Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

On the beautiful stupidity of human beings

If there’s one thing I know for sure in this strange, unpredictable and all-too dangerous world we inhabit, it’s that tomorrow is promised to no one. Our lives often hang by threads, and everything worth cherishing can be gone in an instant if not properly protected. If there’s a second thing I know for sure, it’s my confidence in art’s potential to entertain, to enrich, and even to enlighten on occasion. And if there’s a third thing I know for sure, it’s that Tom Cruise is a batshit looney tune who has dedicated, and risked, his life to deliver some of the most memorable and exhilarating pieces of studio filmmaking to ever saunter out of Hollywood.

These three things will all come together by the end. I promise.

In four days, the world as we know it is going to end. At least, that’s what the opening act of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (the eighth and supposedly final installment in the franchise) informs us: in four days, the world as we know it is going to end in nuclear armageddon. It’s the fault of no one person, country or group, but an artificial intelligence known as “the Entity” that has wormed its way into every corner of cyberspace and is currently taking control of each major power’s nuclear arsenal with the intent to use them against each other, eradicating civilization as we know it and ensuring its control over whatever remains. Of course, the only man who can stop the apocalypse, the only man who can bring the world back from the brink and remove the Entity’s grip on humanity, is Tom Cruise. Oh wait, no, silly me: the only man is Impossible Mission Force operative Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). The man who has climbed mountains bare-handed, who has run through sandstorms, who is so dedicated to his world-saving work that he had no choice but to dump Michelle Monaghan. The man who (as reminded in a skillfully-cut clip show featured in the film’s opening minutes) has given the world “another sunrise” time and time again. And now, with stakes that literally couldn’t be higher, he must perform one last miracle (along with a jaw-dropping stunt or two for good measure).

The stakes could also not be higher for Cruise, as well as for his director, writer, and co-producer Christopher McQuarrie. The two have been thick as thieves for over a decade now, sharing a creative partnership with a consistency and loyalty that’s rare in the film industry. Since 2008, Cruise & McQuarrie have worked on eleven films together, the high-point being 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick. But while Maverick was flying victory laps around the box office, the duo were cooking up their most ambitious venture yet: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Parts One & Two, an epic back-to-back production that’s been chugging along for the better part of six years, barrelling through a pandemic, strikes, and a lot of money. Dead Reckoning Part One came out two summers ago after numerous setbacks, beginning the story of Ethan and his team’s fight against both the Entity and its human compatriate Gabrial (Esai Morales). But with the public weary and wounded from COVID, with younger generations forced to be pickier with what to spend their hard-earned money on, and with Barbenheimer arriving a mere week later, Dead Reckoning Part One was enough of a financial disappointment for Cruise & McQuarrie to erase the “Part One” once it hit home video, with the second entry eventually being delayed by a full year. But it’s almost as if the two were taking a page from Ethan himself, for its seems nothing would stop them from completing the epic they’d spent years dreaming up.

And so, here we are. With civilization on the line and various forces (the Entity, Gabriel, Henry Czerny’s needling CIA honcho Eugene Kittridge, some Russians) threatening to muck it all up, Ethan must once again assemble a crack team to assist him in performing his public suicide attempts. Returning is comic relief Benji (Simon Pegg), gravitas maestro Luther (Ving Rhames) and master pickpocket/sorta-kinda-almost-not-really platonic two decades-younger love interest friend Grace (Hayley Atwell), with Gabriel’s former 2nd-in-command Paris (Pom Klementieff) and CIA agent Degas (Greg Tarzen Davis) being roped into aiding Ethan after spending the last movie trying to kill/arrest him. Awaiting them all is a hefty task: use the last film’s McGuffin, a much-ballyhooed “cruciform key” (take a drink each time somebody says that term over these two films and you’ll be waking up in a coffin), go to the bottom of the Bering Sea, find the Entity’s original source code in a sunken Russian sub, corrupt the code with a “poison pill” crafted by Luther, upload the Entity into a doomsday vault buried in a South African mountain, then trap it in a special hard drive when its defenses are down. Easy stuff, if not for the fact that they don’t know where the sub is…or that they’ll only have 100 miliseconds to trap the AI before it’ll launch the nukes…or that President Angela Bassett is on the verge of launching a devastating, hundreds-of-millions-dead first strike against the arsenals already controlled by the Entity. Just another day at the IMF office.

