Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning: Film Review
You’ve got to take your hat off to Tom Cruise, who has been putting his life quite literally on the line to keep us entertained at the movies. And he does so in a mind-blowing fashion in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.
In this follow-up to Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Cruise is back as IMF agent Ethan Hunt alongside longtime teammates Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames) and new pickpocket recruit Grace (Hayley Atwell). They are once again going up against an AI called The Entity, which is hellbent on destroying the world.
The Mission: Impossible films are usually fun action spectacles, but The Final Reckoning seems to have forgotten that. It’s quite dark and serious – there’s very little humour to be found – and the action-to-talking ratio is way off. Two extended stunt sequences are fantastic but there’s not much action outside of those and there’s far too much talking! As Elvis Presley once sang: A little less conversation, a little more action, please.
The storytelling is clunky, disjointed and poorly edited, particularly in the first half. There are so many flashbacks to previous Missions that it feels like a recap of the whole franchise. You’d be absolutely fine if you’d never seen one before as this gives you a big “previously on” catch-up. I get that it’s trying to tie up the whole franchise given that’s the “final” one (although Cruise won’t confirm if it really is) but it kills any forward momentum and makes the film feel unnecessarily long. The audience shouldn’t have to wait so long for things to get going.
I know the title is Mission: Impossible but this one feels more absurd than usual. You have to suspend your belief to the maximum here and avoid analysing the plot too closely because it really doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. I didn’t care for the story but the action setpieces were so spectacular that I was able to gloss over some of the narrative shortcomings.
The much-publicised biplane stunt is edge-of-your-seat stuff. It is incredibly intense knowing that it is Cruise himself flailing around on the wings of that plane. His willingness to make such death-defying stunts will always blow my mind. As great as that stunt is, I preferred an extended sequence inside a submerged submarine that’s rolling along the sea floor. It’s claustrophobic and cinematic and I was captivated. Cruise really puts himself through the wringer and it was exhausting just watching him running and swimming like his life depended on it.
He is surrounded by an insane amount of supporting actors, such as Pom Klementieff as the assassin Paris, Esai Morales as the main villain Gabriel and Angela Bassett as the U.S. President Erika Sloane, but he spends a lot of the runtime alone, so key teammates like Atwell and Pegg are given sadly less to do. There are far too many minor characters and the only one that truly added value was Tramell Tillman as a submarine captain. He makes his lines count and provides much-needed comic relief.
This is one of the weaker Mission: Impossibles and I actually preferred the first half of this story. But although the storytelling is too slow and overstuffed, the action setpieces are so awesome that I still came away feeling positive about it.
In cinemas from Wednesday 21st May