Part 8 of the Trilogy

 

Mission:Impossible-The Final Reckoning

starring Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Pom Klementieff, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Hannah Waddingham, Esai Morales, Tom Cruise, Tramell Tillman, Shea Briggs, Greg Tarzan Davis, Nick Offerman for some reason, Henry Czerny and Angela Basset

directed by Tom Cruise's Stunt Coordinator Christopher McQuarrie

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YOU KNOW EXACTLY HOW THIS MOVIE WILL GO BECAUSE YOU'RE NOT SEVEN, BUT THIS IS THE SPOILER WARNING ANYWAY

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OK, let's get this right out of the way up front: this movie isn't very good. But is it a good Mission:Impossible movie? That's a separate, more complicated question. Now that these are purportedly over, we can take a step back and consider them in a fuller context, both one by one and in relation to each other.

1. Mission:Impossible: First, I'm not sure how to set this titles off from this list because they use all the punctuation, both colons and dashes, in all of them. You're just going to have to figure it out. Anyway, I remember this being fine. Emilio Estevez gets his face impaled by an elevator shaft that is somehow decorated with what looks to be a giant scimitar for some reason. A helicopter blows up in a train tunnel. Sets the tone: fucking goofy, but really going for it, maximum effort at all times. Basically a movie version of Tom Cruise as a personality.

2. Mission:Impossible 2: Really genuinely terrible. John Woo only makes one movie, the plot of which is irrelevant. I blame him for the recurring motorcycle thing in M:I (he loves motorcycles), though it's funny Tom didn't carry over the slo-mo pigeons and churches. Thandiwe Newton largely wasted, should have been brought back at some point, but no. They got the IT dork from the first movie back for this newest one, but not her, not once? Lame. Anyway, almost killed the franchise.

3. Mission:Impossible III: OK, J.J. Abrams kind of sucks, but he knows how to create mystery and tension, even if he's ABSOLUTELY FUCKING ALLERGIC to resolving any of those things. The secret here is he doesn't try. Focus on character (in this one, they actually tried to give Ethan Hunt character), with real emotional stakes AND get Philip Seymour Hoffman to sell these beats as something of a plot and Bob's your mother's brother. The one that set the formula. I can see now most of the rest of the entries relied on the goodwill this one established. It's legit good.

4. Mission:Impossible-Ghost Protocol: Yay, we lost the numbers in the titles, but being really honest, for these next several, I'm going to have to go back and figure out which one we're talking about because they get all super similar. I think this is the Jeremy Renner one where they do that building climb? That part was dope.

5. Mission:Impossible-Rogue Nation: Couldn't tell you the plot if you started shoving bamboo splinters under my toenails, but I'm pretty sure this is the first Rebecca Ferguson one, so automatic 10 out of 10.

6. Mission:Impossible-Fallout: Renner disappears, but we get Henry Cavill cocking his arms like they're a shotgun in a bathroom fight scene. Also Michelle Monaghan comes back as Ethan Hunt's wife from back in III when they tried to make him a person, which actually worked pretty well. I did a whole write up for this one already, but basically I liked it? "It's just some people throwing really interesting punches and breaking shit," I said at the time, which, hey, there's some high praise.

7. Mission:Impossible-Dead Reckoning: Again, total honesty, I forgot everything about this until I offered to rewatch it with my domestic partner lady so we could go see the new one this past weekend. She hadn't been to a movie theater since pre-COVID, so we prepped the night before and wowee, is this not great. Stunts are good, set-pieces are good (the one with the train at the end is pretty great actually), but the plot and the Esai Morales character, bless him for trying, is tacked on and so forgettable, they actually forgot to put in him like 95% of the next movie.

As far as Final Reckoning goes, yeah, that's about what you need to know about it. The franchise built itself to it's first real peak (III) on the scaly, pointy back of the Godzilla-sized talent of Philip Seymour Hoffman and his ability to make you hate his terrible guts, but what you get by Installment 8 is symptomatic of the slow whining hiss of the helium coming out of this balloon (and, to some degree, injected into Tom Cruise's very puffy face) over the course of 20 years. The "bad guy" is literally nobody, it's nothing, it's the idea of a bad guy in the form of a googly blue waveform thingy that sometimes gets an extreme closeup and arguably more screen time than Hannah Waddingham's American accent.

It's not novel or interesting to note that by now they think of the stunt set-pieces, which are of course still great, and then just plug in the rest of the "plot" to mark the time between them and call that a script. I can't tell you how they filmed that submarine sequence (rotating set I think), but the blend of CG and practical was really well done. It achieved what these films must achieve or fail entirely, making you feel tension in a situation where you know absolutely that the hero will survive in the end. As a result, even when these are new, they feel like prequels even in real-time because the end result is blatantly, obviously, graspably knowable. Nobody goes into it thinking "Oh, is this the one where the bad guy nukes the world and escapes after killing the hero/es?" No, you're thinking of Avengers: Infinity War. This is a Tom Cruise movie and Tom Cruise (the actual human, not the character) has more rigid rules for how he's depicted than Thor or Captain America.

What did the blue-eyed Entity do? It doesn't matter. What was Esai Morales' Gabriel's relationship to it? I dunno, it doesn't matter. There's an empty space left deliberately at the hole of this film that can only be filled by people talking about how Tom Cruise/Ethan Hunt is the only person in the whole world who is pure enough to "do what needs to be done" and then just being OK at leaving it there, details-wise.

Does he get a weird distorted face from being FOR REALS on the outside of a plane flying at hundreds of miles an hour? Of course he does. Does he die and come back to life? Stop trippin', you know the traditions. And does he say to his group of homies that "the only people we can trust are in this room right now?" I don't think they'd be allowed to release it if he didn't. And, finally, does someone at the end who doubted him ALL ALONG say "He did it... the son of a bitch actually did it"? LITERALLY THE SON OF A BITCH ACTUALLY DOES.

Nothing about this film will let you down if you come looking for just those things. But did you think that, possibly, Hayley Atwell was brought in to set up a successor, to continue the story starting at her IMF origin in the last movie? Ha, gotcha, loser! Her big moment here is she gets to grab a thing real fast because of how good a pickpocket she is. She contributes zero plans, has zero agency (ha), reduced to serving as a setter-upper of things that Tom Cruise will finally arrive at and make worth it. She develops nothing; remember she was a pickpocket the first second we saw her in the last movie and she's still basically that at the end of this one. Basically she got the John Boyega treatment from all those Star Wars movies he was in: promising character setup shoved off to the side to make more room for the safest, most predictable bullshit. But that was JJ Abrams, and we've already established the he sucks. Maybe that's all you need to know going in to this one? It's like JJ Abrams made it, but Philip Seymour Hoffman was, in the most profound and existential of ways, unavailable.