“I need you to trust me, one last time.”
That line has been lodged in my brain since the first trailer for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning landed. Each time I caught the trailer that line supercharged my excitement. Now, two years after Dead Reckoning Part 1 (they can change the title, but it’ll always be Dead Reckoning Part 1 to me), The Final Reckoning is here to bring closure to the story started in the previous film and the series itself. After all this time and the run of Tom Cruise-Christopher McQuarrie collaborations (including Top Gun: Maverick and Jack Reacher), they’ve certainly earned the audience’s trust multiple times over.
Picking up months after the action in Dead Reckoning Part 1, Ethan and his team are on the hunt for Gabriel (Esai Morales), the elusive assassin seeking the cruciform (a fancy key) that will grant him control of the Entity, the AI capable of bringing the world to its knees. As always, the techno mumbo jumbo is serviceable at first, then increasingly ludicrous the more it’s explained. And The Final Reckoning is hellbent on explaining it. Throughout the film’s first hour, McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen’s script stacks one expository conversation on top of another. I genuinely think the repetition is meant to be a joke. The number of times characters say “the Entity” is absurd. It culminates with Nick Offerman delivering a staggering line reading of “we’re in the Entity’s reality now.” I think that’s the line. Maybe it’s “the Entity’s world.” Either way, I laughed and that laughter may have caused me to miss the line or misremember it. The Entity.
McQuarrie evens out the absurdity of all that Entity chatter with numerous shots of what will happen if the Entity gains control of the world’s nuclear arsenal. The bleakness of the images of cities being wiped out gives the film a dourness that it sometimes trips over. Needless to say, the entire world is at stake once again and Ethan Hunt remains its only hope. Where The Final Reckoning stumbles is when its tone leans too heavily toward somberness. Yes, the stakes couldn’t be higher, but this series burns brightest when it’s a globe-trotting adventure with breathtaking action and crackling sense of humor. Proving that to be the case, The Final Reckoning picks up steam after that first hour of table-setting is complete.
While this is Ethan’s show all the way, the film makes time to give everyone their moments. Series stalwarts Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg shine brighter than usual as Luther and Benji. Newer additions like Hayley Atwell’s master thief Grace and Pom Klementieff’s assassin Paris are great and steal many of their scenes. Especially Klementieff, who gets to play more humor than we’ve seen from Paris before. Shea Whigham and Greg Tarzan Davis, stuck as cuckolded agents Briggs and Degas in the last film get meatier roles this time out. It feels like a victory lap, and a bit indulgent, but I found most of these character moments to be satisfying.
Continuing with the coronation thread, The Final Reckoning is on a mission to tie up many of the series’ loose ends, not just from the McQuarrie run of films, but the whole shebang. Long a source of jokes, this film finally explains what The Rabbit’s Foot (the macguffin Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s villain was after in M:I – lll). The story even makes room for disgraced CIA agent William Donloe (Rolf Saxon), the agent in charge of the Black Box room Ethan broke into way back in the first film. Did we need all of these answers, follow-ups, and callbacks? Probably not, but smoke’em if you’ve got’em.
Where The Final Reckoning shines brightest is its two massive action set pieces, unsurprisingly. The first is a lengthy underwater sequence with Ethan scuba diving hundreds of feet down to mess around with the sunken submarine from the opening of Dead Reckoning. It’s completely dialogue free, with just the score playing and the terrifying sounds of the submarine creaking and croaking. Most of the series’ best action moments are fast paced and cut between multiple threads, the kind of thing that would make Christopher Nolan proud. This submarine sequence goes the other way, slowing down and letting the tension naturally build as every move Ethan makes brings him equally closer to success and oblivion. The other one is the plane business that has been glimpsed in the film’s promo materials. This one manages to one up the plane stunts from Rogue Nation. Like most of the series’ elaborate action, words can’t really do them justice. You really need to see them, on the biggest screen available to you, to bask in the glory of the skill, imagination, scope, and filmmaking on display.
I used to be a passive fan of the MIssion: Impossible films. I’d watch them when they came out, be entertained, then move on to the next movie. It wasn’t until Fallout that I was all the way in on the franchise. Better late than never, right? The FInal Reckoning is a worthy sendoff for Ethan Hunt and the franchise itself, if this actually holds as the final Cruise-led Mission. It may not reach the delirious heights of the series’ best films, but it offers plenty of melancholy close ups of Cruise along with a few final “how did they do that” level stunts on its way out the door. I left the theater feeling like my trust had not been misplaced.
