Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
⭐⭐
Expectation: This is going to be epic and I’m going to love it.
Reality: It was epically disappointing, exhausting, and underwhelming.
I have a love/hate relationship with this movie. I saw it twice in IMAX and lowered my rating from 3.5 to 2 after the second viewing, so I’ll start with this:
Mission: Impossible and action movie fans should absolutely see this movie, and they should see it in a theater. (If you’re not an avid movie-goer, you probably won’t notice the difference between IMAX and regular; I wouldn’t splurge for the IMAX experience unless you’re a movie buff and that will make a difference to you.)
I love the Mission: Impossible franchise. I’ve been a fan since #2 (I was 3 when the first one came out), and for reference, here’s how I ranked the others:
Mission: Impossible - 5/5
Mission: Impossible II - 4/5
Mission: Impossible III - 3.5/5
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol - 3.5/5
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation - 4/5
Mission: Impossible - Fallout - 4/5
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning - 4.5/5
These ratings skew high because this franchise is so much fun.
M:I II, for example, is the first one I saw, and as a kid I thought the stunts and masks were so freaking cool and it made me want to be an actor. It also has Thandiwe Newton, and in 2000 there wasn’t a whole lot of representation for me on screen, so that was a huge factor.
That said, why does The Final Reckoning get such a low ranking in my book?
High expectations, for one. I re-watch these back-to-back every 2 years or so and as the franchise conclusion (for now, more about that later) I found it underwhelming.
This film is way too long in an exhausting way, not a fun way. I have a lot of issues with the pacing of the second half and the editing throughout. The story isn’t good, and the dialogue is laughable - and not with intentional comedy. It felt like the filmmakers just didn’t care because they knew everyone was going to see this anyway so they focused all of their energy and attention on the stunts. The near 3-hour runtime isn’t used wisely. (Seriously, don’t worry about bathroom breaks. Tom will still be doing the absurd stunt when you return.)
The Final Reckoning is Ethan & team’s most impossible mission yet, but where other films in this franchise have some grounding in reality, this one is full-fledged Fast & Furious-level nonsense. Similar to Fast & Furious, fans don’t see Mission: Impossible for a complex story and emotional experience. We see Mission: Impossible to watch Tom Cruise run really fast and do a bunch of impossible things. The film delivers on those, tenfold. It’s a lot of fun. The stunts, while over done, are very cool.
But the fun isn’t enough to distract from the terrible story, and lots of weak acting.
Angela Bassett carries every single one of her scenes, as she usually does, but her commitment to the material makes the bad script and dumb storyline really stand out. Basset and Ving Rhames are the best parts of this movie. Rhames has the most serious material, so maybe he didn’t have to work as hard to make it work, but he’s brilliant. The story surrounding Luther is the only part the writers seemed to put genuine care and thought into. It works extremely well and stays true to character, while the rest of the film has me questioning how, even in the world of Mission: Impossible, any of these characters have jobs.
Most of the characters feel like shells or caricatures of people. Gabriel (played by the fantastic Esai Morales), for example, went from a normal, misguided but somewhat logical bad guy in Dead Reckoning to full on senseless, mustache-twirling villain. It was weird. There’s a lot of side characters in The Final Reckoning who only have a handful of scenes, so they don’t get enough time to be full people, but so many of the actors tried to stand out with their handful of lines, drawing attention to themselves in a bad way instead of fading into the background to set the tone of the scene.
I want to give an honorable mention to the guy playing Madame President’s son, because he knew how to pack a punch with his one line (and he was supposed to have our attention in that scene).
Simon Pegg, Hayley Atwell, and Pom Klementieff are also great. Greg Tarzan Davis is fine, his presence doesn’t make or break anything. I wish they had more time to shine, but instead we have to watch Tom alone in a submarine for half an hour and then hanging upside down from a plane for 20 minutes without, at the very least, Benji in his ear to entertain us. For my first watch, this was okay, but re-watching, I just wanted more of Ethan’s team and less of Ethan 🙃 I wanted to take a nap until the others were back on screen, and I suspect I’ll fast-forward through these next time I do a full franchise re-watch.
There is also a very weird and unnecessary scene between Ethan and Grace. I suspect it was because the cinematographers wanted the cool shot, which they got, and the filmmakers know that fans want some element of romance even if it’s small, but I honestly would’ve preferred to see them cut into the ice, pull the man out, and cut to the next beat.
The bad parts of The Final Reckoning are so distracting they took me out of it, which is frustrating, and part of the low rating. The rest is because I went into it the first time thinking this was the conclusion to the franchise. I found the film so exhausting that I was just happy it ended. The opening 20 minutes felt like a good franchise conclusion, but everything else that followed did not. Not great, but worth seeing.
Now that I’ve seen the ending twice, I don’t think it’s over. I’m still a fan and look forward to the next one.
