‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’ Review: A Tribute to Tom Cruise by Tom Cruise

It never occurred to me while I was watching “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” that when Alec Baldwin declared Tom Cruise — I’m sorry, I mean “Ethan Hunt” — to be “the living manifestation of destiny” that I was watching something subtle. But compared to the endless procession of Cruise-aggrandizing speeches in “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” that’s exactly what it was.

These “Mission: Impossible” movies have always been odd ducks as far as movie franchising goes. The original film introduced a team of memorable characters, just like the show, but killed them off immediately, including the series’ only consistent hero, Jim Phelps. It then declared Jim Phelps to be the real villain, and made a hitherto unknown new character the star. Try getting away with that in a Batman movie sometime and see how far it gets you. All the Bat-Persons and Robins die immediately, some new dude named “Draven McGillicuddy” is the hero from now on, and Batman is the main bad guy. Social media is going to love that.

But now, nearly 30 years later, it’s hard to imagine these “Mission: Impossible” movies any other way. For three whole decades Tom Cruise dominated this series, acquiring new team members along the way and, with the exception of Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames, kicking them to the curb willy-nilly. And ever since Brad Bird’s “Ghost Protocol” these movies became less about their plots and more about Cruise’s stunts, which grew more jaw-dropping and death-defying as the franchise wore on.

“Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” has more spectacular stunts, including an epic mid-air biplane chase that must be seen to be believed. (Then again you have already seen it, since it’s front-and-center in all the marketing.) But this time it’s also very much about the plot. “Final Reckoning” tries to wrap this franchise up, at least for the time being, and it’s wistful for all the old movies except “Mission: Impossible 2.” So this installment revolves entirely around self-reference. Old and forgotten story elements were, it turns out, important this whole time. “Final Reckoning” even gets meta and turns the release date of the first movie — May 22, 1996 — into an important plot point. How adorable.

If you missed the last “Mission: Impossible,” and considering the film’s somewhat disappointing box office there’s a chance you did, here’s what you missed. A rogue A.I. called “The Entity” is wreaking havoc all over the world, infecting every corner of the internet and making all information unreliable, and turning impressionable internet users into dangerous tech zealots. It’s up to Tom Cruise, who hates A.I. and wants to destroy it even if it means resetting the world’s infrastructure back fifty years, to find a way to kill The Entity once and for all, using old-fashioned moxie, hand-crafted skills and his unflinching faith in humanity.

To be fair this is all relevant as hell. It’s a pity “Final Reckoning” raises the idea of a world completely undermined by A.I. and shows next to none of that chaos, but at least director/co-writer Christopher McQuarrie’s head and heart are in the right place. Yet the threat of A.I. quickly devolves into yet another “Mission: Impossible” plot point, which is to say merely an excuse to jeopardize Tom Cruise’s life for the thrill of it. All you really need to know is that in three days the nuclear powers of the world will destroy the planet unless Ethan Hunt does a lot of implausible stunts. There was no need to complicate that.

We make fun of plot contrivances but they exist for a reason, to simplify a narrative and get to what the storytellers hope is “the good stuff.” For some reason McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen’s “Final Reckoning” script does the opposite, pumping the narrative full of convoluted set-ups and extraneous characters just to justify the same thing these movies always do: prevent important stuff from blowing up, literally or figuratively. So much of this nearly three-hour movie consists of explaining itself in complex detail that one suspects it could have easily been a spritely 100 minutes with a judicious editor, either in the screenwriting or post-production phase.

Then again, maybe McQuarrie is trying to distract us from the repetition. It was inevitable, but no less sad, that the “Mission: Impossible” movies ran out of novelty. The two centerpiece action sequences — one aboard a sunken submarine and the biplane chase I mentioned earlier — are undeniable rehashes of stunts McQuarrie staged in “Rogue Nation” and “Fallout,” only bigger and/or slightly different. That does not mean they’re not cool as hell, it’s just that this series seems to be winding down whether it wants to or not. There’s only so many ways you can nearly kill Tom Cruise without getting the Jigsaw killer involved.

But if you can get past all that, “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” delivers what fans of this franchise probably want. Tom Cruise runs a lot. Tom Cruise defies death. Everyone talks about how great Tom Cruise is. Rhames and Pegg show up. Easter eggs from previous films are everywhere, some more obvious than others. McQuarrie killed off Rebecca Ferguson, dang it, but her role is now filled by two likable new characters from “Dead Reckoning — Part One,” played by Hayley Atwell and Pom Klementieff, the latter of whom has very little to do but is undeniably cool.

If this is the end of the “Mission: Impossible” movies, they ended on an adequate note. Some of the callbacks are fun and satisfying, some will make you roll your eyes. The stunts are incredible but not so incredible that you’re desperate for another installment. In the end it all boils down to Tom Cruise, who is destined to save us all, according to this Tom Cruise movie. If “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” actually puts a stop to the destructive force of A.I. in the real world we will actually have to give him some credit for it. Kudos for killing it in fiction either way. That’s a fantasy audiences can get behind.

“Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” opens exclusively in theaters on May 23.

The post ‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’ Review: A Tribute to Tom Cruise by Tom Cruise appeared first on TheWrap.