davidehrlich’s review published on Letterboxd:
Whether or not “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” actually ends up being Tom Cruise’s last time racing to save the world as a renegade member of the IMF, there is no mistaking the fact that Christopher McQuarrie’s heartbreakingly flat and disted epic was intended as a last hurrah for America’s best action series.
That has almost nothing to do with how the movie ends, and just about everything to do with how it comports itself for the 160 minutes before that. Case in point: The festivities kick off with a bonafide supercut of Ethan Hunt’s greatest hits from the saga’s previous seven installments, neatly divided into subcategories like “love interest” and “villain.” And it would be a massive understatement to say that “The Final Reckoning” only leans harder into its everything has led to this ethos after that.
To a certain extent, that’s to be expected from the culmination of a franchise that’s grown more self-referential towards its own past at roughly the same rate as it’s become more freighted with the responsibility of fighting against Hollywood’s future. 2018’s miraculous “Fallout” supercharged its third act by looping back to a plot thread that seemed to have already been sewn up, while 2023’s madcap “Dead Reckoning” — a direct prequel to the ponderous new “Mission,” despite being tonally unrecognizable from it — dusted off a spiteful bureaucrat from the very first “Mission: Impossible” movie just to emphasize how much Ethan Hunt can’t trust his own government.
“The Final Reckoning” one-ups that trick with the kind of spectacularly goofy aplomb that will convince hardcore fans they’ve died and gone to heaven, but that’s the least of the movie’s efforts to make its bizarrely joyless story feel like the living manifestation of destiny. Everything that happens in “The Final Reckoning” is framed as a consequence of the choices that Ethan has made in the past, and while that approach results in two of the cleverest ret-cons in blockbuster history (both of which do a silly but satisfying job of tying the whole franchise together), it has the unfortunate side effect of forcing the film to haltingly dramatize — and thereby diminish — the same tensions that Tom Cruise has latently seeded into every stunt, sprint, and hard stare over the course of the previous seven movies.
The singular pleasure of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise — especially since its purpose was streamlined by “Mission: Impossible — III” — has always been rooted in Cruise’s supernatural ability to balance reality with disbelief, fatalism with free will, and the snuff-like daredevilry of the silent era with the larger-than-life spectacle of the blockbuster age. The struggle to reconcile those things is of paramount importance to a franchise about a man who adamantly refuses to compromise between them; Ethan Hunt is constantly risking millions of human lives in a desperate bid to save his loved ones, just as Tom Cruise is constantly risking his own life in a desperate bid to entertain millions of strangers.
In other words, “The Final Reckoning” isn’t the first time those balancing acts have been suffused into the plot of these movies. But previous “Mission” adventures — especially the ones helmed by returning director Christopher McQuarrie, all of which moved with the confidence of a prophecy being fulfilled even though they were built on the fly and held together with sticky tack — understood that action is the best argument against predestination. That’s especially true of “Dead Reckoning,” which saw Cruise fight back against the brain rot of A.I. by driving a motorcycle off a cliff for our enjoyment; “There’s always a choice,” Ethan is fond of saying, and the man playing him tends to prove that by making choices that no one on Earth has ever made before.
That same A.I., better known by its stage name “The Entity,” is back with a vengeance in “The Final Reckoning,” and it’s determined to goad humanity towards nuclear annihilation. But this time, Cruise and McQuarrie choose to illustrate the crisis of algorithmic thinking across a ploddingly scripted boardroom drama that cleaves a lot closer to the Cold War brinksmanship of “13 Days” than it does to the Buster Keaton-esque brilliance of their previous “Missions.”
The change of pace feels deliberate, but why ditch the franchise’s signature elegance in favor of the same kind of blockbuster tedium that “Mission: Impossible” has always defined itself against? The choice — and there’s always a choice — might stem from a strained production that was nearly torpedoed by strikes, but it’s also possible that McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen were handcuffed by the apocalyptic stakes the Entity demanded of them. Maybe they wanted to background Ethan Hunt in order to seed his ethos to the future his franchise is leaving behind, or maybe McQuarrie and Cruise just saw this story as the next step in their war against technological enshittification. If Tom Cruise can get people back to the movies, who’s to say he can’t get them to stop relying on ChatGPT?
Whatever the case, I can’t overstate how frustrating and redundant it feels to watch some random people we don’t care about — namely, President Angela Bassett and her beefy cabinet of flop-sweating character actors — equivocate over (and over) the lesser of two evils at the tail end of a franchise whose hero continues to disproves that logic with every mind-boggling setpiece. And the setpieces are still mind-boggling, even if this movie desperately needed more of them. The climactic biplane chase is somewhat diminished by the sheer worthlessness of the film’s villain (a new low in a franchise that has frequently struggled on that front), but the wordless 10-minute sequence where Cruise is tossed around the hull of a sunken nuclear submarine as it rolls towards the edge of a cliff reaches levels of “how the hell did they do that?” that have previously been reserved for certain Renaissance sculptures and early Björk albums.