Tom Cruise is one of the last movie stars left. It seemed to be a perfect storm with peak TV, movie theater attendance dropping, reality and influencer stars becoming famous, and kids watching Youtube instead of anything else...but the "movie star" seems to be a thing of the past. All of the big movie stars today seem to be ones that became famous decades ago, like Tom Hanks, Leonardo DiCaprio, Denzel Washington, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Robert DeNiro. Most of the current, new movie stars, like Timothee Chalamet, Emma Stone, and Margot Robbie, are people that you might have to explain who they are to some people. "Oh, Margot Robbie was Barbie," you might have to tell a co-worker, and then they'd know. You don't have to do that with Tom Cruise. He's a Hollywood icon, so it's a little sad that the majority of movies Tom Cruise has made lately have been re-makes of a 1960's TV show.
Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning is the 8th film in the franchise. Yikes. Presumably, with the title having "final" in it, this will be the last. If you've ever seen any of these films, then this new one will be so similar that it will blend with all the others. A big bad threatens to destroy the world for no good reason. Cruise, as Ethan Hunt, will have to save the world by going rogue from the very secret government he works for. There will be exotic locations. There will be a scene at a black tie event. There will be a beautiful woman half Tom Cruise's age that seems to love and/or care for him for no obvious reason since he's not supposed to be the rich & famous Tom Cruise but Ethan Hunt, a guy that always gets people killed around him. This is all paint-by-numbers stuff. The days of Cruise recruiting interesting directors like John Woo, Brad Bird, and JJ Abrams to direct these films are long gone (Christopher McQuarrie directed the last four, including this one). So what's left? To be entertained? Unfortunately, this last one doesn't even offer that. At 2 hours and 41 minutes, The Final Reckoning is a bloated, badly written mess with literally only one action scene in it. I guess it's good that it's the end.
The original title for this was Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part 2 because it's a continuation of the last one, a film I enjoyed a lot more. In Dead Reckoning, the 7th entry, it seemed that the writers (Erik Jendresen and McQuarrie) came up with the action sequences before the script and plot. The reason was that the plot was extremely silly & stupid. It was basically Skynet from the Terminator movies. A computer program known as The Entity was going to take over the world. The only way to find it was to get a magic key. Honestly, this sounds like the kind of plot you'd find in a movie like The Never Ending Story. "I have to find the magic key to stop The Entity from taking over the world!" Thankfully, Dead Reckoning had some exciting and suspenseful action sequences, so the plot didn't really matter. Not so here. There's a scene on an airplane where Cruise and his friends are all deep in thought explaining how to stop The Entity. I swear, this is Monty Python stuff because it's so ludicrous and laughably bad.
To stop The Entity, Cruise and co. have to get a computer drive from a submarine submerged at the bottom of the sea in Antartica. This sequence, with Cruise in a wet suit grunting his way around a submarine, is fairly entertaining. The submarine is tumbling around towards a cliff underwater, so Cruise is spinning around while nuclear missiles come loose, and he has to evade them. This is all done fairly well and made me think of the excellent scene in Titanic when DiCaprio is half-submerged inside the ship trying to escape. The only other sequence that's good in the film is also the only action scene in the entire picture. There is another big bad in the film, Gabriel, played by Esai Morales. He escapes in a bi-plane, so of course Cruise ends up dangling from the wing of the plane and fighting Morales while the plane is flipping and diving and going upside down. This sequence is fantastic, the type of great, wild, death-defying stunt scene you used to see in James Bond movies before CGI made everything fake looking and safe in modern action flicks.
Besides Morales and Cruise, the usual team of Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames are back. Hayley Atwell plays Grace, one of the good guys. Severance's Tramell Tillman shows up as a submarine captain. Nick Offerman is a general. The U.S. president is played by Angela Bassett (the most unrealistic aspect of the film). One of the highlights of the franchise has been the amusing comradery between Cruise and Rhames and Pegg. If I recall, this used to be a humorous and fun group. Pegg is, after all, a comedy actor. Seeing the old gang back together should be a good time. Nope! This film is dour. Rhames is literally on his death bed in this film and Pegg's comedic, wisecracking cohort has disappeared into the world-ending, dramatic murk.
There's been so many of these films that it's hard to even remember if any of them have been good or great or bad. I'll always remember the first one, directed by Brian DePalma, that came out in 1996, because of the set pieces: Cruise dangling in the white room, Cruise running from the exploding fish tank, Cruise hanging from a train while a helicopter explodes. I remember the 2nd one, directed by John Woo, being really awful. I remember the 3rd one, directed by JJ Abrams, because of Phillip Seymour Hoffman's evil villain. And Brad Bird's 4th one had that cool scene with Cruise climbing up the skyscraper in Dubai. After that, everything merges into similarity. I suppose it's a shame that the franchise will end on what will be either the worst or 2nd worst entry. But it's probably also good that it's ending so Cruise can do something else besides make Top Gun and Mission: Impossible sequels. He's one of the biggest movie stars in the world and he can be in any movie he wants. Remember when he actually was a part of interesting films made by interesting directors instead of just starring in popcorn schlock? Hell, he was in a Stanley Kubrick film. He was nominated for an Oscar for starring in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia. I think it's time for one of the biggest movie stars in the world to have a final reckoning of his own and start being in movies that are fresh, new, bold, and actually intriguing. **
