Too meaningless to even be pretentious: a detailed autopsy of the two-part finale to the Mission Impossible series.
Final Reckoning isn’t so much the ‘culmination’ as the ‘most’ of the Missions Impossible: the most meaningless, the most interminably expository, the most runtime, and the most egregious in its action set pieces being completely unconnected to anything to do with story, character, dialogue, or theme.
Story
Director Chrisopher McQuarrie has explained how his Mission Impossible movies are ‘written’: first locations are chosen, then stunt sequences are devised, and then dialogue is written to tie them together into a ‘story’. Given his lead’s commitment to doing his own stunts, this formula has produced event cinema whose primary appeal is that each movie showcases how Tom Cruise nearly died this time around.
This approach has made for a series of mostly-practical-effects spectacles which are exhilarating viewing in the moment, but which present little that’s actually memorable, mainly because the stunt sequences don’t stem from anyone or anything unique to or distinctive about the story. You may recall which specific set pieces are in Ghost Protocol (2011), Rogue Nation (2015), or Fallout (2018), but do you as easily remember why, much less what they were for?
The warning signs are apparent in Dead Reckoning. While the action sequences are a good time (the handcuff car chase is fun, and the train carriage finale escalates hyperbolically), none of the action has any connection to the purported threat: The Entity, a rogue AI which threatens to take over the world in ways we’re only told, but never shown.
The deep-seated problem in Dead Reckoning is the time bomb that McQ and Cruise fail to keep from exploding Final Reckoning.
Character
Over the course of Mission Impossible films, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has evolved from resourceful spy to veritable god. By Final Reckoning, Ethan is the only one who actually does anything, the only person anyone else talks about, the one person upon whom the entire world depends, and the man around whom it revolves. To make even more room for Ethan to do and be everything, his team has been reduced to NPCs assigned little more than to stand around and wait for him to single-handedly save the world. This waste of resources is emblematic of the descent from Dead to Final Reckoning.
The criminally diminished roles aren’t limited to Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), and the newcomers somehow get it worse. Paris (Pom Klementieff) is introduced in Dead Reckoning as a feral force of nature; in Final Reckoning, she’s furniture. In Dead Reckoning, Grace (Hayley Atwell) is introduced as a master thief who is granted a redemption arc; in Final Reckoning, however, her big move is… cutting a wire. And what even does Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) contribute to the team? Meanwhile, Briggs (Shea Whigham) was beginning to warm to Ethan by the end of Dead Reckoning, only to have re-upped his simmering hatred in Final Reckoning because… callback reveal, but not really? And let’s not even get into how dirty they do Rebecca Ferguson‘s Isla Faust (perhaps surpassed only by the series’ egregious jettisoning of Paula Patton after Ghost Protocol)… Rather than affording these characters more screen time or showcasing their defining traits, Final Reckoning instead introduces a bunch of new characters (and an old one no-one expected or even really thought about, if we’re honest, who is given more emotional responsibility than any of the short-changed, actual team members). Each additional character is laughably grave, collectively they’re tonally inconsistent, and every single one takes only a matter of time (sometimes seconds) to go from intractably jaded to deferential toward Our Lord and Saviour, Ethan Hunt (there’s even a “You did it, you son of a bitch” said directly to camera by somebody we don’t know, who has never been in a single other movie in this series, as if we’re suddenly dropped in to a Roland Emmerich blockbuster).
Dialogue
I could write a whole separate entry of both Reckonings‘ dialogue scenes alone. From the buffet of vacuous word-salad exchanges, to the unmotivated hop scotch all over the 180 line (which, for supposed saviours of movies, is the most 101 Film illiterate thing McQ & Co. could do), to the way both movies insist on highlighting their own shortcomings by referencing scenes and inserting shots from previous instalments in this series (and possibly earlier Tom Cruise movies outside this series).
