An Impossible Mission

Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning

Look. This movie is about as ridiculous as Scientology. It’s long, rambling, and loud. But it’s about as much fun as you can have at the movies.

Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning, the eighth and presumably final entry in the 30-year action franchise based on the 1960s television show of the same name, is the final piece of a puzzle we didn’t even know we were putting together.

The Mission: Impossible franchise is incredibly solid. While the first three entries, directed by Brian De Palma, John Woo, and JJ Abrams, respectively, were as different from each other as they could have been, all reflecting the director's singular vision of the franchise. The next five films tell a more cohesive narrative story, especially the last four, which Christopher McQuarrie directed.

Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning makes it clear that this is the culmination of not just the McQuarrie films, but of the franchise as a whole. There are throwbacks and easter eggs galore going back all the way to the first movie in 1996. This is the smartest dumb film I’ve ever seen. The concept of “the Entity”, a rogue computer program that will eventually take over all of cyberspace and along with it the totality of the world’s nuclear arsenal, is both terrifying and incredibly silly. Hunt and his team’s plan is ridiculous, convoluted, dangerous, and over the top as always, but this time it’s even MORE ridiculous, convoluted, dangerous, and over the top. As the stakes are, which make no mistake; it is the total nuclear devastation of the planet. Yes, it definitely sounds like Skynet if you were wondering.

The film does reflect our current political climate a bit as there is a cult that has been built around the Entity. This means that NO ONE can be trusted and that Hunt and his team may encounter cult members who want the Entity to win along the way. And by may, I mean will.

We find out through a series of flashbacks that the mysterious MacGuffin from MI3, the so-called “rabbit’s foot,” was the source code for the entity. Remember that puzzle I mentioned earlier? Mission: Impossible- The Final Reckoning does an admirable job of creating a tapestry of coincidences from all eight movies that were very likely not planned when the first few movies were being made. While this retrofitting does require a bit of extraneous exposition and flashbacks to footage from previous films, it never feels heavy-handed, nor does it feel like they are shoving a square peg in a round hole. It does suddenly feel like the MCU, in that if you missed one movie, you may have missed something important, but rather than leave those fans behind, the movie does a little hand-holding to get everyone up to speed.

Mission: Impossible- The Final Reckoning is action-packed from the word go. Ethan gets his mission, if he so chooses to accept it, directly from the president. From there, we were off to the races. Tom Cruise as Hunt runs, jumps, kicks, runs, fights, runs, punches, and runs a lot. Often in his underpants. Dude is 62 and looks incredible in his underpants. He almost dies, a lot. The stunts which he does himself are insane and breathtaking. I found myself squirming in my seat during the extended underwater sequence and breathless during the final fight in the air.

The tension is taut the entire movie. Again, if Ethan and team fail, we’re all dead. It builds to an over-the-top climax, where Hunt needs to get a computer poison pill that Luther made to stop the entity from Gabriel, while Paris does emergency surgery on Benji so he can tell Grace how to trap the entity in a magic USB drive all while Donloe, yes the exiled Langley programmer from the first movie has to dismantle an atomic bomb. Yes. That sounds incredibly stupid. But it's thrilling and exhilarating.

The music, direction, and acting all work together to build a compelling action thriller. This movie knows what it is and what it wants to do and it does it in spades.

If you can get past Cruise’s Scientology antics and love big, loud, bombastic, action-heavy cinema, Mission: Impossible- The Final Reckoning is for you. It’s definitely for me.