For a final (?) Mission, an older Tom Cruise forgets some basic film lessons

Once again Luke Y. Thompson (AV Club) has given us an exclusive film review you’ll find only here at the Bunker. Our association with Luke goes back more than 20 years, to a now defunct publication, New Times Los Angeles, where he was one of the very few reviewers in the country who actually liked John Travolta’s Battlefield Earth. In other words, Luke calls them the way he sees them. He last provided us a look at Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One and before that what we still consider the best and most truthful review of Top Gun: Maverick that you’ll find anywhere. (Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning opens in US theaters on May 23.)

If there’s a running theme to Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, it’s that everyone thinks Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is a total nutjob, but he’s actually the greatest human being alive — just trust him!

He’ll save every one of us, ah-aahhhhh! No, really, he’s specific about this: He lives and dies in the shadows “for those we hold close and for those we never meet.” And if you take a drink every time a character onscreen repeats that, you shouldn’t drive home. In three hours, yes, three hours, there’s a lot of time to talk, since Cruise really only does two of the Big Dumb Stunts these movies are sold on.

Whether or not he’s really-really doing them, I couldn’t say. All I know is that stuntman David Leitch directed The Fall Guy last year, and it felt like him venting about every bad stunt experience he’s ever had, including an evil asshole villain who’s an actor — with a very familiar sounding laugh — claiming to do his own stunts but actually a total coward when put to the test. Was he meant to be complete fiction? Again, I couldn’t say. What’s weird is for all the shots of Cruise hanging off a biplane that look convincing, there are several fight sequences that are quickly cut and let hair hang over his face. One thing you can count on, though, is that in classic Captain Kirk style, he’ll usually have his shirt ripped off by the end, showcasing his sculpted abs and saggy pecs. Even when his shirt is a hi-tech wetsuit, and he’s underwater in the Arctic.

It’s also hilarious that the new Oscar for Best Stunts isn’t going to be implemented until after this movie can be eligible for it. Somebody, or multiple somebodies, really didn’t want Cruise to win it.

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning is a direct sequel to Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, not called “Part Two” because that movie was a disappointment, hindered by the actor’s strike and the fact that it wasn’t Top Gun 3. It’s set in a parallel universe, which we know because the president of the United States is a mildly fictionalized version of Kamala Harris (Angela Bassett) and it depicts Tom Cruise as being opposed to a techno-religious cult. It seems that “The Entity,” an evil AI established in the last movie, has flooded the Internet with fake news and created a doomsday religion that believes in clearing the planet...of humanity. Said cult has, ANONYMOUS-ly, infiltrated many businesses and institutions at multiple levels, stirring up global conflicts and hatred, though there’s no word on whether or not they wear V for Vendetta masks. (“You...spend...too...much...time...on the...Internet!” exclaims an underwear-clad Ethan as he repeatedly kicks one of them in the face.)

The Entity intends to start a nuclear war, though it will only do so after it has complete control over every nuke on the planet, as opposed to just enough to make it uninhabitable. Killing The Entity, however, will make the global Internet and economy crash, and world governments can’t actually decide which option is worse (that, at least, feels realistic). Ethan Hunt, being the most perfect human being to ever live, is the only guy with true moral clarity on the issue. He’s pretty certain that letting The Entity live is a bridge too far.

To rub it in, The Final Reckoning is three god-damned hours long — did I mention that? — and the first hour mostly consists of scenes like this:

ANTAGONIST CHARACTER: Ethan, you’re a nutjob who never follows orders, and it’s good that we have you prisoner now.

TOM CRUISE: Actually, I’m the most perfect person in the world, and I need you to trust me on this.

[montage of stunts from previous Mission: Impossible movies plays, as another tertiary character may or may not narrate]

ANTAGONIST CHARACTER: OK, you’re pretty awesome, so I will trust you.

FEMALE CHARACTER IN THE SCENE: [Staring longingly at Tom Cruise, even when it’s Katy O’Brian, who is 100 percent not into dudes at all.] Godspeed, you awesome guy!

I’m not kidding about the montages. Director Christopher McQuarrie finally seems to have learned something from other franchises, and recognized that there’s a dedicated fan base out there that loves retcons, callbacks, and plot complications that recontextualize previous movies, and who have kept Saw and Fast & Furious alive long past their sell-by dates. So you will finally learn what exactly J.J. Abrams’ stupid mystery box MacGuffin “The Rabbit’s Foot” from MI:III is, for example. Maybe in the next one — you don’t actually think the word “final” means anything here, do you? — they’ll come up with a plot reason for John Woo’s doves in part 2.

