Spoiler Thoughts on M:I—The Final Reckoning
It took 12 years for The Fast and the Furious franchise to morph into the Mission:Impossible franchise, then it took another 12 years for Mission: Impossible to turn into The Fast and the Furious.
This is largely fun and funny and human, but it's also absolutely hamstrung by Avengers Endgame-itis where so much attention is payed to this being the final film in the series that it ends up doing it all a disservice. Just do a good Mission: Impossible movie and leave the wrapping it all up to the final two minutes and you'd have a winner!
It's funny how each McQuarrie script is worse than the previous one (Fallout has a much worse script than Rogue Nation, but the action is so good, I like the movie more). I don't know if it was in the writing beforehand or in trying to assemble things after, but I think the choppy nature of the first act is being attributed too much to the clips from past movies (which I actually enjoyed) and not enough to the weird decision to retrofit Benji and Luther exposition into minor flashbacks throughout the action of the first 45 minutes. Also insane that we are somehow dropped into "Luther is mortally ill" without even a hint as to when or why that happened.
Overall, though, the stakes have accidentally gotten TOO high and the world posited in this movie is both too far flung from ours for me to really grab onto, but also not really explored enough to be an interesting backdrop for the film.
Apparently during the scripting of Ghost Protocol they had really complex motivations for the villain that were kind of hard to track, until Cruise said "Hey, what if he just has a nuclear bomb and wants to use it" as a clarifying tool. It worked there, but then they went back to that exact same well in both Fallout and this. With all the stupid connections to past movies, why not have a good one and say the Entity trained itself on John Lark's manifesto which was inspired by Hendricks' theories that the mankind that survives a nuclear war would be stronger?
Quick rundown on the connections it makes between the previous films:
Bringing back Dunlow and making him and his wife the heart of the second half of the film and making them feel expendable enough that it genuinely raises tension throughout the back half: Excellent!
Making the Rabbits Foot the origin of The Entity: Completely neutral
Finishing the movie in Prague with his team and drawing a connection between the way Ethan lost his whole team in the first film and his desire to never let anyone die again starting around MI:3 on: Wonderful.
Shea Whigham revealing that instead of Briggs, his name is Jim Phelps, Jr. and Tom Cruise has somehow figured it out, and this never comes into play and does nothing to their relationship that isn't already explained by Briggs' overall demeanor: Insane. Why did they do this? In all the attempts to get this down to a manageable length, how do you miss this easy cut?
What a good team! I wish they got to get up to some classic Mission antics.
Now, I do love the new team they develop here. Pom and Hayley Atwell and Greg Tarzan Davis are fun and interesting foils to a Benji-led team, and frankly I was getting a little sick of the Benji-Luther-Ilsa team that seemingly codified in Rogue Nation. Part of the fun of the franchise for me is seeing Ethan play off of new characters as he recruits his team!
But, they don't get enough of a chance to be a Mission: Impossible team! Because the villain is the Entity, it robs the movie of doing what I think of as Mission's true spirit, not stunts, but tricks (also generally thought of as The Mousetrap) in these movies! The Burj Khalifa scene is great because it's Tom Cruise on the outside of a building, but it's ALSO great because it's the Mission team having to improvise and set up duplicate meetings between a buyer and a seller that they don't want to interact. We get a quick mask pull early on, but otherwise everything here is so linear! They kind of set the climax up to be like a classic Mission trick on the Entity where they make it think it's going one place but it ends up in another, but it ends up just being a couple blinking lights and is overly straight-forward.
But that leads to the other element of the M:I trinity (The Mousetrap, the Heist, The Stunt), the Heist. We get one HELL of a heist here as the movie really starts firing on all cylinders around the time of the dual-exposition scenes where Benji explains the plan to the team while Tom Cruise explains it to an oddly American Hannah Waddingham (also, this is probably on me, but I don't fully get what her connection is to that envelope with the date the first movie came out is?). The Heist has always been the weakest part of the McQ Missions to me, the underwater one in Rogue Nation is ok, I guess grabbing Solomon Lane is the heist in Fallout and then I don't think Dead Reckoning really even has one, but here he does one that fully lives up to the Langley sequence and harkens back to it in a creative, interesting way that the callbacks SHOULD have been handled in the movie.
We get an extended, dialog-free sequence of Hunt diving down to the sub to get the source code and the movie is comfortable enough to do all of its storytelling visually. There's no cross-cutting and Hunt doesn't talk to himself except for one obvious piece of ADR that rivals Bruce Campbell's "workshed" read in Evil Dead 2 where he says "torpedo tube" to himself, certainly in response to confused test audiences. The tension is amped up really well, there's great ticking clocks that they add and it's visually and structurally insanely impressive. I only dock it for Cruise's ascent back up to the surface which seems oddly easy after Katy O'Brien's big spiel about how dangerous diving is.
Then we're into the big finale and having read a book about 1920s airshows (which largely developed along with crop-dusting because WWI turned out a lot of new pilots who now had nothing better to do with their pilot skills), I'm pleasantly amused that 100 years later we still just enjoy seeing guys hanging off of biplanes.
The sequence is a lot of fun, and Gabriel has finally turned into a cackling cartoon villain that makes him way more enjoyable than the cool, collected cucumber he was in the last one, but every time we cut between these goofy antics, and the geopolitical reality of every nuke on Earth possibly getting launched (also laughed every time this movie ignored that Israel refuses to admit they have nukes), I felt a tonal swing and a lurch that almost knocked me out of my seat. Fallout balanced them a little better, just because helicopters belong a little more to the milleu of the military spy story; the biplanes need a story that's a little more fun and frolicky to fit in. It's a hell of a sequence and a perfect stunt showcase that feels on par with something from an '80s Hong Kong movie but with more of a budget to back it up. Had to laugh every time we saw Gabriel and Hunt in the same shot though and it was suddenly green screen.
Meanwhile, Benji gets a great showcase where he leads Paris in lung surgery AND Grace in hacking while simultaneously dying. Great fun sequence, but it leads to the Entity being trapped in (as the movie says like five different times) the blink of an eye. Gabriel has already been demoted from main villain at the start of this, so it's kind of an ignoble end for the AI that they act like everything is built around.
Speaking of Gabriel...it's insane to me that they give him a mysterious background with Ethan in the last movie that is not at any point expanded on in this film. I don't really mind, because I didn't like it in that one either, but wild that they didn't do anything with it here.
For me, Dead Reckoning was the dividing line between the Mission movies I loved and the ones I enjoyed with reservations, and this falls JUST on the other side of that dividing line (M:I>Ghost Protocol>Fallout>Rogue Nation>Dead Reckoning>Final Reckoning>MI:3>MI:2).
All this is to say, I had a fun time watching this movie and really enjoyed the stunt sequences and the character beats, but it was missing that special Mission feel to really take it over the top for me.
But my big positive takeaways outside of the two big sequences include: Hayley Atwell has two broadly comic beats that absolutely rule (her watching Hunt murder some folks and then her learning how to steer a sled dog team); I really can't get over how invested I was in Donlow and his wife; there's a great treadmill fight; Pom is an absolute joy every time she's on screen and gets a lot of great comic moments; the opening Entity bit is actually really well-done and in IMAX started to make me feel a little unsteady and dizzy.
All this is to say: Ethan Hunt seemingly destroys the world's ability to stream movies. Five Stars.