Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in a scene from "Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning." (Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures)
The postcard was small, but its impact was pretty big. I just had to show it off to my high school classmates. “Look! Tom Cruise wrote me back!” I said as I held up the cherished parcel, the thank-you note it contained on the appealing side of generic.
The critically derided “Cocktail” (though not by me at the time) had just come and gone from local theaters, and I was riding the kind of high that can only be fully understood by those who followed their favorite A-listers, on the page and on the screen, throughout the 1980s. It would be a few more years before I weaned myself off an unhealthy diet of “Bop” magazine and nightly viewings of “Entertainment Tonight.”
But on this day, my classmates were not impressed. “Did he write to you personally?” asked one classmate who shall remains nameless. Well, no, but it's the thought that counts, I muttered to myself, as I basked in the glow of a letter that may or may not have been written by Cruise's PR team.
Hayley Atwell as Grace, Simon Pegg as Benji, Pom Klementieff as Paris and Greg Tarzan Davis as Degas in a scene from "Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning." (Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures)
The newsletters started coming shortly after, fan club updates that incorporated words of advice from the mega-star. In one of these missives, Cruise stressed the importance of words, and how you should always look up the meaning of words you don't understand. Knowing the challenges that the Oscar nominee experienced growing up with dyslexia, this particular tip stood out from the more run-of-the-mill coverage of premieres and upcoming projects.
That postcard and the fan club newsletter popped into my head as I waded through the interminable first hour of “Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning.” the eighth, and ostensibly last, installment of the nearly three-decade franchise spearheaded by Cruise and his increasingly dangerous decisions to put his life on the line for entertainment's sake. The mental throwback came about because Cruise's advice from back in the day explains the exhausting tendency, favored by the star and his director, Christopher McQuarrie, of stopping their espionage tales dead in their tracks to have the characters summarize what has just happened and reveal what their next course of action will be. They genuinely want us to understand exactly what's going on in their (sometimes needlessly) byzantine narratives, a gesture borne out of goodwill to ensure we're able to keep up.
Charles Parnell as Richards, Mark Gatiss as Angstrom, Janet McTeer as Walters, Angela Bassett as President Erika Sloane, Holt McCallany as Serling and Nick Offerman as General Sydney in a scene from "Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning." (Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures)
These time-out powwows also kill the momentum their movies have built up to that point, and in “The Final Reckoning,” they're saddled with endless callbacks to the franchise's previous installments (though not, that I could discern, any reference to the John Woo-directed “Mission: Impossible II” beyond Hunt's longer hair this time around). The victory lap is so mammoth that it threatens to swallow up what otherwise plays as the movie this sequel was originally conceived to be: “Part Two” to 2023's similarly overlong “Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One.”
“The Final Reckoning” starts some time after the events in “Dead Reckoning,” as “The Entity,” a rogue AI with the capacity to tinker with countries' defense intelligence via cyberspace, has brought the planet to the brink of a global conflict. It's up to Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his team at the Impossible Missions Force to stop the dastardly Gabriel (a gleefully over-the-top Esai Morales), a shadowy figure with ties to the Entity who leaves a trail of destruction wherever he goes.
Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in a scene from "Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning." (Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures)
Ethan and his team are struggling to prevent the world from blowing itself up, what with all kinds of obstacles placing success further and further out of reach, not just from the mustache-twirling Gabriel, but from U.S. government officials at odds about what to do about Ethan or how to stave off a nuclear Armageddon. President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) overrides naysayers and reluctantly allows Hunt to carry out his (seemingly doomed to fail) mission, which involves a deep dive to retrieve a crucial item from the sunken Russian submarine that got this mess started at the beginning of “Dead Reckoning,” As the doomsday clock inches closer to midnight.
This may sound like way too much plot for one film to carry, but I'm just skimming the bare bones of the dense maneuverings and criss-crosses that take this bloated franchise entry closer and closer to Tom Clancy territory, albeit with precious little of that author's political acumen and sophistication. The complications pile up like there's no tomorrow, but McQuarrie, working from a screenplay credited to him and Erik Jendresen, are too busy parsing out their narrative strands to give audiences what they came to see: narrow brushes with death featuring Cruise tempting the Fates for real.
This convoluted spy tale would sure be a lot more palatable if it didn't take itself so seriously, but McQuarrie has a knack for making his “Mission: Impossible” entries feel like homework, and this time, he turns the high-drama knob up to 11. That hissing sound you might hear is the film's levity seeping out like helium from a lead balloon.
Simon Pegg as Benji and Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in a scene from "Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning." (Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures)
Frustration set in for this reviewer as “The Final Reckoning” spun its wheels, over and over. “Dude, enough,” I jotted down in the darkened auditorium, clearly enough so I could make out this cry for help amid my more illegible scribblings. Then my id started screaming into my mind's ear, and I began to wish I threw decorum to the winds and yelled out what it wanted me to tell McQuarrie: STOP. EXPLAINING. EVERYTHING. TO ME!!!
Following its thoroughly ill-conceived first hour, “The Final Reckoning” finally begins to gather speed, but no movie could recover from that brick wall. There are even highlights that suggest the more limber and agile action thriller this could have been if it hadn't been smothered by the filmmaker's excesses and self-indulgent references to Missions of years past.
Take, for instance, the very attractive crew of a U.S. submarine that Ethan seeks out in his do-or-die quest to reach his underwater target. There's Captain Bledsoe (Tramell Tillman) and his fierce pornstache, as well as naval soldiers Shirley (hot ginger Paul Bullion), Pills (handsome Stephen Oyoung) and Kodiak (“Love Lies Bleeding's” Katy O'Brian). You start hoping the movie becomes more about them. This section of the film climaxes (pun intended) with a mano-a-mano in close quarters, featuring Cruise clad only in his black undies, that's the most homoerotic scene in the franchise's history, even more so than the men's restroom brawl in “Fallout.”
Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in a scene from "Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning." (Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures)
More often than not, though, “The Final Reckoning” is a tough slog, a lumbering spectacle where the dazzling moments of peril are few and far between. It clocks in at 169 minutes, five minutes longer than “Dead Reckoning,” but it could have easily been 129. That's how full of hot air this franchise capper is.
And yet, it can't be completely dismissed as a self-serious cashgrab, because its set pieces are so expertly assembled and, more so than in prior entries, make good use of IMAX cameras. For instance, the film's much publicized airborne pursuit shows Cruise dangling upside down from the wing of a yellow Boeing Stearman biplane. The sequence delivers the goods with panache in both sides of the lens, but it comes way too late in the game to get this disappointing sequel off the ground, one that sees Cruise apparently bidding farewell to his reckless secret agent with a soft spot for his co-workers. Maybe in his next action project, Cruise will actually pay tribute to his co-stars without making it all about himself and how he keeps pushing himself to the limit.
What he can do to truly push himself is return to those smaller films that give his acting chops a workout, and maybe recapture that star quality that turned this budding movie reviewer into a devoted fan all those years ago. Sounds to me like a most excellent mission. Will he choose to accept it?
“Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning” is now playing across South Florida in wide release, including IMAX engagements at Regal South Beach, AMC Aventura 24, AMC Sunset Place 24, CMX Cinemas Dolphin 19, Regal Kendall Village and the AutoNation IMAX at the Museum of Discovery and Science in Fort Lauderdale.
