“I need you one more time to trust me.” Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise)
Trust we have given over 30 years to a Mission Impossible franchise that has given us a durable hero in the form of Ethan Hunt: played by Tom Cruise, now 62 years old and more vigorous and brighter than most beings half his age. The new Mission Impossible-The Final Reckoning is as long on Cruise’s stunts as it is on The Entity, an AI cyber villain for our times. Writer/director Christopher McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen deftly steer us to salvation.
Probably this modern hero, Ethan Hunt, fulfills our desire for a romantic and indestructible savior the way Douglas Fairbanks did in the early days of 20th-Century cinema. The difference is that Hunt is technically savvy and less sexy than Fairbanks, but no less in the dreams of men and women looking for love and deliverance from ruthless dictators.
Today’s Hunt goes places Fairbanks’s characters never went, in this case the bottom of the Baltic Sea to recover source code that will help neutralize The Entity before it controls the world. Our hero, Ethan, and the actor, Cruise, go there while also jousting mid sky with biplanes that allow us once again to see Cruise latch on to an airborne plane, action the actor claims took his breath away, literally.
At almost three hours, this epic adventure lets us breathe while the world contemplates the destruction that ensues if our hero doesn’t gain the code and can’t stop arch villain Gabriel (Esai Morales) from controlling Entity. What does save the world is the old super-hero trope of family, a group of eccentric characters hanging together as a team, albeit Ethan the major operative.
More than anything, cooperation and demanding timing save the day, showing whatever disaster awaits mankind, shared values and precise maneuvers will save the world. It all sounds so meta, but the idea of human love saving the day gives hope to our tangled world. Nobody better than Cruise to help us survive Armageddon and Three-hour movie adventures. Great summer escape with thoughts on surviving contemporary political disasters.
“It is written.” Paris (Pom Klementieff)
Mission Impossible-The Final Reckoning
Director: Christopher McQuarrie (MI-Dead Reckoning Part One), Jack Reacher
Screenplay: McQuarrie, Erik Jendresen, (MI-Dead Reckoning Part One)
Cast: Tom Cruise
Rating: PG-13
Length: 2h 49m
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take (recently listed by Feedspot as two of the ten best NPR Movie Podcasts) out of WCBE 90.5 FM, Columbus, Ohio. Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com