★★★

It’s a good thing this series is over so I don’t have to keep losing brain cells trying to figure out the title.

Last I checked, this film’s predecessor was called Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.  Now we have the eighth film, simply titled Final Reckoning, but which has, not to spoil anything, no actual “reckoning” of the sort.

This was bothering me over the course of the first third of the movie, which, much like the last two thirds of the previous one, had an aimless, confused zigzag – full of references to old stuff, so desperate to tee up a big epic sequel to itself that it forgot how to thrill us right then and there when our butts were already in the seats.  And where parts and players were swapped in and out in a way that made them feel trivial and meaningless.  How were we supposed to respect the sacrifice of Ilsa Faust when another girl instantly takes her place, and where she never needs to be mentioned again?  All these useless elements came back to reopen Final Reckoning, but then the tone shifted from mildly serious to mildly comical.  “Wait, Hunt was the guy who did that crazy thing from an old movie?” funny lines gradually ate away the “you unintentionally created the very thing you are now out to destroy!” fake taunt of gravitas from the villain.  And speaking of the villain, he was less of the “I am a ghost of your past, shielded from visibility by the Entity” smokescreen of seriousness in the previous film, and more of the mouse who has what the cat wants and dares him to come get it.

Final Reckoning loses the ideas that Dead Reckoning suggested, which is fine because that film never made much use of them in the first place.  Everyone and everything are sanded down to their bare, most familiar elements, including the very pacing of the final sequence.  And the film is brought down by the constant repetition of reverse psychology: “the Entity wants you to not trust me and not do what I’m telling you to do,” and “we are living in the Entity’s reality!” lines that raise the stakes about as effectively as the soliloquy at the end give it meaning, which is to say none at all.

Before I get to the good stuff, let me keep going with the other things that bring the film down.  The new team doesn’t pop the way the old team did.  Character roles are not obvious or intuitive as they had been in Ghost Protocol – still the best entry by far, or even Rogue Nation, where Jeremy Renner played a character so redundant that the next movie – Fallout – removed him completely and lost nothing.  None of the actors, aside from Simon Pegg, have the chemistry with Tom Cruise that Paula Patton, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ving Rhames did, so Final Reckoning has to make up for that by mostly sidelining them and then bringing on a host of others who bring more familiarity and cheek, even if briefly.  But there’s even a character – one of the handful predisposed against trusting Hunt – who sees a picture of her son, misses him, and then at the end of the movie when the world is saved (spoiler alert) sees him in person, as though it amounts to some earned payoff.

There is no point dwelling on the politics of Final Reckoning or of the global order it exalts because everything about it is stupid.  And yet the stupidity of it somehow strengthens its ability to create a prisoner’s dilemma among nuclear powers, which sets the board for the fight against the Entity.  What all of these mild gripes above have in common, aside from the fact they they make it easy to make fun of these films, is that together they convert the tone from ineffective dread and paranoia to far better anticipation for the thing we really all came to see in the first place – Tom Cruise doing crazy things on screen.

I remember criticizing the previous film for how obvious it was that Cruise and Director Christopher McQuarrie only cared about the big sequences, with barely any thought whatsoever for how they were all supposed to be strung together.  That was a real problem for a “Part One,” which was all about a big scary A.I. concept and then putting pieces in place for a final mission without actually executing it.  Not this one.  If anything here, the familiarity of events, characters, and tropes brings clarity to the entire Mission: Impossible franchise in the sense that all the baits and switches, would-be tense confrontations between Hunt and his bosses mid-film that puts him on track to be disavowed, and mask twists were mostly just there to pass enough time and set up the chase where the villain inevitably gets away and the countdown sequence for the final battle.  That sounds obvious, but Final Reckoning shares that “mission clarity” quality with the franchise’s middle three films (Ghost Protocol, Rogue Nation, and Fallout) that made them the best of it.  The point is to make the action as thrilling and suspenseful as it can be, and Final Reckoning understands that.

So as the film’s self-awareness of the silliness of everything was slowly working to make its core concept less irritating, its mission focus was also actually doing the work to put Hunt and his team in position to thrill the audience.  Directing and steering every story and plot element to set up multiple elaborate countdown sequences where the right person has to be in the right place at the right time is always believable as an impossible mission, and the title Mission: Impossible always sold itself as the vehicle for Tom Cruise to deliver.  And he does.  Dead Reckoning Part One was all but screaming that in the next film, Hunt was going to reach the submarine.  That sequence may be unbelievable by every measure of realism, but it lived up to the hype, as does the other stunt you might have heard about, since it isn’t just a quick jump, repeated 4 times for effect, and where you can see it coming from miles away.

I have more to criticize, but the fact is – when you get the big stuff right, the rest is just… well, it’s the little stuff.  Final Reckoning figures just enough of itself out to deliver on what a Mission: Impossible movie, now a 30 year film franchise adapting from a 7-year TV series from the 1960s, is.  Or maybe I’m wrong and the A.I. controlling my fingertips typing on this keyboard is just telling you what you want to hear.

– Vivek