A Grand Finale… Maybe

To reiterate (from my rereview of Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part 1), I do really like the Mission: ImpossibleIntroduced in 1966, the original Mission: Impossible featured a team of agents (with varying skills) heading out into the field to solve puzzle-box like cases on a weekly basis. This simple concept spawned a long-running series, a second series in the 1980s, and a hugely successful movie franchise starring Tom Cruise that continues today. film series. While I could take or leave the television shows, the films have hooked me and kept me interested in them, especially from the point at which J.J. Abrams came on for Mission: Impossible III through the resulting long era of films all the way through the sixth, Mission: Impossible: Fallout. They’re great, bombasting action films with crazy stunts, and are generally a lot of fun.

With that said, any film series can run out of steam, and it really does feel like maybe Mission: Impossible should have been put on hiatus, or found a way to pass the torch, or something because Mission: Impossible: Fallout both marked the high point for the franchise, and the natural point at which the series should have known it did all it could and couldn’t get any crazier or more interesting. Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part 1 not only felt like a lazy, boomer story doing a AI spy tale we’d see better elsewhere (once again, I’ll point over at Person of Interest), but it also didn’t have much new to add to the franchise. The stunts were cool, but based on things we’d seen before, and the plot felt as lazy as it could get. It was gonna take a miracle for it’s second part to somehow manage to elevate and course correct from the seventh film if it was going to somehow redeem the franchise.

To be clear: Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning does not manage to do that. Bloated, overly long, and tired, this film not only fails to redeem the previous film, it’s also just not a very good Mission: Impossible film in general. Everything feels like it’s going by the numbers, following the expected formula, doing the expected things. Even the stunts, the one part of these films you could always rely on no matter what, feel less interesting and less fun. This is another film in the franchise proving that maybe it’s time to put this series, and its 62 year old lead star, out to pasture. The glory days are over, we all need to let it go.

This eighth film in the franchise picks up one month after the events of Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part 1. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is on the run, and his team of people – Simon Pegg as Benji Dunn, Ving Rhames as Luther Stickwell, Haley Atwell as Grace, Pom Klementieff as Paris – are either evading capture, missing, or in prison. Ethan has to get his team together to take on the AI threat, the Entity, that is potentially going to destroy the world. How could this be?

Well, after Ethan bested Gabriel (Esai Morales) previously, the Entity decided that Gabriel couldn’t be trusted and it’d have to take matters into its own (digital) hands. As such it’s been infesting every corner of the internet it can find, taking over all of the software and infrastructure, making the world totally dependent upon it. It’s even begun taking over the nuclear armaments across the globe, with the end goal of preparing an all out nuclear war that would wipe away all of humanity, leaving the Entity as the only unharmed survivor for thousands of years. Ethan and the team have to use that special key they got previously and find the Stevastopol, the sunken, Russian ship that holds the original source code for the Entity, if they’re going to find a way to wipe it out before it wipes all of us out.

There are two major flaws with Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning: it’s too long, and it makes no sense. On the first front, this film shows the big reason why dividing this story up into two parts was a bad idea. Not only does it drag a threadbare story out over nearly six-hours, but it requires the second film in this two-parter to literally stop and tell us everything we might have missed if we didn’t already see the previous film in the series. Which, for most people, they probably didn’t since Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part 1 was the first true Box Office failure for this franchise. Many people didn’t see it so they likely wouldn’t know, going into part two, what the heck was going on.

Bear in mind there are ways to get people caught up on past events without having to info dump on them at the start of a film. One of the best ways is to drop the audience into the middle of the action, having them already performing their mission while dropping only the occasional line about what they’re doing, to an onlooker or supervisor, so that we’re caught up without actually having to waste time going over everything in detail. Past Mission: Impossible films have done just that, putting us right in the middle of the action (such as the prison break that opened the fourth movie, Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol which set the stage for the adventure to come).

Instead, though, Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning wastes forty minutes on exposition and recapping, wasting a lot of time before we finally get to the actual mission at hand. It grinds the film to a halt before it can even get going, which is bad enough. But then it does it again, and again, constant;ly lurching and jerking to a halt any time we, get onto a mission, re-explaining things we already know, or were told minutes beforehand, as if it can’t trust us to remember even basic details about the film. A lot of time is wasted here, padding out a runtime that absolutely should not have been padded.

