Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning

Sweet Mother of all things preposterous, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning is a long and enjoyable movie. The story follows on from the previous, with Cruise’s Ethan Hunt on the run from his own good guys with a key which will unlock some theoretical antidote to the AI which is taking over the world’s nuclear arsenal in every nation.

The first hour or so is the set-up, and the opening titles occur quite a long time into the film. Why, even before the first scene we get Actual Tom Cruise thanking us all for coming to see the film on the big screen as the makers intended. Cruise’s commitment to the big-screen experience is laudable and Christopher McQuarrie knows how to put together a tense action scene. In this case there’s a set-piece underwater sequence where Hunt has to go to the stricken submarine from the previous movie. He has to recover a part which has the source code of the AI which can be used to destroy it.

Meanwhile the establishment is suspicious. President Angela Basset surrounded with Hawks and idiots has to decide whether to have faith in Ethan Hunt or throw in with the policy that they come up with to fight the AI. And if the plot of the film is ridiculous in the service of making the story move, the military solution in an “America First” kind of a way. There’s a kind of a WarGames vibe to the nuclear gun-play complete with characters who would rather destroy cities than trust some guy…

And what makes the story is that the inverse of this: a character whose life was changed by Ethan Hunt’s actions way back at the start of this cinematic franchise is now back in the story and this time he’s working for the other side. Even if the film is all about Ethan Hunt, and the franchise is all about Tom Cruise, the story does have that simple moral heart: and the good guys are the ones who take care of their team. 

There are some weird things: Hunt has a painful meeting (interface?) with The Entity, and he emerges from it blathering about a DC3, but the aeroplane is how they can get to where they need to close to the arctic because it can’t be traced. The whole subplot about the Russians and the Secret Coordinates is time consuming and could possibly have been trimmed, but there’s an out-of-the-blue misdirect which you’re just going to have to be fine with, because it does set up some of the meat of the story. And then there’s the final action sequence involving the two Boeing Stearman biplanes is where the film recalled Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade—which is also about personal relationships versus the need for ultimate power, and I have some quibbles with this film on what it does with that film. 

But : all the shots of airport departure boards going offline, and a world being deprived of modern powers and so on refers to real-world events demonstrating how much we’re all reliant on technology, and so there’s a fear of a technological future where once we were scared of enemy ideologies. Take heart though but sometimes you need a low-tech aircraft and a team around you whom you trust and love. And that’s not a bad message.