Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning <img src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-glyphs/20/000000/star--v1.png"/><img src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-glyphs/20/000000/star--v1.png"/><img src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-glyphs/20/000000/star--v1.png"/>

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.

Comments

Münter and Kandinsky - The Blue Rider

Artist biopics are few and far between these days. Mr. Turner in 2014 and Daaaaaali! in 2023 come to mind as relatively recent examples, and Van Gogh and Picasso are always popular subjects. This German production, directed by TV stalwart Marcus O. Rosenmüller, looks at the life of Expressionist maestro, Wassily Kandinsky, but crucially, via the perspective of his lover and ex-student, Gabriele Münter. The film starts and ends with her and Vanessa Loibl gives the character a vivid intensity. We see Münter's dissatisfaction with the lot of women in turn of the century Munich. She wants to study and practice her art and so is chuffed when she hears of a studio called the Phalanx, where women are allowed to attend. This is where she meets the intense Kandinsky, a lecturer at the college. After some visible romantic tension, a painting excursion to picturesque Kochel brings them together. Post coitus, Kandinsky tells Münter that he wants her to leave the trip early as his wife is com...

Sinners

Hats off to Ryan Coogler for turning out this vibrantly bloody cracker with only his fifth feature. It's also quite a hand brake turn after two Black Panther films and one Rocky spin-off to deliver a singular story like this (I'm presuming there'll be no Sinners Cinematic Universe but I could be wrong). I say singular but actually, this owes a lot to Tarantino, and many other genre directors. I'm dancing around the issue here as the best way to watch this is to be completely unaware of what you're going to get. What I can say is that this is great fun. It really zips along, there's hardly a scene without forward momentum. Even the wonderfully ambitious musical numbers (relax, it's not a musical) add background to the story. Coogler's script crackles, especially in the mouths of the excellent cast - more on them later. One of the best things about this is that it disguises itself really well, you're not sure where it's going until it arrives the...

The Tasters

My final tilt at the 2025 German Film Festival turned out to be a Swiss/Belgian/Italian co-production, directed by Silvio Soldini. It's based on a book by Rosella Postorino called At the Wolf's Table , about a year or so in the life of Margot Wölk. This luckless woman was one of 15 official food tasters for Hitler when he was staying at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia (current day Poland). Rosa Sauer (Elisa Schlott) arrives at her parents-in-law's house in the town of Parcz to await the return of her husband from the Eastern Front. Not long after, she is co-opted into a perverse gig at the military compound just outside the town - Rosa and several other young, healthy women must taste the Fuhrer's food before he eats it, in case it's poisoned. The dynamic between the women is well played. Some are suspicious of Rosa, due to the fact that she's from Berlin; one is young and naive; one is blindly loyal to the Reich; one is staunchly discreet. All are bricking ...

The Surfer

The Surfer is an Australian/Irish co-production, filmed in the south of WA. If you can get over the premise that Nicolas Cage was born in Australia and gained an American accent after the age of about 15, then maybe you'll go with this a bit more than I did. Cage stars as the otherwise unnamed Surfer, who returns to Lunar Bay (Yallingup) to buy his old family home that overlooked the beach where he used to surf. Upon arriving with his teenage son, intent on having a surf, he find the beach occupied by a gang called the Bay Boys. He's very quickly told to fuck off and that if you "don't live here, don't surf here." After taking his son home, he returns to the carpark above the beach and here's where events start to go off the rails. The surfer's board is stolen, then his shoes, his car battery dies, his phone battery too, he trades his sunglasses for a pair of binoculars from an old beach bum with a grievance. This idea of him being unable or unwillin...

Thunderbolts*

This is the sixth and final film in phase five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and by my reckoning, it's the second best of the phase (after the third Guardians film). It's certainly an improvement on the flaccid Captain America: Brave New World from a few months back. Kevin Feige has done a good bit of business getting the right team together here, not unlike the film itself. The reasonably unknown crew includes director Jacob Schreier, writers Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, and cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo. Schreier hasn't actually directed a feature for ten years (he's been involved in TV) but they all have some interesting credits to their names. The film picks up the story of Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), adopted sister of Black Widow. She's taking jobs for Valentina de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), mostly illegal cleanup gigs with high body counts, but is becoming disenchanted with all the drudgery. She's in a murderous malaise. A fatality funk...

Two to One

Two to One (or Zwei zu Eins ) is a true life heist film that holds up a light to the haphazardness of German reunification but is ultimately about fairness and belonging. In short, the main characters are slowly losing their jobs as East Germany prepares to rejoin the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union and her satellite states. Maren (Sandra Hüller) and Robert (Max Riemelt) are having an unemployment party when an old friend of the couple, Volker (Ronald Zehrfeld) returns from years abroad. Disenchantment in the neighbourhood drives the trio to investigate the strange movement of army trucks to a local underground facility. A distant relative still works there and so is summarily co-opted to help them gain access to the 'bunker'. There they find bags and bags of disused East German marks, very soon to be out of circulation. Disappointed, they grab a bunch of notes anyway, more as a keepsake than anything else. When a door-to-door salesman offers to take the old curre...

80s Movies and their Songs

So I was driving back from down south and we decided to fiddle with the radio. A generic FM station appeared and my Gen X ears knew most of the tracks, some ok, some dire. But the thing that prompted me to start this post was that a couple of the songs were clearly linked to films from the 1980s. I began thinking that, as much as it doesn't really happen now (or even much after the end of that decade, with some notable exceptions), this 'movie/song tie-in' was a huge pop culture phenomenon back then. As a massive time-wasting technique, I decided to do a bit of research and try to find the film and song pairing that was the most popular of the era. Box Office Mojo helped with the film's takings, but how to discern a song's popularity? I've had a look at the US Billboard charts and the UK top 40, so we'll see if this goes some way to covering it. Ultimately, the song that YOU heard on the radio all the time, or watched on MTV (often with the film's actor...

Mickey 17

Mickey 17 is Bong Joon Ho's third English language feature and it has similar themes to his others - Snowpiercer and Okja - absurdities galore, odd creatures, and earnest entreaties for a steadier hand, socially and ecologically. In contrast, his Korean films feel a little more hardboiled, not as fantastical. Robert Pattinson plays the titular Mickey as a creepy but endearing loser. He and his areshole mate, Timo (Steven Yeun) are on the run from a nasty loan shark, so they decide to billet themselves on a space-going vessel. Said ship is heading to the planet Niflheim to colonise and propagate the human species. This endeavour is led by a proper bell-end, failed senator Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his foodie wife Ylfa (Toni Collette). The chicken twistie here is that Mickey accidentally signs up as an 'expendable', meaning his body is reproduced every time he dies, but his memories and personality are retained (mostly) and uploaded into a newly printed Mickey. ...

Top twenty WWII films

The Guardian recently ran an article on the ten best World War II films, as voted by respondents to a Deltapoll for The War Movie Theatre podcast (see their list and link at the end of this piece). As this year is 80 years since the end of hostilities, I thought it might be interesting to run down my top twenty World War II films. Here we go: 20. Empire of the Sun (Steven Spielberg - 1987) This China-set drama of expats during the war in the Pacific theatre was Christian Bale's first big role at the age of 13. He's pretty bloody good too, as are most of the cast, including John Malkovich and Nigel Havers. Spielberg saw this J.G. Ballard story as a chance to make a comparatively 'darker' film about the loss of innocence and it turned out to be one of his very best. 19. The English Patient (Anthony Minghella - 1996) All the press for this film was the love story angle between dreamy Ralph Fiennes (pre-Voldemort, of course) and elegantly icy Kristin Sc...

Film Shapes

Search This Blog