Movie: Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning
Grade: A-
Once more...with feeling
With a budget north of $400M (maybe the biggest in history), Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning better be good. Skydance Studios has bet the studio on it. It has the best writers, editors, actors, and stunts that money can buy. With so much riding on it, it better be REAL good, and there's every reason to think it could be. Tom Cruise has a history of not disappointing. He makes only a few films a decade. All have huge budgets and are filled with action sequences meant to satisfy his legion of fans. The problem is, if you're not a Cruise fan, those films better be able to satisfy you as well if they're going to justify those budgets. That's where things have always gone a little wonky for Cruise.
Tom Cruise films have a formula, and that's especially true of the Mission Impossible films. He likes a small cast. Little character development. Little plot. Huge, episodic action sequences using live stuntmen (often himsef) and very little CGI, all held together by breaks of compicated exposition that the audience can interpret however they wish. He doesn't go for big emotions. Just big action. To Tom Cruise, character development is just a waste of time that could have been better spent on another big action sequence. Characters are defined by what they do in those action scenes, not what they say in between them. Cruise himself rarely speaks (delivery was never his strong point).
Cruise has been very open that The Final Reckoning will be the last Mission Impossible film, and if he says it is, then it's so (He pretty much owns the franchise). He wanted to go out with a bang. At just a hair over three hours this will likely be remembered as Cruise's magnum opus. The problem with the film is that while it checks all the boxes, it's not much better than most Cruise films. There's simply more of it.
The last film left off with several open plot points. A sunken Russian submarine containing a computer virus. A key that might access it. A power-crazed underworld leader who wants to control the world, and Ethan Hunt's team stretched thin, with one dead, and another hospitalized. Final Reckoning picks up almost immediately after the last film. The race is on to reach the sunken submarine and stop a computer threat cryptically named The Entity (a typical Cruise name, revealing as much about the threat as a Cruise film will ever give you).
It wouldn't be Mission Impossible if the stunts weren't impossible. These films like to push the action to the point where they no longer seem plausible and leave you saying "enough already. Give him a break!" Hunt doesn't just grab a biplane taking off and climb into it - he climbs into one cockpit, then the other, then transfers from a crashing plane to another biplane, climbing into both of its cockpits! It makes what Indiana Jones did seem easy, and maybe that's the point, but it also seems overly long and complicated.
Tom Cruise also isn't Tom Clancy. The world's most powerful Russian submarine isn't a mystery to be solved - it's just a propeller to be dodged. The threat of nuclear war isn't solved by great minds searching for a solution we didn't see coming - it's solved with a slight-of-hand trick.
In the end Final Reckoning is a big, fun, action spy film, but is it any better than watching two Mission Impossible films back-to-back? Probably not.