In the don’t-try-this-at-home climax of “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” the thrillingly doom-laden last chapter of the “M:I” series, Tom Cruise does something you expect — he’s featured in the kind of elaborate stunt sequence that’s become this 30-year-old series’ trademark — but he also does something you may not expect. He tops himself in the most outrageous way. He literally flies beyond all the stunts he’s done before, leaving us in an exhilarated state of awe.
Cruise, as the unstoppable IMF agent Ethan Hunt, is trying to catch up with Gabriel (Esai Morales), the film’s serviceably sinister villain, who wants to gain control of the Entity, the film’s apocalyptic projection of artificial intelligence and everything it’s capable of — like initiating global nuclear war, just because it can. Hanging around Gabriel’s neck is the digital “poison pill” created by Ving Rhames’ tech wizard Luther. If Ethan can get his hands on that device and slip it into the podkova (a gadget the size of a cell phone that contains the Entity’s source code), he can trigger the end of the Entity’s power. The two men are in primitive propeller planes. Gabriel is flying a yellow-and-black one, and Ethan…well, he has climbed aboard a red one with a bad-guy pilot, and as the planes zoom through a sunlit canyon and then out into the open air, he attempts to gain control of it.
This means walking on the wing and dangling from a thin bar and wriggling his way from the passenger seat into the cockpit, all while the plane is rocketing forward. When I’ve seen barnstorming daredevil plane sequences, like in “The Great Waldo Pepper,” the stunt people up there tend to be quite staid. But Tom Cruise, filmed in drop-dead close-up, scrambles around that plane as if it were a set of monkey bars, his face mashed into rubber by the G-force of the wind, the grassland stretching out a mile below him. After tossing out the pilot, he slithers onto Gabriel’s yellow plane, and that’s when the action becomes too dizzying for words. Cruise is crawling over the plane, and now it’s tilting sideways, nearly upside down, so he’s hanging off it, and I was literally gawking at the screen going, “How in God’s name did he do this?” Because what we’re seeing looks…impossible.
And here’s what fuses it all. Two years ago, when Cruise took that motorcycle sky dive off a cliff in “Dead Reckoning Part One,” it was impressive, to be sure, but all I remember experiencing was the abstract physical daring of it. In “The Final Reckoning,” Cruise is doing something on that plane that no stunt person could do as well — he’s acting. He bends his limbs around the metal with every fiber of his fear and desire, showing us the ferocity of Ethan’s will to defeat evil, which matches up with Cruise’s own will not just to entertain us but to leave us in a state of rapt disbelief. In “The Final Reckoning,” Tom Cruise is out to save movies as much as Ethan Hunt is out to save the world. He’s doing what he does on that plane so that we don’t have to.
Up until then, “The Final Reckoning” is more of a churning slow burn. Yet the film is good enough to remind you how much fun it is when something is truly at stake in a high-flying, twisty-plotted, solemnly preposterous popcorn movie. There are moments when “The Final Reckoning” is preposterous — I’d say knowingly so, though at the screening I attended there was derisive hipster laughter. No one would claim that this is the breeziest of the “M:I” films. The sequences that I remember most fondly from the series have a nimble sense of play — Cruise hanging from a wire in that breathless heist in the first “Mission: Impossible,” his vertiginous suction-cup scaling of the Burj Khalifa in “Ghost Protocol,” all the trap-door tuxedo-party deceptions. “The Final Reckoning” is two hours and 49 minutes long, and it grinds along with a furrowed-brow anxiety about the precariousness of civilization in the age of omnipotent technology.
Yet that gravitas works for the movie. A.I. was merely a creeping threat in “Dead Reckoning.” Here it’s a specter whose time has arrived, and that’s part of what makes this a more potent adventure. A line that keeps getting repeated by members of the IMF team (and becomes a running joke) is “We’ll figure it out.” And that means: When the world hangs by a thread, necessity will always be the mother of split-second espionage invention. “The Final Reckoning” is an ode to winging it.
