Tom Cruise does awesome stunts with biplanes but you gotta wait through like two hours of movie to get to that in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, a movie that is allegedly the finale of this Mission: Impossible series.
In a movie with a smattering of Little Bads, the Big Bad here is the Entity — an AI that “eats truth” and is causing havoc all over the world, which is such an eyeroll of a “yeah, I’ve got that on my phone” thing but this one is attempting to hack into all the world’s nuclear weapons systems and control them so that it, the Entity, can destroy all life on Earth and … something. Throughout the movie I remained murky on the something, the explanation for how nuclear apocalypse benefits the Entity. But whatever the reason, it really wants this. And it has even convinced a few human people that nuclear apocalypse is a cool idea, so occasionally we get an Entity-puppet-person throwing a wrench in some Team Impossible Mission plan.
Nuclear apocalypse, that’s The Entity’s goal. The movie’s goal is to connect many of the various Ethan Hunt (Cruise) missions (i.e. the previous movies) as all sharing a part in the rise of The Entity. So we get a lot of flashbacks here to accompany talk about how this thing he stole in a previous movie provided some building block to the Entity in another movie or how this guy from the first movie is related to this thing now. The good news is that you don’t really have to care about any of this to enjoy the best parts of Final Reckoning. The bad news is that we all this discussion is a slog to get through and I wish we could have just replaced the movie’s first 40 minutes with one of those Star Wars crawls.
The meat of this deal is our familiar team — Ethan, Benji (Simon Pegg), Luther (Ving Rhames), requisite girl Grace (Haley Atwell), villain turned ally Paris (Pom Klementieff) and extra person American good guy Theo (Greg Tarzan Davis) — performing a series of tasks to attempt to stop the Entity before the Entity can blow up the world. President Angela Bassett (her name is Erika; Wikipedia says the character has been in three of these movies) is getting competing advice to either do a preemptive bombing on all the nuclear powers (which wouldn’t seem to solve a single problem but sure) or just unplug her weapons so the Entity can’t control them. (The movie doesn’t, as far as I can remember, address the “just unplug the weapons” element but it did stop me for a moment. Ethan and the team have to travel the world, cheating death multiple times, but also nations could just unplug their weapons? I get that the Entity has sown mistrust and nations of the world have stopped communicating with each other but I mean come on.)
Anyway, our heroes perform a bunch of tasks — and stunts — to stop the Entity, President Angela Bassett and assorted “Madame President, we can’t trust this one rogue agent” types are hanging out in a room with maps and countdown clocks, and then, throughout, assorted troublemakers show up to give the tasks an extra challenge. One of recurring regulars of this sort is Gabriel (Esai Morales), who was in the last movie.
We have here maybe a solid 50 minutes of fun action sequences, including an interesting sequence where Ethan has to fight his way through a sunken submarine that is on a shelf in the ocean, slowly rolling toward an abyss. And we also get the set piece finale with the airplanes, cross-cut of course with a scene of the Team trying to work out various computer-y, wire-y, bomb things. These scenes deliver the feeling of “wheeee!” that I look for in my Missions: Impossible. Tom Cruise with his “my family gets more death benefits if I die in the line of duty” energy doing absolutely crazy stunts that you can tell are, to some degree, not just green screen, is why I buy the ticket.
Unfortunately, this movie is two hours and 49 minutes long and we spend a whole lot of time in the other kinds of scenes, most of which don’t add any of the energy and lightness that is this movie’s hallmark when it’s really humming. There are very assembled-with-duct-tape story elements trying to draw in barely remembered characters or events from earlier in the series. As awesome as Angela Bassett is, there is probably too much time spent with her and her cabinet and their ultimately irrelevant discussions. There are some lesser action scenes that feel like a box of puzzle pieces are just being thrown at you — Hand! Knife! Tom Cruise’s face way too close up!
The Mission Impossible series is one of those franchises when the best movies pare back the story and let the artistry of the stunts shine. The Final Reckoning too often tries to steal its best elements’ spotlight. B- In theaters.