English
Arabic
French
Spanish
Portuguese
Deutsch
Turkish
Dutch
Italiano
Russian
Romaian
Portuguese (Brazil)
Greek
The Final Reckoning hits Mission: Impossible’s highest highs and lowest lows
I never thought I’d see the day when Tom Cruise didn’t stick the landing, but here we are. Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, the second half of the story launched in 2023’s Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, is a high-wire act gone horribly wrong.
The stunts are stunning, as you’d be right to assume due to the mere fact that Cruise showed up to make another M:I movie at all. In what’s been coylyteased as the final curtain call for Ethan Hunt, the character Cruise has played since 1996’s Mission: Impossible, Cruise jumps from barrel-rolling biplane to barrel-rolling biplane, squeezes through a claustrophobic maze of undetonated underwater missiles in a sunken submarine, and knife-fights in booty shorts, in a most John Wickian turn.
The Final Reckoning has it all — including two and a half hours of dead-in-the-water character drama and endless platitudes about Ethan’s destiny. The sheer number of flashbacks to previous franchise installments puts The Final Reckoning in a category with Seinfeld’s notorious clip show finale. Seeing two action-movie geniuses like Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie making a movie that is so often deadly boring, I wondered whether wrapping up the M:I series with a sense of finality was the true impossible mission all along.
The Final Reckoningpicks up two months after the events of 2023’s Dead Reckoning, in a world that has been nearly consumed by the Entity, an all-powerful AI. Ethan has a plan to take down the robotic overlord, and it once again requires him to pull off a handful of nearly implausible tasks with his team, which includes longtime pals like Lutherand Benji, alongside newer friends from Dead Reckoning, including pickpocket Graceand French assassin Paris. Assuming their skills and a lot of ridiculous coincidences all come together with pinpoint precision, then maaaaybe he can time the execution of their digital overlord juuuuust right.
There are obstacles: Mustache-twirling Gabrielconstantly pops out of nowhere to screw with Ethan in hopes of seizing the Entity for his own control, while returning legacy M:I character Eugene Kittridge, now director of the CIA, hopes to arrest the rogue Ethan and save the day his own way. In theory, this should all be another wild M:I ride.
But even as a diehard M:I Guy, I was constantly lost among The Final Reckoning’s expositional word salad and aggressive attempts to tie every single story beat back to some event in the franchise’s past. The bar has been raised for Marvel movies that supposedly require too much homework ahead of viewing. Final Reckoning’s most direct references are groan-worthy: It “solves” a long-running series mystery with the grace of Solo’s “We’ll call you Solo” scene. And it turns the Langley NOC-list heist from the 1996 movie into the single most important historical event since the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
Tom Cruise, typically a mesmerizing charmer, looks beaten and exhausted throughout the talky opening hour of Final Reckoning — perhaps because filming the more thrilling parts of the movie left him literally beaten and exhausted. The leaden dialogue doesn’t help, and McQuarrie’s decision to rarely hold the camera on his leading man for more than a few seconds means Cruise never gets to lock his charisma on the audience. The choppiness of the editing, even during the talky parts, recalls the hyperactive editing tactics that made Taken 3 go viral. A lackluster play-the-hits score makes even Ethan’s required running scenes limp along. The vibes are off.
Bless the Final Reckoning actors who have pep in their step anyway! Atwell remains a cunning counterpart to Cruise, all reflexes and wit, and McQuarrie overindulges in her role. Final Reckoning did not need an extended scene where an Inuit woman teaches Grace how to steer a dog sled, but it’s tender. A chunk of the movie plays less like the usual globetrotting spy story than a tense Tom Clancy political thriller. But hey, if circumstances are going to trap Ethan in a submarine, at least it’s with a captain played by Tramell Tillman, who ports over his hilariously mannered presence from Severance to the equally heightened world of Mission: Impossible.
And with the U.S. on the brink of atomic war, McQuarrie fills war rooms with cheeky TV actors, gifting Hannah Waddingham, Nick Offerman, and Holt McCallanysome much deserved dramatic spotlights. It’s the series’ best that-guy casting since Mission: Impossible III.
Still, between bursts of personality, the plot of Final Reckoning spins in circles. There’s little tension in the pursuit of the Entity, an invisible threat and the greatest enemy to the “show, don’t tell” screenwriting adage. McQuarrie stages Ethan’s big confrontation with the evil Siri in a VR chamber that zips through the AI’s master plan like it’s the wormhole in 2001: A Space Odyssey. If that sequence felt like anything more than an info dump, it could have been a rush based on the visual design alone. But the Entity blathering the same lines over and over about Ethan’s destiny in no way compares to human villains offering inhumane horrors. A talking blue circle isn’t exactly a standoff with Philip Seymour Hoffman holding a gun to Ethan’s wife’s head.
