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Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

This eighth entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise feels like a good place to end things. The series is rapidly ripening and it's possible that any more and we might be getting into the fruit fly stage. It's not going out on a limb to say they will probably continue until Tom Cruise is in traction but, by the looks of this warlock, he'll outlast us all.

The Final Reckoning is many things to many people. On the one hand, it's great fun, packed with tension and brilliantly edited to within an inch of its celluloid life (kudos to the editor with a name like a British snooker player, Eddie Hamilton).

On the other hand, it reeks with honking dialogue and convoluted exposition that wastes an awful lot of its lengthy run-time (170 mins, no thanks Mr. Bladder). One character actually says, "It's the end of the world as we know it." At this stage, I didn't feel fine. And for your bingo card, make a cross in the square for 'characters saying the name of the film IN the film'.

There's even a strange tonal shift from the other films, especially at the beginning. After a recap of the whole franchise, Ethan Hunt (the Cruiser) and Grace (Hayley Atwell) find themselves trapped in a cellar prepping for a bit of torture. This was a facsimile, almost down to the actual set, of the scene from Rogue Nation, switching out Rebecca Ferguson for Atwell. The main difference being that Grace doesn't do as much fighting as Ilsa did in the earlier film, but also it's played almost for giggles in this one. It's not terrible but it felt odd, like they weren't sure when to be serious and when to lighten the tension. I'd suggest this wasn't the place, all things considered.

The film doesn't really get going until the excellent submarine sortie sequence. This is peak Mission set-piece, and depending on your particular phobia, it's one of the most cheek-clenching of the lot. The addition of Tramell Tillman as Captain Bledsoe helped immeasurably. His performance straddles the edge of Steven Seagal films and Zucker/Abrams films without going too far either way. ("Mister, if you're about to poke the bear, you've come to the right guy.") Another great plus around this time was the Inuk actress, Lucy Tulugarjuk. Here was the right place to lighten the tension and she was a great implement for this task.

Thematically, The Final Reckoning is basically a cyberspace Lord of the Rings with the AI Entity as the ring, Gabriel (Esai Morales) as Gollum and the Cruiser as Frodo ("Nobody should use this, I'm going to destroy it"). There are the same old refrains of team loyalty and sacrifices for the greater good, and by this film, Hunt is morally above reproach and bulletproof to boot, even if there's a half-arsed attempt to crowbar in some retconning bollocks from Mission: 3 about him being responsible for helping the Entity by stealing the 'Rabbit's Foot' MacGuffin from that film. You what? Never mind, me either.

On this reimagining of past films in the series, having Shea Whigham's character revealed as Jim Phelps' son was a high level of unnecessary bullshit. All for a congratulatory handshake at the end? I'll pass. And I wonder if director Chris McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen (with McQuarrie) actually planned to be politically balanced. Let's have a black female president in Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett, channeling Kamala Harris) BUT also, let's name the aircraft carrier Hunt uses the George H W Bush. A bob each way maybe?

All this negativity aside, Pom Klementieff is good value as returning killer, Paris, and Atwell is fine, though she's given less to do than in Dead Reckoning, the first half of this story. As mentioned earlier, the cross-cutting in the fight scenes - the US submarine and the Arctic station - is extremely well edited and choreographed. These lads know how to turn out an exciting actioner. A tighter, less clunky script and a much shorter running time would have made this one of the best in the series.

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is in cinemas around the world now.

See also:

The pick of the series for me would be a tie between Rogue Nation (2015) and Dead Reckoning (2023), both directed by Christopher McQuarrie. And for a fantastic film written by McQuarrie, you can't go past The Usual Suspects (1995), directed by Bryan Singer.

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