Your mission, should you choose to accept this clumsy comedic homage, is to endure almost 3 hours of the latest (and final?) Mission Impossible film. Dead Reckoning Part II (now re-branded as “The FINAL Reckoning) is the fourth outing for Tom Cruise and his director/writer bestie Christopher McQuarrie and is the 7th (or 8th, depending on how you count) total in the franchise. And that’s the curious thing the film attempts to grapple with: legacy. This final adventure tries to combine all prior films into a singular world, retconning prior story points and McGuffins to imbue them with significance for this new slap-dash feeling story.
The issue: most of the previous adventures were director driven one-offs: unique genre exercises in a particular filmmaker’s style. For example, the difference in tone and worldbuilding between the 1st film (Brian DePalma’s grounded, shifty, neo-noir) and the 2nd Film (John Woo’s gonzo, Ssow-motion gun-fu) is stark; they’re different planets and their respective main characters only resemble each other in name. Later films continue this trend, changing Cruise’s protagonist Ethan Hunt to fit the style of the filmmaker’s world. This all changes when Cruise and McQuarrie start their decade long partnership with the last few films. The problem then becomes trying to square the all the circles, attempting to forge a sequel to Dead Reckoning: Part 1 and somehow, tie in an unneeded conclusion to all 7 unconnected prior adventures. Indeed, somehow Palpatine has returned.
In this finale, Ethan Hunt and all his unrelated, prior incarnations adventures are retconned to be the source of (and somehow also the ONLY solution to?) defeating the new, evil AI algorithm. While we spend little screen time with this new villain, it is determined to end the world in nuclear war (for reasons). Once more, Cruise needs his friends to help him stop it. Only, he doesn’t really?
Previous installments feature teamwork and fun banter between all our main characters in the espionage hijinks, giving Cruise the chance to bounce off his team as they give him the odds over radio or tell him how insane he is before he does an insane stunt. Unfortunately, in this outing almost all the extended action set pieces here are essentially silent short films featuring death defying stunts by a lone 63-year-old Tom Cruise as he risks his life for our amusement. This is part of where the film falls flat. While the stunts are the best, top notch executed action sequences you’ll see this decade, they lack the character and whimsy of prior films while focusing exclusively on Tom.
And that’s the real issue here: the extreme focus on Tom, or more specifically the death-defying spectacle he’s promised us. Of course, he’s a movie star and of course he is endlessly fascinating on screen, no one argues he’s not the last great one of a dying breed. In fact, he’s become a living movie action poster for the franchise: every new Mission Impossible’s marketing focuses on the fact that Cruise is really doing the insane things you’ll see on screen, just buy an IMAX ticket and drink it in. But therein lies the problem: excellent action requires the service of an engaging narrative to propel it.
And Alas, the real issue with the film is the story. Poorly crafted dumps of expository dialogue feel like the popsicle stick bridges connecting the story beats and the masterclass, high tension action set pieces. We never quite feel the engagement or stakes because the antagonist has no character: it is literally not a character, it’s a rouge AI program hellbent on destroying the world. We get no Hans Gruber charm or hammy Bond villain monologues, no living performance to feel the threat from. Instead, we get team huddle exposition dumps in between globetrotting action where our characters keep telling us just how dangerous the threat. But we never cut to the bad guy. Things are true simply because a character says them out loud and that just doesn’t have the impact required. In a film that constantly wants to show you and not tell you in the action sequences, the dialogue and plot doesn’t follow the same rules. | Joseph C. Roussin