I love Mission: Impossible. I’ve loved Mission: Impossible ever since I saw the fourth film, Ghost Protocol, on a Blockbuster rental DVD and stared in awe as Cruise summotted the Burj Khalifa. But love them as I do, I’ll be the first to admit that these films have always struggled to be about anything. They’ve always been about Tom Cruise: Movie Star, sure. But meta-textual commentaries will only take you so far. It took until the fifth film, Rogue Nation (where Ethan is famously called “the living manifestation of destiny”), for the series to fully lean into the absurdity of its lead character and find something meaningful amidst the chaos he wrought. And with Dead Reckoning, things started to get philosophical. The Entity was not just another villian of the week, but the antithesis of every reckless/beautiful/self-actualizing act Ethan/Cruise/we viewers had ever committed. Our lives may not be perfect, but they’re still ours, damn it. Don’t let the computers tell us what to do, or make our art, or detonate our nukes! The Final Reckoning continues the philosophizing, crystalizing it around Ethan’s love for those around him. He’s not in it for the money, the power, the glory. He just wants everybody, from friends to total strangers, to see another sunrise in a world controlled not by some digital overlord, but by themselves. By their own actions, and their own choices.

After eventually dispensing with the exposition and recapping, The Final Reckoning begins to fire its booster rockets. McQuarrie demonstrates a deep dedication to stacking the deck impossibly high against his characters, tightening the screws over and over again before finally letting them scamper away by the skin of their teeth. And it’s just so goddamn satisfying. The film’s two big set-pieces, a nearly wordless trip through the aforementioned sunken sub as Ethan struggles mightily to retrieve the source code and swim to the surface alive, and an amazing hair-raiser where our fearless hero enters and exits two separate biplanes mid-flight (it’s the center of the film’s marketing campaign and rightly so), are up there with the best in modern cinema. But things remain relentless even in the “smaller” moments, be it a knife fight Cruise conducts in his undies or a climactic hacking sequence where one character dictates instruction while their lung collapses. At both screenings I attended, audiences members groaned, than laughed in utter delight at the madness they were witnessing, the film squeezing and releasing us like some great big cinematic pump machine. There are few better sensations than realizing that you’re in good hands.

But there’s another ingredient here, an element that inspired me to write this in the first place. The ingredient is “humanity”, and heaps of it. Consider the faces. Consider Angela Bassett, Shea Whigham, Hannah Waddingham, Nick Offerman, Tramell Tillman, Katy O’Brian, Rolf Saxon. Consider how much McQuarrie lingers on them, gives them little beats to play and arcs to complete even in a film already saddled with so much. Consider how he divides up the dialogue, making sure everybody gets a piece of the pie, everybody gets a chance to speak their mind or save the day in their own little way. The Final Reckoning’s magic trick is gradually making you believe that you’re in a world not just perilous, but full. There have been many films that toy with the apocalypse, but few that understand the danger of that threat with such empathy as this one, and few that revel so much in the beauty of averting such a fate. I’m not traditionally a big crier at movies, but at those same two screenings where I groaned and laughed with the crowd, I was tearing up as The Final Reckoning, and the thirty years-long journey of Ethan Hunt, came to a victorious close.

I think the measure of a film is the feeling you have when you leave the theater. Challengers? Reeling. Tár? Floored. Trap? Laughing like a nutjob. Most Missions: Impossible have left me walking out with a rush and a smile, but The Final Reckoning gave me something a little extra. Oddly enough, it reminded me how grateful I was to be here, on this planet, even with all the caveats. I know, it sounds crazy for a four-quadrant $400 million blockbuster to give me the kind of emotional rejuvenation expected from a Francois Truffault film. And yet, it’s the truth: I walked out of the theater, into a crowd of people swimming around in the L.A. sunshine, not a cloud in the sky, and I just felt so glad that I was here. That we were all here, these strangers and I, and that we would most likely still be here tommorow. There are far better movies than Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning with far more profundity to offer (Sinners, for one). But there’s a purity to this insane, earnest enterprise that can’t be denied. A purity that could only have come from some very driven, very deranged, very dedicated human beings.

(Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is currently in theaters)