Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Grade: C

Mission: Impossible II (2000) had Anthony Hopkins telling Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt “It’s not called Mission: Difficult.” You can say that again. You could call this latest movie Mission: Impossible – No Pressure. Characters are constantly explaining, instructing, and preparing Cruise for something he’s about to do. “We’re gonna put this scuba suit on you and you’ll go under and while you get the shakes and experience extreme pain you’ll need to do as much exhaling as possible otherwise your lungs will explode then once you get the thing you’re supposed to get you’ll ditch the suit and float to the top and you’ll die for a few minutes but if you’re in the right place at the right time and so are we we’ll revive you…”

What Roger Ebert said in the first paragraph of his review of the first Tom Cruise M:I – in 1996 – can be said for, really, every film in the series. He calls the plot a nearly impenetrable labyrinth, of which he’s not sure he’d pass a test. But it doesn’t matter. It’s secondary to the action, aided by Cruise’s notoriety for performing his own stunts. Cruise is 62, and still standing on top of trains and hanging off planes. That’s my biggest takeaway here. There’s otherwise not enough substance in between to keep me interested.

I went back to my B+ review of 2023’s Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One to get a refresher on why it worked so well for me then, but really didn’t now. I noted that the bits in between the action had compelling enough thrills, of the psychological variety. That’s definitely lacking here. In this installment, I also felt the absence of strong woman characters. There were some fierce femme fatales with significant screen time in DRP1, especially Vanessa Kirby, who is not in this. I missed that here. What we’re left with, while we wait for the next thrilling bit of the mission, is the endless robotic conversations in conference rooms, offices, and the like. The dialogue always sounds planned, calculated, and rehearsed. Nobody stumbles on words, or interrupts anyone. That played endearingly last time, but doesn’t go over so well here.

The underwater part is cool (temperature cool, too, to say the least), and the climactic scene involving the airplanes is especially exciting. It has, deservedly, been widely talked about. This 62-year-old is having an eventful couple of days. The scene, and the film, was marred for me at the end, due to a line of dialogue, yelled out by the villain, which turned out to be false. So why even have it in there? Plus, how did Hunt survive this? I suppose people have been asking that question for 29 years. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is a couple of awesome action sequences with a bloated, padded, mechanical, boring movie built around it.

Grade: C