REEL | Accomplishing 'Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning'

"Our lives are the sum of our choices."

Paramount Pictures / Skydance

Our IMF team of star/producer Tom Cruise and now four-time co-writer/director Christopher McQuarrie reteam for the retitled and reworked second half of the originally-planned two-part Dead Reckoning films and eighth, supposedly last entry in the current iteration of the TV-to-film franchise. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (formerly Dead Reckoning Part Two) takes a Spectre-type approach but with better stunts to retcon the mythology of all the previous seven movies across nearly three decades in a more cohesive but also overly complicated finale.

The Final Reckoning ultimately pays off the stubborn competence of Ethan Hunt and his inability to not save the world despite being the one putting it in such grave danger in the first place. Scripted once again by McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen, the dizzingly dense exposition of the first act tries hard to recontextualize past films and their dangling threads, resembling the Fast & Furious franchise more than Mission with its absurdly high stakes.

This time around, Ethan's newish team is primarily made up of Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, Simon Pegg, and Greg Tarzan Davis, who must work together to stop the all-powerful but not particularly compelling rogue A.I. algorithm villain, "The Entity," and his human counterpart (Esai Morales) by anticipating their calculations before they happen.



Original M:I co-star Henry Czerny and a returning Angela Bassett (now the President) are the chief authoritative characters tasked with both setting off and disavowing Ethan's rather difficult mission. We get much more insight into the U.S. government's response to possible nuclear annihilation instead of the usual tight focus on only the IMF team.

It's hard not to notice the lack of crowd shots, shooting locations, transition sequences, fewer characters, more hand-to-hand fighting, many scenes of people talking in rooms, and only a handful of the trademark action set pieces—think more along the lines of relatively stripped-down Ghost Protocol—saving the budget for an extended, highly tense submarine diving sequence and the jaw-dropping biplane aerial finale. This Reckoning likely necessitated a more controlled production and scaled-back scope after the notorious delayed overruns on Part One. Some of this leads to it feeling a bit like a frustrating rehash of the previous films.

Over its almost three-hour runtime, The Final Reckoning stops frequently to remark on the achievements of all the prior movies with extended montages and character moments acknowledging our long history with these characters, missions, and action. Cruise as Hunt is always able, but also seems appropriately exhausted as we feel the weight of his decisions, actions, and risks. Regardless of its chaotic messiness as possibly the conclusive M:I film or not, it's a worthy but still disappointing final Mission after the glorious highs of Fallout.


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