[6]
Writer/director Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) concludes the Mission: Impossible franchise with this eighth, overly-long and curiously somber film. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team spend half the film wrestling with the U.S. government before finally being cut loose to find and destroy ‘The Entity’, an A.I. threat that has seized control of several nuclear arsenals around the globe. The stakes have never been higher as the world approaches a doomsday scenario in just 72 hours, during which time the President (Angela Bassett) struggles with military leaders who want her to launch preemptive attacks on The Entity’s nuclear sites. While she staves off the apocalypse, Ethan must brave the frigid Arctic waters to board a sunken submarine to obtain The Entity’s source code and prepare for a final showdown in South Africa with the A.I. menace and all those who seek to control it.
The Final Reckoning is easily the most dramatically tense film in the franchise, but it’s also the least fun — a supremely glum experience that struggles to maintain momentum, and saves all its action for the last hour. McQuarrie balanced action and humor so well in other entries, that it’s a shame to see the epic conclusion take a decidedly dour, lopsided turn. It’s a good movie — it’s just not a Mission: Impossible movie. Cruise gets precious little screen time with his winning cast mates Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg, and Hayley Atwell hasn’t done enough to earn second-billing status in only her second film in the series. Sorely missing is Rebecca Ferguson, whose character died in the previous film. The Final Reckoning would have been more compelling if she had been allowed to fulfill Atwell’s functions within the story. The film is also too self-important, littered with a number of unnecessary call-backs to earlier chapters in the franchise, trying to mine some greater, dramatic importance to the series than it warrants. I mean, these are fun, goofy action movies, not Oscar-winning dramas.
Despite it’s tonal shift and comparative lack of action, the film’s still a moderately entertaining flick if you can temper your expectations. Ethan’s escape from the sunken submarine as it rolls off a cliff into greater depths is a memorable sequence, and the climactic airplane chase features some of Cruise’s most breathtaking stunt work in the entire series.
With Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny, and Nick Offerman.