By now we’ve seen more than enough movies turn on the prospect of the planet being destroyed, and that doesn’t automatically mean there’s anything at stake in them. (Just think of such empty vessels of end-of-the-world action as “Armageddon” or “X-Men: Apocalypse.”) But in “The Final Reckoning,” Cruise and his “M:I” partner and director, Christopher McQuarrie, ratchet up the doomsday fervor with enough conviction — and obsession — to carry you along on hairpin turns of suspense. The film glances back, in several quick-cut montages, to all seven of the series’ previous films, taking Ethan’s defining trait — his propensity to go rogue, which of course is what he does when he can’t accomplish his mission any other way — and folding that into the film’s symphonic sense of peril. The Entity, which is presented as the logical culmination of A.I. (i.e., a force that isn’t necessarily going to be on our side), is out to control everything, to tap into the world’s nuclear-weapons systems and destroy the human race. Total power is the outgrowth of its intelligence. But Ethan is almost a cousin of A.I. — over and over, he has been someone willing to gamble with the fate of the world.
“The Final Reckoning” has a few patchy moments, but I think it’s the most enveloping entry in the series since “Ghost Protocol,” because it finds a new way to make the impossible elating. Instead of fooling us with rubber masks and digital illusion, the film is all about pushing outlandish situations to the wall, where Ethan has to act at a split second’s notice. Early on he’s captured, along with Hayley Atwell’s debonair Grace, and as they sit in a dungeon in handcuffs, he teases out a fake molar that will toxify him if he bites into it; that proves to be the way out. After a while, Ethan comes in from the cold, appearing at a meeting led by the U.S. president, Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett), as the IMF-head-turned-CIA suit Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) and other dour brass look on disapprovingly. Ethan asks to be given control of an aircraft carrier (named after George H.W. Bush — a bit of we-didn’t-know-how-good-we-had-it nostalgia geared to the age of Trump), and the president gives him the approval…on the sly.
It’s here that the film turns into a very different sort of mission, a dense action caper set in the frozen sea. William Donloe (Rolf Saxon), a defrocked CIA analyst who was exiled after Ethan’s heist in the first film, returns. He’s the one who knows the exact location of the Russian submarine that was tricked by the Entity into blowing itself up at the start of “Dead Reckoning” — and that’s where they’ll find the Entity’s source code.
The sequence where Ethan dives deep into the Bering Sea to burrow into the carcass of that submarine has the kind of quiet floating logistical majesty I loved as a kid in the underwater sequences of “Thunderball.” The submarine, jogged by Ethan’s weight, keeps creaking and falling and turning, spilling water around inside, which gives the sequence, slow as it is, a spectral enchantment. But the film also has plenty of down-to-the-wire tension, as when Benji (Simon Pegg) directs a bomb defusion through the fog of his collapsing lung. And it’s the hellbent jacked sincerity of Cruise’s movie-star performance that makes it all mean something. Ethan’s loyalty has become a major theme (he won’t leave one of his team members behind), but despite the game contributions of Atwell and Rhames, whose Luther delivers the series’ moving sendoff, Ethan has rarely been out on his own the way he is here.
Is this truly the series’ final reckoning? We’re now in an era where John Wick can snap back to life, and where even the death of James Bond, in “No Time to Die” (a movie that feels like a cousin to this one — though I think “Final Reckoning” is better), came off like a parlor trick. I expect “The Final Reckoning” will prove to be one of the must-see movies of the summer, and at the end of it Ethan Hunt is very much alive. Yet an element of the film’s power is that it’s genuinely saying goodbye to these characters, to that reconfigured 1960s chicanery, to Ethan’s more-Bond-than-Bond mojo. Besides, what’s Tom Cruise going to do for an encore? In “The Final Reckoning,” he’s more than just the top gun of danger junkies. He has turned the spectacle of doing his own stunts into a popcorn art form.
From Variety US