The eighth movie in the series, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning does leave itself a door cracked open for possible future films. Nevertheless, it does feel like Tom Cruise’s farewell to the franchise that started in 1996, when his Ethan Hunt was dealing with magneto-optical disks because they were the leading edge of technology. Nobody fools Father Time: His hair may be the same, but the sharp facial features that made him into a movie star all those decades ago are lengthening. He’s starting to look like the 63-year-old man that he is. The time is ripe for a graceful retirement, which is no more than what he deserves.
That graceful retirement might have taken the form of a good movie, but unfortunately, the need to say goodbye to its defining star results in a disjointed piece of storytelling. Ethan is in London in one scene, South Africa the next, and back in London in the one after that. Would it have killed director Christopher McQuarrie to insert a shot of an airplane flying through the sky just to let us know that Ethan is traveling? He does insert old shots of many of the actors who have graced this series throughout its history (Rebecca Ferguson, Alec Baldwin, Laurence Fishburne, Jon Voight, Michelle Monaghan, Keri Russell, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) to give a sense of all the people Ethan has touched in his long career, but these montages aren’t well done and feel like so much padding in this 165-minute epic.
The story picks up a few months after the end of the last film, as the president of the United States (Angela Bassett) delivers Ethan a message on VHS videotape, so he knows it hasn’t been digitally tampered with. World order has broken down completely with the AI known as the Entity spreading taking control of the world’s nuclear arsenals. If Ethan doesn’t stop it, it will cause an apocalypse that will eradicate the human race. However, if Ethan does stop it, it will destroy the internet and likely cause a number of wars that may very well eradicate the human species as well.
The nods to the franchise’s past does one good thing in bringing back a character who hasn’t been seen since the original film, and whose reappearance is an untrammeled delight. Something else from the first movie resurfaces: Ethan’s vulnerability, namely his psychological need to save others and his fear of failing to do so. This comes up in an early scene when Ethan helplessly watches Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) save London from a nuclear bomb by setting off a smaller explosion and sacrificing his own life. The series never did enough with this character facet of Ethan’s, and while this is nice to have, it feels like too little and too late.
The movie doesn’t disappoint in the area where it has been consistently best: its action scenes. There’s a great, nearly dialogue-free sequence when Ethan climbs aboard the sunken Russian submarine from the previous film and finds the seacraft rolling on the bottom of the ocean floor, which complicates his mission by making nuclear warheads fall on him in the torpedo room. The climax is too convoluted by three-quarters, with Ethan needing to recover two doohickeys and put them together while his team fights off both IMF agents and the bad guys, but it does have Ethan chasing after Gabriel (Esai Morales) through the air, jumping off his biplane onto the villain’s biplane and hanging off the wing as Gabriel tries to shake him off. That might just be the best stunt in the entire Mission: Impossible series.
Films like these are about their emotional connections with the audience and how they leave after having been part of our moviegoing lives for so long. That airplane fight is followed by Ethan silently saying goodbye to his team and then melting anonymously into a crowd on the street. It’s a better farewell than Jason Bourne got, and if it’s Ethan’s last turn in the field, we can all acknowledge it.
Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning
Starring Tom Cruise. Directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Written by Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen. Rated PG-13.
