Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning review – delivers the big swings

The headline that came on the back of 2024’s Mission:Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One was that it didn’t make the sort of box office dough that Ethan Hunt and his IMF crew usually pull in. So the prospect of a direct sequel seems like a bit of a gamble considering that it’s the continuation of a story that not enough people were actually that interested in.

Yet there’s a sense that the makers of Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning are biting a thumb at the naysayers and playing the hits one more time, albeit with a little bit more focus on the previous feature instalments, and one particularly moving and intricate callback to Brian de Palma’s OG M:I from 1995, when Tom Cruise was rocking spiky rather than floppy cut.

The antagonist of this new film, who was introduced in Part One, is The Entity, an out-of-control AI that we discover, unsurprisingly, is male when Ethan has a chance to interface with him directly. This digital superbeing is in the process of commandeering the global arsenal of nuclear weapons and causing a doomsday event – but not before its been safely nestled in its own indestructible server room hidey-hole so it can await a new civilisation to grow out of the ashes, and likely terrorise them too.

The logic goes that the best and only way to defeat a digital menace is to go fully analog, and so the gang kinda half-heartedly abide by those rules and head to a sunken sub in the Arctic to retrieve a little hard drive thingy which they’re then able to connect to a little pen drive virus and then, hopefully, The Entity goes away. It’s a little more intricate than that, but the gist is all you need to be able to get along with this high concept stuff. As an ode to the analog, it’s certainly worthwhile, but its commitment to that theme is rather half-assed.

McQuarrie is a writer who earned his spurs on heist and noir movies, and the structure of the Mission: Impossible titles tend to riff on a similar structure. It’s one where the audience is regaled with the plan in immaculate detail, and then we get to see it executed, often with many hurdles, upsets and wrong turns. In this case, the main “heist” is so complex and relies on so many different variables coming together, that it ends up not making a whole lot of logical sense. It’s almost as if the stressful variations suppress the rules that have been carefully laid out beforehand.

Cruise’s performance in this and many of the McQuarrie-helmed M:I films is one of desperate fury, as he’s required to oscillate directly between acrobatic action man mode and an exposition delivery node, with a heavy side dose of pretending not to notice that I’m the messiah. Yet his “acting” almost transcends the traditional definition of the term, and while his face is of course a key asset in his charisma arsenal, he’s the rare example of a star who is willing to express via every part of his body. Robert Bresson would approve!

It’s also nice to see him locking horns with Esai Morales as The Entity’s bootboy, Gabriel, who makes ashy designer stubble and aviator shades look so, so evil. And you probably have to hark back to the days of classic Hollywood to see a mainstream action film where its two main stars are over 60 years old.

Elsewhere, the supporting cast get less of a shake than they did in Part One, with Haley Atwell’s Grace and Pom Klementieff’s atomic blond Paris relegated to gun-toting assistants. Simon Pegg’s Benji gets a few decent scenes, yet it’s sad that his character is no longer a comic relief, as his witty interventions in the earlier films certainly relieved them of their slightly oppressive sense of seriousness.

At its worst, Mission: Impossible under the McQuarrie watch has merged lanes with the similarly-inclined (and more overtly throwaway) Fast and Furious franchise, and were there to be more of these films in the future (the door is certainly left open), then a return to a smaller, more humane palette with odds that amount to a bit more than “everyone’s gonna get blown to smithereens,” would be most welcome. Next time, rather than a grand nostalgic callback to the 1995 film, why not heed some of its dramatic lessons too.

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