Tom Cruise’s long run as Ethan Hunt may be coming to a close, but if that’s the case, he’s determined to go out with a bang in The Final Reckoning. Tony Stamp assesses how it measures up to the rest of the Mission: Impossible films.
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
The eighth film in Tom Cruise’s nearly 30-year-old action franchise features one of the most incredible set pieces ever put to film. It almost feels redundant to point this out, as Cruise and his team have been upping the ante for the series’ entire run, from the train tunnel sequence in the first instalment, to driving a motorcycle off a cliff in Dead Reckoning.
Watching Cruise put his life on the line for our pleasure has been a true marvel of modern entertainment, harking back to the likes of Buster Keaton, or French icon Jean-Paul Belmondo (the influence of his 1975 film Fear Over the City on latter-day Missions is undeniable). It’s also a canny pivot from a guy who went from accolades for his dramatic chops to rumours about his state of mind. Leaning into the craziness worked to everyone’s benefit.
In various interviews, including his exhaustive hours-long breakdowns for Empire Magazine, Chris McQuarrie (director of the four most-recent M:I films), is extremely candid about how he, Cruise, and their army of technicians achieve these feats: years are spent planning, refining, and rehearsing them, prior to any script existing.
Speaking about Dead Reckoning, he said it boiled down to Cruise wanting to do the motorbike stunt, and him wanting to do a train sequence. They worked backwards from there, the story coming together bit by bit as the filmmakers figured things out, often on the day. To give one example, the first scene in that movie only exists to make sense of a line of dialogue later on in its runtime, after they realised it could be confusing.
This approach of essentially gambling with millions of dollars each day of shooting in the hopes a plot will present itself has worked real magic in the past. McQuarrie was on set rewriting scenes during Brad Bird’s Ghost Protocol, Cruise so taken with his approach he installed him as the series’ director going forward.
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
Rogue Nation was a miracle, the opera sequence a Swiss watch of tension that evidently came together on the fly without any storyboarding, and the film’s opening gambit of Tom Cruise, movie star, hanging off the side of a plane, was the franchise’s most effective bit of shock and awe (up until The Final Reckoning, that is). Fallout perfected the formula, a bruising, wildly entertaining series of setpieces involving Cruise risking life and limb over and over to delirious effect.
Unfortunately, signs of strain began to show in Dead Reckoning: Part One. There was a sweatiness to its assemblage that had been missing previously, a sense that McQuarrie and Cruise had struggled getting all the pieces to fit together. The pre-opening-credits parts of McQuarrie’s films used to sing, but here they sagged.
That sense is even worse in The Final Reckoning. Perhaps because of the lukewarm response from audiences and critics, the ‘Part One’ was dropped from the prior film, and efforts were made to have this be a defining, all-encompassing sendoff for Ethan Hunt and his team. As a result, The Final Reckoning’s first hour is bogged down with recaps of other entries, supercuts of earlier stunts, and worst of all, the idea that this is All Very Important.
It feels desperate, and the attempt at gravity backfires: these films used to be fleet-of-foot, not portentous. They were genuinely hilarious in parts, while the humour here is sometimes misjudged, several attempts at levity landing with a clang in amongst all the plot minutiae and efforts to tie the franchise up in a bow (there are exceptions, including an all-time great line Cruise delivers mid-fight, all the more funny because he’s the one saying it).
But back to those stunts. The moment we begin a deep-sea jaunt through an abandoned submarine, you feel the movie finally slow down, and everything clicks into place. The sequence is prolonged and dialogue-free, going from hair-raising to nightmarish as Hunt finds himself in increasingly tricky circumstances, the actor portraying him clearly visible in each uncomfortable shot. It’s unbearably tense.
Another involves him hanging off several biplanes, and is the culmination of the M:I films’ attempts at shocking us through verisimilitude. It goes on and on, and the longer it does, the more you can’t understand how they achieved it. Your palms will sweat. It’s stunning.
Both scenes involve post-production finessing which is less distracting than previously. They really filmed a fight on a moving train for Dead Reckoning, but replaced the background digitally, leaving an impression that something was off. Similarly, in Fallout, Cruise really jumped out of a plane (over a hundred times actually), but once a CGI Paris was added to the background, it took away some of the impact.
There’s nothing so egregious here, just minute after minute of the incredibly famous actor’s face getting buffeted about at high velocity. Vanity takes a backseat in his ongoing quest to dazzle us.
The Final Reckoning is always entertaining. Even without those hair-raising stunts, it stands above most other recent blockbusters thanks to McQuarrie’s visual wit and his star’s abundant charisma. Cruise is still endlessly engaging, but again you feel the pair working hard—perhaps too hard—to keep us engaged.
Just look at the cast. It’s an absolute delight to see Nick Offerman, Hannah Waddingham, Holt McCallany, Janet McTeer, Katy O’Brian, and Tramell Tillman (very much proving he has The Juice outside Severance, even if it’s a similarly enigmatic role) show up in their first Mission. They are all brilliant actors, but just getting through that list is tiring. Add to that returning faces like Esai Morales, Mark Gattis, Chalres Parnell, Shea Wigham, Pom Klementieff, and Greg Tarzan Davis, and things start to feel unwieldy—and these are all supporting roles, not main players.
The eye for casting is on point, but you can have too much of a good thing. O’Brian is a fantastic screen presence who deserves more than to be another of Ethan’s Special Brunettes with whom he forms an instant (platonic) bond. And Davis is left to wander after other characters without any motivation or reason.
The return of Rolf Saxon as William Donloe, last seen in the first Mission, is one example of this entry’s weaponised nostalgia paying off. Aside from his great performance, the role he’s given is generous, a genuinely heartwarming addition to the story.
It’s a shame that, (without giving anything away), he’s partly there to excuse Ethan of any former misdeeds. It turns out that even when Hunt makes a mistake, it winds up being for the best.
McQuarrie’s entries have emphasised Cruise’s avatar as the most capable man on the planet, “the living manifestation of destiny,” as Alec Baldwin’s Alan Huntley says in Rogue Nation, and that always felt like a self-aware way of justifying his superhuman acts. It was balanced with Ethan being fallible: miscalculating, losing fights, needing help. But in The Final Reckoning (despite several scenes of people saving his life) he emerges as a near-deity, in ways that feel increasingly uncomfortable the more you think about Cruise’s personal life.
There’s a brilliant movie in here under all this baggage, one that nods to genre greats like Aliens and The Thing. One subplot owes a huge debt to 1964’s Fail-Safe. But taken as a whole, it’s more ungainly than we’ve come to expect (the bloated runtime is your first clue).
As The Final Reckoning grinds to a halt, it gives several characters emotional grace notes. Some are very sweet, some very clunky, but the effort is appreciated, as are the comparatively subtle final moments. It must be said, though, they don’t actually feel very final, and on cue, Cruise has mentioned the possibility of another entry during his press tour.
If it happens, let’s hope it comes after some careful rethinking. It’s hard to imagine how they could top themselves in terms of spectacle, and all other aspects are beginning to show signs of strain.
