Director – Christopher McQuarrie – 2022 – US – Cert. 12a – 163m
*****
Tom Cruise’s eighth and director Christopher McQuarrie’s fourth Mission: Impossible outing delivers up to par globe-trotting action set pieces and considerably more plot than last time – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, May 21st
When Tom Cruise made his first Mission: Impossible movie (Brian DePalma, 1996), no-one foresaw that the property, already a successful and long-running TV series emblazoned into the cultural zeitgeist along with its immediately recognisable Lalo Schifrin theme tune, would turn into an equally successful movie franchise. With each passing movie, it has seemed a better and better fit for Tom Cruise – while he has a wide-ranging career, this franchise is today what his name immediately brings to mind. After several directors, the franchise and Cruise somehow found another director -actually a writer director – who seemed to fit the franchise as well as he did. Chrstopher McQuarrie did uncredited rewrites on the fourth entry Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird, 2011) and has directed and written or co-written every entry in the franchise since. Watching these films, you sense a shorthand developing between producer-star and writer-director, with each film feeling more assured than its predecessor.
The new film has been touted as the series’ final entry, including by Cruise himself. Certainly, it’s as good an ending as you can imagine. But it’s much more than that: The Final Reckoning has been very cleverly constructed so that it not only works as a standalone film, but also proves more than adequate as the sequel to Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One (Christopher McQuarrie, 2022). On top of that, for anyone who has followed the series from the first film, the new one plants lots of references taking the viewer back to earlier films, including the first, which has the effect of bringing the eight movies together as a complete whole in a way that earlier entries didn’t. It’s difficult to know where the franchise could be taken after this: the film feels like a satisfying ending which brings lots of elements from its predecessors together.
It’s to both Cruise and McQuarrie’s credit that unlike certain other ensemble action Hollywood action franchises, this one never feels cheesy or unbelievable or past its sell-by date. Considering that these movies deal with larger-than-life, outlandish action, that’s quite an achievement. It’s done that by a combination of factors. One is the stunts, built around (and often performed by) Cruise himself in the tradition of death-defying screen actors doing their own stunts from Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton in Hollywood’s silent era through Jackie Chan in 1970s Hong Kong. Another is the ensemble cast, among whom Ving Rhames as technician Luther Stickell is the only cast member other than Cruise to feature in all eight films while Britain’s Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn has been in every entry since Mission: Impossible III (J. J. Abrams, 2006). These two and a number of others – among them in The Final Reckoning Grace (Hayley Atwell), a skilled pickpocket, and Paris (Pom Klementieff) from Dead Reckoning – are members of the crack team assembled around Ethan Hunt (Cruise) under the larger banner of the Impossible Mission Force (IMF), while another returning cast member Esai Morales plays Gabriel, the human villain of Dead Reckoning who works for the largely unseen ubervillain known as The Entity, an AI that has gone rogue and threatens mankind.
The Entity is what drives the plot, with the mission of Hunt and his team ultimately to trick it into entering a small container wherein it can be contained and isolated from the World Wide Web. This is an action that needs to be executed in an exact nanosecond – too soon or too late and the trap won’t catch it, an outside chance which will require all Grace’s deft sleight of hand skills if it is to work.
For all those who enjoyed the opening of Dead Reckoning in which Russian submarine The Sevastopol came to grief after being tricked by The Entity that another submarine was pursuing it when in fact there wasn’t one, there is a lot more of the sunken submarine this time round. Specifically, Ethan must be dropped into the freezing Bering Sea to swim down to and through the submarine to retrieve the missing part of a weapon, even as the vessel rests perilously atop a sea floor ridge and could topple off into deeper waters at any moment.
His swim into and around the sunken vessel is one of the most gripping such sequences I can remember seeing in the movies. It was shot in a specially constructed tank in which the actor had to perform at considerable depth in 75 minute takes. Such sequences are normally shot by underwater cameramen with a director watching feeds on dry land, but McQuarrie broke the mould by devising a system where he could be in the water directing the shoot himself at first hand, and it pays off in spades.
The sunken sub sequence is one of the movies two trademark set pieces, the other commencing with the villainous Gabriel doing a runner in one of two biplanes, the second of which Hunt manages to hang on to as it’s taking off. Like the bike jump off a cliff in the previous film, the shots for this extended sequence are all filmed for real as Cruise first gains control of the second aircraft from its pilot, then boards the first one for a fight with Gabriel.
It would be all too easy to let such sequences derail the film, showcasing the stunts for their own sake, yet Cruise and McQuarrie’s years of working in the franchise have helped them hone the twin crafts of engaging storytelling and exploring character. When Cruise drops into the Bering Sea and in his subsequent time in the sunken sub – and, for that matter, in the sequence aboard a ‘friendly’, fully functional sub which precedes it – you’re learning something about Ethan Hunt, how he works under pressure (McQuarrie suggests in the film’s extensive press handouts that the phrase “under pressure” is the perfect metaphor for what Ethan’s character and the Mission: Impossible films are all about) and exactly who he is. The same is true of the biplane sequence. Both are indeed bravura stunt sequences in themselves, but they are fundamentally there to serve a larger storytelling whole.
Even as The Final Reckoning pushes the envelope in terms of what is possible within spectacle-driven action cinema, it doesn’t lose sight of its narrative duties, and despite its near-three-hour running length, makes for compelling viewing. Still thinking about it a week after it was screened to press, it’s remarkable that a film can simultaneously work as a standalone feature, a satisfying second film in a two-part story, and a concluding film in an eight-film franchise. Whether you are diving into the franchise fresh with this film, are here to see the conclusion of the previous, open-ended entry or want to see how this pulls the franchise’s seven previous movies together, The Final Reckoning does the job admirably. In short, a treat.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is out in cinemas in the UK on Wednesday, May 21st.
Trailer: