It has grown from a 1960s television series that opened with an earworm theme and a nifty self-destructing message into a thirty-year entertainment behemoth. You could call this mission creep: it began in 1996 with the first Mission: Impossible movie, a Tom Cruise vehicle in which he played Ethan Hunt, a man of action whose raison d’être is his forced recruitment into a secret organisation that specialises in saving the world, one impossible mission at a time.
It is a franchise with remarkable longevity, featuring epic stunts, evolving plotlines and a mystique around Cruise and his cinematic ambitions. It’s almost as if he and his character have become hard to tell apart.
At first, each movie had a different director, beginning with Brian De Palma, who handed over to John Woo. Continuity arrived with Christopher McQuarrie, who came on board in 1994 for number five, Rogue Nation, and has co-written and directed the next three.
In many ways Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, with its implied element of resolution, invites both nostalgia and evaluation. There’s the suggestion contained in the title change: the film was originally called Dead Reckoning Part 2. This time, the traditional, self-destructing message to Ethan sounds more like a eulogy, or at least a speech at a retirement function.
Early in the film a rapid succession of clips gives a high-speed “previously on Mission: Impossible” recap of much that has gone before, not just in the previous instalment but also in the six movies that preceded it. Threads and characters from past films return to the narrative in various ways like guests in an episode of This Is Your Life. The mysterious deadly object that was the focus of Mission: Impossible III turns out to have had ramifications for the present crisis. An encounter on a remote island introduces a character we haven’t seen since the first movie, and does it very neatly. There’s also a connection drawn between the villain from the first instalment and a relatively recent figure in the line-up. It all adds to the sense that this film explicitly completes a circle. (There is even a reference in the film to a significant date, 22 May 1996, which also happens to have been the US release date for the first movie.)
It’s not all about ancient history, of course. There is unfinished business to be dealt with from Dead Reckoning, which gave us both a literal cliffhanger (a wonderful sequence involving a train hanging precariously off the side of a mountain) and an all-pervasive, invisible foe that had not yet been defeated.
In The Final Reckoning this deadly foe, known as The Entity, is AI gone rogue on a global scale. The human connection is a man called Gabriel (Esai Morales), who has designs on world domination and plans to use The Entity to his own ends.
Ethan is still working with his core team: genius hacker Luther (Ving Rhames), who has been in every film, and tech-turned-field agent Benji (Simon Pegg), on his sixth mission. Two significant additions arrived in the previous movie: nonpareil pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) and single-minded assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff). Ethan’s commitment to those close to him has become a core principle of the M:I universe; once again, it is shown as both a strength and a weakness.
If Mission: Impossible has a philosophy, it’s something like “Chaos bad, social cohesion good.” The Final Reckoning sees the world in a particularly parlous state. The Entity’s greatest threat is that it divides to conquer, undermining every authority and institution. It affects both nations and individuals: those countries that have nuclear weapons are even starting to consider using them before The Entity takes them over. Across the world, many are embracing the message of destruction they have received via social media, something Ethan references when he is attacked by an Entity-pilled member of the armed forces. As he fights back, he tells the man, through gritted teeth, “You. Spend. Too Much. Time. On. The Internet.”
Overall, the tone is solemn, even dour: there are fewer lighter moments, either the scenes played for laughs or the action set-pieces that have often embraced moments of absurdity. But the increasingly messianic, save-the-world tone takes its toll. Self-sacrifice has always been a theme, and it’s more evident here than ever.
Yet some things remain the same. The extended, somewhat longwinded exposition gives way to Stuff Happening. Every member of the team has a part to play: there are bombs to be defused, objects to be retrieved, codes to be cracked. We see Shirtless Cruise and Fist-Pumping Running Cruise, just as we have come to expect.
As always, audiences must combine a willing suspension of disbelief when it comes to many aspects of the plot with a strong faith in Cruise’s commitment to doing his own stunts. There is always something pleasingly tactile about the action sequences of the M:I franchise, no matter how far-fetched they are. This time, we see Cruise dispatched underwater to retrieve a deceive from a submarine. He also takes to the air, forced to hang perilously off a biplane not once but twice, in an extended chase sequence that feels partly like a homage to the silent era. (When I interviewed McQuarrie in 2018 about the sixth film, Fallout, he spoke of how Buster Keaton’s virtuosic 1926 action-comedy The General was a reference point he and Cruise shared.)
Of the new characters, the most memorable is a submariner, Commanding Officer Bledsoe, played by Tramell Tillman (Severance), who devours his brief scenes and few lines of dialogue. The way he calls Ethan “mister” is an absolute treat.
Is this Reckoning actually Final? The answer is probably not, but the film seems to mark a turning point, a partial reset. It’s not clear what comes next, but it will surely involve Cruise. When I spoke to McQuarrie, he was already well aware that there was no real end in sight. “We joke about how some Mission: Impossible down the road is going to have Tom, in his nineties in an iron lung, being thrown out of an airplane,” he said. So here’s to another thirty years. •