To make up for the lack of chase, McQuarrie cranks up every familiar form of Impossible Mission Force-patented heist operation to maximum impossibility, to the point where it’s kind of exhausting. The difference between “thrillingly inconceivable” and “preposterously cartoonish” is the difference between “we need split-second precision” and “we need split-nanosecond precision.” Everything in The Final Reckoning, from pinpointing the needle-in-a-haystack location of a missing submarine to the mind-boggling requirements of incarcerating an AI in the realm of scientific possibility, veers over the edge: Unbelievable coincidence, not skill or precision, drives these plans. Also, there has never been a three-hour movie that needed more than one ticking-time-bomb-defusal sequence. Never!
But, my god, the actual stunts. McQuarrie’s set pieces whisk the audience from the streets of London to the Arctic circle to the mountains of South Africa, and it’s progressively more awe-inspiring with each new sequence. A crosscut fight between Ethan and an Entity cultist — yes, we have those now — while his team members are duking it out with goons in a burning building is a spectacle of exactitude. Though Ethan winds up back on an aircraft carrier, in what seems like a shameless callback to Top Gun, Cruise really revives his Maverick do-or-die energy when he descends into the icy depths and contends with elaborate water stunts.
The movie’s much-teased climactic plane stunt is the greatest sequence Cruise has ever committed to film. While many of the Mission: Impossible franchise’s set pieces have been anchored by one death-defying moment, Ethan’s pursuit of Gabriel through the skies goes on and on and on — and I couldn’t get enough. Cruise clings to the side of two different planes, flopping against their sides with every barrel roll, letting his cheeks flap in the wind, and delivering a few Indiana Jones-style punches as he commandeers each vehicle. There are times when he appears to be in full zero G as the second plane careens through valleys. Anything that goes right for him immediately goes wrong, and with constant escalation. It’s breathtaking.
And it’s the grand finale of a bad watch. Ethan Hunt deserves a proper send-off, and not just in a blaze of action-fueled glory. In 2006, J.J. Abrams gave the character a down-to-Earth quality and a group of close friends in M:I III. McQuarrie ran with that intimacy when he rewrote Ghost Protocol in 2011 then made the franchise his own with 2015’s Rogue Nation. His follow-up, 2018’s Mission: Impossible — Fallout, saw Ethan close the book on his marriage, hug it out with his best buds, and sustain a symphony of stunts from start to finish. It was the perfect finale. But it was so successful that Cruise and McQuarrie couldn’t resist going back for more, with this two-part story stretched across years.
Dead Reckoning was satisfying, in a classic M:I way, but it needed a coda to wrap up all its open-ended plots. What was initially planned as Dead Reckoning Part Two became The Final Reckoning, which, after watching the movie, feels like an apt title for what is likely the duo’s last swing at the property. Either way, when the credits roll, Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible series feels like it’s over for good, whether more sequels are on the way or not.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning opens in theaters on May 23.
#final #reckoning #hits #mission #impossibles
The Final Reckoning hits Mission: Impossible’s highest highs and lowest lows
I never thought I’d see the day when Tom Cruise didn’t stick the landing, but here we are. Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, the second half of the story launched in 2023’s Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, is a high-wire act gone horribly wrong.
The stunts are stunning, as you’d be right to assume due to the mere fact that Cruise showed up to make another M:I movie at all. In what’s been coylyteased as the final curtain call for Ethan Hunt, the character Cruise has played since 1996’s Mission: Impossible, Cruise jumps from barrel-rolling biplane to barrel-rolling biplane, squeezes through a claustrophobic maze of undetonated underwater missiles in a sunken submarine, and knife-fights in booty shorts, in a most John Wickian turn.
The Final Reckoning has it all — including two and a half hours of dead-in-the-water character drama and endless platitudes about Ethan’s destiny. The sheer number of flashbacks to previous franchise installments puts The Final Reckoning in a category with Seinfeld’s notorious clip show finale. Seeing two action-movie geniuses like Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie making a movie that is so often deadly boring, I wondered whether wrapping up the M:I series with a sense of finality was the true impossible mission all along.
The Final Reckoningpicks up two months after the events of 2023’s Dead Reckoning, in a world that has been nearly consumed by the Entity, an all-powerful AI. Ethan has a plan to take down the robotic overlord, and it once again requires him to pull off a handful of nearly implausible tasks with his team, which includes longtime pals like Lutherand Benji, alongside newer friends from Dead Reckoning, including pickpocket Graceand French assassin Paris. Assuming their skills and a lot of ridiculous coincidences all come together with pinpoint precision, then maaaaybe he can time the execution of their digital overlord juuuuust right.
There are obstacles: Mustache-twirling Gabrielconstantly pops out of nowhere to screw with Ethan in hopes of seizing the Entity for his own control, while returning legacy M:I character Eugene Kittridge, now director of the CIA, hopes to arrest the rogue Ethan and save the day his own way. In theory, this should all be another wild M:I ride.
