looking cruciform key for controlling it, out of unscrupulous hands—including the US governments’.
Audiences should note Final Reckoning isn’t a film where everything is spoon fed to them, and beyond seeing the seventh in the series, watching the first and the third is recommended.
There are notable absences (a character established in the second half of the series is not even mentioned) but, blessedly, “fan service” is also absent as the callbacks to previous instalments are warranted.
Director Christopher McQuarrie allows the tension to grow, his set pieces to breathe, and the stunts to shine, with expert filming helped by the minimalistic editing style employed by Eddie Hamilton.
Mission: Impossible has a lot to recommend it, but the main event for many are the madcap stunts, often performed by Cruise himself, as they are here, with the standout being an extended water-based stunt set in a submarine.
In a word, Mission: Impossible – the Final Reckoning is pure “cinema.” Unafraid to take risks, it breaks from the usual style of frenetic I-can-barely-see-anything Marvel editing, with long stretches free of dialogue.
It secures Cruise’s status as one of the last true movie stars (although the man himself would disagree with the designation), with the film’s content, stunts, and cultural impact guaranteed to leave its mark on film history.
Pressing on a nerve running through the current zeitgeist (usually a trait reserved for horror movies) the film shows the dangers of AI—dangers which, if not imminent, are already here.
It asks the questions: Who can you trust when everything is fake? How can you stop something no one in power really wants you to stop? How do you put the world to rights when everything is falling apart? How can you control something so powerful?
Although Final Reckoning (and Dead Reckoning before it) both raise good arguments about these, the answers are not as simple as getting one fearless—and seemingly superhuman— man and his equally fearless team to fix the problem for us.
In a critical part of the film, Hunt looks into the camera, saying “I’m asking you to trust me one last time,” and audiences would be doing themselves a disservice if they didn’t choose to accept.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is rated M and in cinemas now.
