I Hope ‘Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning’ is the End
Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning | Credit: Paramount Pictures
The most special agent, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), is back with another impossible mission. He must stop the evil AI known as ‘The Entity’ from destroying the entire world. And, of course, he’s the only one who can save the day.
No pressure.
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is an effective way to wrap up the series, but it fails to live up emotionally and narratively to some of the previous films. The action set pieces are exciting, especially knowing that our favorite actor with a death wish does as much of these stunts as the insurance company will allow him to do. While watching, I was definitely wondering how they completed some of these scenes and am looking forward to watching the behind-the-scenes footage to help me understand the lengths that Tom and everyone else went through to bring this story to the big screen.
I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to end an iconic franchise, especially one that has lasted for nearly 30 years. While clunky and riddled with far too many flashbacks for my taste, I think that this does land the proverbial and literal plane, allowing Ethan to walk away. And I hope he does walk away… I hope that this series sits on a shelf for 10 or 15 years and then can be rebooted with a whole new cast then. Some time away from Ethan Hunt and the IMF would probably do all of us some good.
It’s been a fun ride with Ethan, Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg), and the rest of the crew, but a break would probably be for the best.
Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning | Credit: Paramount Pictures
While aspects of this film work well, I think my biggest disappointment was in the writing. While the Mission: Impossible franchise isn’t known for its excellent dialogue, I think the cheese was laid extra thick on this script. If you were to take a drink anytime someone said “you’re the only one” or “the final reckoning,” you’d probably leave the film feeling a buzz. At times, it felt as though they ran out of interesting things to say, so they just started recycling cliches.
While I can overlook mediocre dialogue, I struggle with some of the larger structural choices about this film. In ending the franchise, I think they leaned too heavily into nostalgia, which ended up working against them. Throughout Final Reckoning, there are a lot of flashbacks, and the first hour is very exposition-heavy. I understand that the film needs to catch us up and help us remember what happened in the previous film, while also tying it to all of those that came before it. That’s not an easy feat, but the way they did it felt clunky to me. I think there are more elegant and interesting ways to situate the events of this film with the others in the franchise.
In one early scene, Ethan and Grace (Hayley Atwell) have been kidnapped by Gabriel (Esai Morales) and held hostage. Immediately, I was thinking about Mission: Impossible III, where Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman) holds Ethan hostage in a very similar manner. Then Gabriel goes on to explicitly reference that scene and the rabbit’s foot that Ethan was forced to steal. While I don’t mind callbacks to previous films like this, I think referencing this particular scene is to Final Reckoning’s detriment.
Owen Davian, thanks to Hoffman’s performance, is, I would argue, the best villain in the franchise. For me, it’s no contest. As great as Esai Morales is, Gabriel isn’t Owen Davian. So that whole scene made me want to go and rewatch Mission: Impossible III instead of continuing to sit through this film. (They also decided to do some ridiculous retconning, making the rabbit’s foot related to The Entity so that the films would be tied together, which was absolutely not necessary.)
Footage from the first film is also shown pretty frequently, which is my favorite of the series. While I appreciate the continuity and bringing back the analyst, William Donloe (Rolf Saxon), all of those scenes made me want to rewatch the film that started it all. I longed to go back to the first film, which was much more scoped and attached to reality.
Playing on the nostalgia of the audience is a great move, and I know it worked for a lot of people. For me, it just made me want something else—to go back to a simpler time and the scaled-back version of these movies.
Hayley Atwell, Simon Pegg, Pom Klementieff, and Greg Tarzan Davis in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning | Credit: Paramount Pictures
For the most part, I’ve largely enjoyed the Mission: Impossible films. It’s been a fun time running around with Ethan and his entire team as they try to save the world yet again from utter destruction. If this is the end of this version of the series, I think it’s done a good enough job of bringing Ethan’s story to a close.
My favorite part of Final Reckoning is how this film also honors Luther, who I would argue is the MVP of the series. Without Luther, there is no Ethan Hunt, and this film does a great job of showing that.
Who knows where the franchise will go after this, but I hope that they take a break. It’s been a great run, but it’s probably time for Tom Cruise to hang up his IMF hat and find some other way to practice his favorite daredevil tricks.