In various trailers and promotional items for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise – as Ethan Hunt, AKA The Living Manifestation of Destiny himself – looks directly into the camera and says “I need you to trust me. One last time.”
While this line read is in the movie, it’s clear that this is directed to the audience thinking about parting with their money for a ticket to see another Mission: Impossible movie. Happily we can tell you that you can indeed trust Mr. Cruise with your ticket money one last time and that The Final Reckoning is a good movie. Unfortunately some missteps along the way keep it from greatness and leave us a bit saddened by what should have been an all timer.
We can’t give you the outline of this new movie without spoiling a bit of 2023’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning. This is a bit of a roadblock as Dead Reckoning was originally subtitled “Part One” with this latest film meant to be its Part Two. After Dead Reckoning unfortunately didn’t do the best at the box office, a name change was in order, but don’t let that fool you: this is still Part Two and takes place after a short time jump.
Without spoiling either movie we can tell you this: In Part One a true AI comes into being. This AI, known as The Entity, has the potential to do just about anything, and Hunt and the IMF need to stop it. Only doing a half job of this in Part One, Part Two picks up in the aftermath of The Entity basically controlling the world and threatening to end it. If that can be stopped, who will control (or destroy) The Entity when it’s done and if that victor is sitting on a corpse of a post-nuclear war world is the adventure you’re embarking on.
While that sounds great on paper, the way it’s presented in The Final Reckoning is rather unsatisfactory. For example: we’re told in the opening minutes of the movie that the world is completely unrecognisable and every square metre is changed by The Entity, but we never actually see this. It’s the oldest moviemaking fumble in the books: telling without showing. The Final Reckoning wants you so badly to care about the fate of the world and the main stars, but does almost nothing to show you anything of their struggles or turmoil.
This worked in previous Mission: Impossible movies, but the stakes have been ratcheted up so high that some time needs to be spent setting up the dominoes and ensuring that the audience cares to see them fall. In past movies it was fine to skip over “the mission” when it was just “stop the bomb” or “find the secret agent list”, but when the new task is “do we have the courage to live in the reality created by an AI?”, then you need to put in the work to make that highfalutin premise work.
The Final Reckoning does awkwardly try and do this with some monologues, narration and even retconning previous movies, but the entire premise here feels wasted. Don’t get us wrong, we actually love high concept stories like this, but not when they’re executed so poorly.
“So what?” You may ask. If Tom Cruise is still doing insane stunts in this movie, does all that even matter? Well yes, because the insane stunts were always done against the backdrop of a story that made those stunts matter.
That being said, where the story falls down, we really can’t fault the rest of the movie.
In terms of performances we could be here all day listing off big name cast members, but everyone showed up to do their best and it really works. Even newly-introduced characters with limited time on the screen are expertly written to feel real and believable. When these lesser-used characters talk it doesn’t feel like they’re a cardboard cutout created for the movie, but a real-enough character that existed before they were on camera.
It seems like all the solid writing that vanished from the story went into these characters instead and the cast had the talent to mirror the writers.
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