But even as a diehard M:I Guy, I was constantly lost among The Final Reckoning’s expositional word salad and aggressive attempts to tie every single story beat back to some event in the franchise’s past. The bar has been raised for Marvel movies that supposedly require too much homework ahead of viewing. Final Reckoning’s most direct references are groan-worthy: It “solves” a long-running series mystery with the grace of Solo’s “We’ll call you Solo” scene. And it turns the Langley NOC-list heist from the 1996 movie into the single most important historical event since the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
Tom Cruise, typically a mesmerizing charmer, looks beaten and exhausted throughout the talky opening hour of Final Reckoning — perhaps because filming the more thrilling parts of the movie left him literally beaten and exhausted. The leaden dialogue doesn’t help, and McQuarrie’s decision to rarely hold the camera on his leading man for more than a few seconds means Cruise never gets to lock his charisma on the audience. The choppiness of the editing, even during the talky parts, recalls the hyperactive editing tactics that made Taken 3 go viral. A lackluster play-the-hits score makes even Ethan’s required running scenes limp along. The vibes are off.
Bless the Final Reckoning actors who have pep in their step anyway! Atwell remains a cunning counterpart to Cruise, all reflexes and wit, and McQuarrie overindulges in her role. Final Reckoning did not need an extended scene where an Inuit woman teaches Grace how to steer a dog sled, but it’s tender. A chunk of the movie plays less like the usual globetrotting spy story than a tense Tom Clancy political thriller. But hey, if circumstances are going to trap Ethan in a submarine, at least it’s with a captain played by Tramell Tillman, who ports over his hilariously mannered presence from Severance to the equally heightened world of Mission: Impossible.
And with the U.S. on the brink of atomic war, McQuarrie fills war rooms with cheeky TV actors, gifting Hannah Waddingham, Nick Offerman, and Holt McCallanysome much deserved dramatic spotlights. It’s the series’ best that-guy casting since Mission: Impossible III.
Still, between bursts of personality, the plot of Final Reckoning spins in circles. There’s little tension in the pursuit of the Entity, an invisible threat and the greatest enemy to the “show, don’t tell” screenwriting adage. McQuarrie stages Ethan’s big confrontation with the evil Siri in a VR chamber that zips through the AI’s master plan like it’s the wormhole in 2001: A Space Odyssey. If that sequence felt like anything more than an info dump, it could have been a rush based on the visual design alone. But the Entity blathering the same lines over and over about Ethan’s destiny in no way compares to human villains offering inhumane horrors. A talking blue circle isn’t exactly a standoff with Philip Seymour Hoffman holding a gun to Ethan’s wife’s head.
To make up for the lack of chase, McQuarrie cranks up every familiar form of Impossible Mission Force-patented heist operation to maximum impossibility, to the point where it’s kind of exhausting. The difference between “thrillingly inconceivable” and “preposterously cartoonish” is the difference between “we need split-second precision” and “we need split-nanosecond precision.” Everything in The Final Reckoning, from pinpointing the needle-in-a-haystack location of a missing submarine to the mind-boggling requirements of incarcerating an AI in the realm of scientific possibility, veers over the edge: Unbelievable coincidence, not skill or precision, drives these plans. Also, there has never been a three-hour movie that needed more than one ticking-time-bomb-defusal sequence. Never!
But, my god, the actual stunts. McQuarrie’s set pieces whisk the audience from the streets of London to the Arctic circle to the mountains of South Africa, and it’s progressively more awe-inspiring with each new sequence. A crosscut fight between Ethan and an Entity cultist — yes, we have those now — while his team members are duking it out with goons in a burning building is a spectacle of exactitude. Though Ethan winds up back on an aircraft carrier, in what seems like a shameless callback to Top Gun, Cruise really revives his Maverick do-or-die energy when he descends into the icy depths and contends with elaborate water stunts.
The movie’s much-teased climactic plane stunt is the greatest sequence Cruise has ever committed to film. While many of the Mission: Impossible franchise’s set pieces have been anchored by one death-defying moment, Ethan’s pursuit of Gabriel through the skies goes on and on and on — and I couldn’t get enough. Cruise clings to the side of two different planes, flopping against their sides with every barrel roll, letting his cheeks flap in the wind, and delivering a few Indiana Jones-style punches as he commandeers each vehicle. There are times when he appears to be in full zero G as the second plane careens through valleys. Anything that goes right for him immediately goes wrong, and with constant escalation. It’s breathtaking.
And it’s the grand finale of a bad watch. Ethan Hunt deserves a proper send-off, and not just in a blaze of action-fueled glory. In 2006, J.J. Abrams gave the character a down-to-Earth quality and a group of close friends in M:I III. McQuarrie ran with that intimacy when he rewrote Ghost Protocol in 2011 then made the franchise his own with 2015’s Rogue Nation. His follow-up, 2018’s Mission: Impossible — Fallout, saw Ethan close the book on his marriage, hug it out with his best buds, and sustain a symphony of stunts from start to finish. It was the perfect finale. But it was so successful that Cruise and McQuarrie couldn’t resist going back for more, with this two-part story stretched across years.
Dead Reckoning was satisfying, in a classic M:I way, but it needed a coda to wrap up all its open-ended plots. What was initially planned as Dead Reckoning Part Two became The Final Reckoning, which, after watching the movie, feels like an apt title for what is likely the duo’s last swing at the property. Either way, when the credits roll, Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible series feels like it’s over for good, whether more sequels are on the way or not.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning opens in theaters on May 23.
#final #reckoning #hits #mission #impossibles
·14 Views