Mission: Impossible as a franchise will have been around for 60 years in 2026, with the first 30 dedicated to a spy show about a team, and the second 30 (yes, since 1996) being basically Tom Cruise: The Movie. Ethan Hunt as a character is so poorly defined that even his most prominent characteristic in recent sequels, which is to say his reluctance to kill anyone in the line of saving the world, goes out the window here: before the opening credits roll, he has butchered a henchman with a meat cleaver, albeit entirely offscreen, via incongruously comical sound effects. It makes sense, perhaps, that the arch-enemy of The Entity would be a non-entity. “Just keep telling yourself it’s only pain,” he says to Grace (Hayley Atwell) in anticipation of the possibility that she might be tortured.

Cruise has somehow convinced himself that his fans don’t want to see love scenes, which is weird, because most of his superfans I know are middle-aged female critics who would probably vicariously dig seeing him get romantic. The Final Reckoning offers a truly bizarre substitute: Ethan, in a portable decompression room, is given mouth-to-mouth by Grace, who’s leaning forward in a tank top for maximum cleavage exposure, as Ethan quivers and moans because he has the bends. Out of context, it might look like a sex scene; in context, it’s weirdly fetishizing suffering. Then when he wakes up in his undies next to Hayley Atwell, his first thought is to get back to the mission, unlike any straight guy I can think of. I actually don’t doubt that Tom Cruise is heterosexual, but I’m starting to have questions about Ethan Hunt.

Every M:I sequel since part 4 has promoted itself around a Big Dumb Stunt, even though the best part of the movie is usually not that. Last movie, for example, the BDS was a motorcycle jump off a cliff, but the best part was a series of falling train carriages, because it surrounded a plot point we were invested in, even if CG was involved in the execution. Here, there are two — one where Ethan goes deep diving into a submarine at the bottom of the ocean, and the other is the biplane chase from the poster.

The former takes way too long, and gives Cruise a chance to do the worst acting stuff he does, which is react to things by faking surprise and shock. The latter involves the plot really bending over backwards to explain why century-old vehicles are part of the plot at all. Both sequences could also have fit into a 90-minute movie.

The Entity is an odd concept for an arch-villain, and it only really converses with Ethan once — he has to enter a hi-tech coffin and put on a VR mask, not unlike those worn by the Psychlos in Battlefield Earth, the novel. Once he does so, he sees a blue starfield, and hears a voice say, “You have questions. The Entity has answers. But you have to let it in. The Entity offers hope for the future.” I swear I think I’ve seen a Super Bowl commercial that was a lot like this, for a couple years now. I could comment about the fact that multiple characters say “I will see you again” when they’re about to die, but I think it’s just deliberate vagueness on the issue of afterlife versus reincarnation, so as to play in every country. The nation most likely to be offended by this film is probably Israel, honestly, since it flat-out calls them a nuclear power, showing ICBMs bearing their flag, and we aren’t supposed to say that out loud.

So how is the movie, in the end? For all Cruise’s talk about having studied at the feet of the masters — Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, and all the good directors he used to work with — he’s starting to forget some basic lessons. Things like trimming scenes that aren’t essential to the story. Or “show, don’t tell” (and tell...and tell...and tell some more). Editors are fond of the phrase “Kill your darlings,” meaning be willing to trim scenes you love when they don’t work, but Cruise is his own darling, and apparently plans to live for a billion years. Yes, McQuarrie is ostensibly the writer and director, but nobody has any doubt who the real creative force is on these. The storytelling is rough and reliant on the equivalent of visual footnotes by way of flashbacks; the big stunt sequences work well enough to be fun, but it feels like the story is primarily serving them when it should be vice versa. There is plenty of dead space for the pee breaks you’ll need.

If your franchise has “earned” a three-hour finale, the best idea is to stuff it full of crazy weird shit they’d never let you do before, like Gore Verbinski did with Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Relying on credible logic only gets you so far — there has to be someone in the world younger and better at this than 60 year-old Ethan. Roger Moore looked old for Bond when he was only in his fifties, but at least he had a sense of humor about the whole thing.

— Luke Y. Thompson

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