At the end of the last film we knew that the team had to get to the Sevastopol and find the AI core that was within it. That was established in the previous film, and was our clear goal for this movie. As such, why does it take us nearly two full acts to get to that AI core. Most of the movie is wasted on the search for the sub, and it’s not even an interesting search. Some guy in Alaska (who, in fairness, was in previous Mission: Impossible films and his inclusion is a nice Easter Egg) has the info, and the team goes there, gets it from him, and then uses it to pinpoint the location. Honestly, none of this is needed. The film could have picked up with Ethan (and maybe some other team members, since he really doesn’t need to do everything on his own) diving down to the sub to get the AI, and the only thing that had to be said was, “we found the location, let’s go!” That’s it. Nearly two hours of the movie boiled away in one line. And, believe me, it wasn’t a very interesting two hours.

Beyond this, though, all of this time is wasted on a story that really doesn’t make sense. The AI is embedded in every part of the internet, the film says. It can do anything, and if you delete the AI you delete the internet. Everything will crash to a halt! Except, you know, servers are backed up, utilities have fail safes, and that’s really not how infrastructure works in general. I’m not saying that taking out a rogue AI that’s embedded in everything wouldn’t have some consequences, but from a technological standpoint that really doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

Also, why is the AI so intent on getting control of the nuclear weapons? It’s not SkyNet, and it doesn’t really seem to have a great end-goal in mind. It wants to break into an archive deep in Africa that is designed to survive the apocalypse, storing all the useful information of the world. That’s a great idea, in theory, as it lets the AI survive anything. But the trick is that there has to be people, and infrastructure, and society to come back to afterwards or that AI is going to spend thousands of years in a vault, waiting, until eventually the power goes out and it, too, dies. Someone has to service the vault. People are needed to build society and keep it going. If the AI nukes everyone and melts the Earth down to glass, none of that will happen.

Is it waiting for aliens to come and rescue it? I mean, that would be a killer swerve if that were the case, but no. The film doesn’t really address it, saying, “oh, someone will survive and the AI will come back,” but… I don’t know. It feels like a plot twist that no one really thought about, primarily because the people writing this franchise don't truly understand the technology that they’re writing about and how it would actually function. They made a villain that’s beyond their own writing capabilities, and it shows. It’s a boomer fantasy, the idea that technology is bad, but we have an aging superhero that can save us, and it just doesn’t work.

Worst of all, though, is that this is in service of action set pieces that aren’t really that great. Make no mistake, the set pieces are elaborate, with two big ones that stand out. There’s Ethan’s dive on the sub, where he has to navigate it while the sub slowly drifts and sinks deeper into the ocean. This would be more interesting if it didn’t feel so fake. While I’m sure Cruise practiced his deep sea diving and did a lot of scuba for this, the end result is a sequence that feels very staged, using a lot of CGI, which doesn’t fit the “all real, all the time” ethos of previous films.

A better set piece is the one set on two biplanes, with Ethan having to jump between the planes, and fly them around, all without the safety of a parachute. While engaging on a surface level, the sequence doesn’t inspire the same level of aw as the helicopter chase sequence from Mission: Impossible: Fallout. It isn’t as elaborate, or as interesting, and it doesn’t feel anywhere near as death-defying. It feels like a watered down version of that helicopter chase, and we already have that, so we certainly didn’t need another version two films later.

Truly, this feels like a set of two films that doesn’t know what they’re doing anymore. I couldn’t shake the feeling during this film that Tom Cruise and writer/director Christopher McQuarrie overestimated just how much they could get away with in a Mission: Impossible film. They had a franchise where they kept making hits, kept doing death defying stunts, and the audience kept coming back over and over. But there’s only so much you can do in a franchise, only so many ways you can hit the same beats, and things get tiring over time. Instead of realizing that, the two got high on their own supply and figured, “we’ve made nothing but hits, so let’s make the biggest, baddest two-part action adventure we can!”

In a way, they achieved this as Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning certainly is bad. Okay, at best you could call it a mediocre movie, livened by decent performances and a few middling action set pieces. But considering the highest this franchise reached, mediocre isn’t good enough. Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning isn’t good enough, and everyone involved in this two-part fiasco should take a hard look and really think about truly making this the true final adventure for the franchise.