Compare the palpable paranoia communicated, via meticulous composition and sequencing, in this conversation between Ethan and Kittridge (Henry Czerny) in Brian De Palma‘s Mission Impossible (1996)…
… to the meaningless camera angles and editing choices, and the utter lack of actual storytelling, in their reunion scene in McQ’s Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One (2023):
To its credit at least, Dead Reckoning doesn’t make us wait an hour to get to the action. Final Reckoning, however, somehow manages to spend too much time discussing what’s going to happen, and too little time giving anyone but Ethan anything to do about it: too much of its three hours is talking (and talking, and talking) about the global threat of AI which, visually, ultimately comes down to a punch-up on a biplane for a New Age crystal necklace and a Gameboy.
Theme
Alfred Hitchcock explained why the MacGuffin itself doesn’t really matter, that what audiences really care about is the action the MacGuffin informs. McQ and Cruise seem to have misunderstood this completely: the Reckonings are overstuffed with MacGuffins (I count twelve in Final Reckoning alone, including a second magical key we never see), and yet not a single one propels the action in any visual way. A quick thought exercise: in any given action scene, how many cuts are to a shot of that scene’s MacGuffin, versus how many to the real villain of any scene: a clock counting down? And speaking of time: particularly in Final Reckoning, the weight is unevenly distributed between long stretches with zero action, and then multiple action scenes at once, which the film cross-cuts between in ways that want to be Christopher Nolan at his best, but are Christopher Nolan at his worst (and even for all the exposition in his films, Nolan at least ensures action happens at regular intervals). Final Reckoning‘s action scenes are relentless in part because the stakes are too convoluted or abstract, while the film-making insists it’s all incredibly meaningful, so we have to keep telling ourselves it’s all for… something.
That feeling of exhaustion? That’s you doing the emotional heavy lifting for the action scenes. Tom Cruise may be out here legitimately risking his life, but you are working hard to make it mean something.
Why is any of this happening? By inflating Ethan Hunt to god status, the Mission Impossible world has shrunk to man-sized. We’re told the stakes are about humanity, but we’re shown that they come down to one man – and, specifically, what he alone can physically do. This might work as a parable – but what does Ethan Hunt even represent? At this point, this deep into the series, there seems to be a delusion that all this lore adds up to enough of a mythology to be self-reflexive. But its parts aren’t rich, deep, or even consistent enough to add up to a sum – and by Final Reckoning, those parts have been dissolved to distil focus to Ethan Hunt, and Ethan Hunt alone – and as much as the film wants him represent something, he simply doesn’t.
By comparison: as epic final instalments go, The Return of the King (2003) spends substantial time with characters other than the King, and actually shows us the stakes both of the love they fight for, and of the evil they are willing to die trying to defeat. Final Reckoning wastes its (and frankly, our) time with disdain for character and story, a lack of understanding of the need for or function of theme, and first-draft dialogue which, ironically, absolutely could have been written by AI. If McQ and Cruise’s crusade to save cinema has revolved around its hand-made craft, they may have missed the point: that what separates cinema from AI slop isn’t merely spectacle, but intention and meaning. The movies in this series have always been silly, but earlier instalments were at least more fun. All the worst tendencies of the Missions Impossible are finally laid bare in its final three-hour stunt showreel. Final Reckoning is bloated and messy. It would be pretentious if it were actually saying or doing anything meaningful. It’s the final, disapponting exhibit in the case for why this franchise should at last be laid to rest.
Further Viewing
Editor Eddie Hamilton speaks candidly about Final Reckoning, from struggles with the opening forty-five minutes to his “wish it was shorter” even after cutting the film down from its original four hour runtime (via The Rough Cut):
As always, director Chrisopher McQuarrie’s openness about his filmmaking process is generous and valuable – and, in this instance, a fascinating case study in how filmmakers can prioritise taking lessons from the audience response to the previous film, and still make mystifying choices when making the next. He’s so close to getting it, and yet still so far. They assumed the problem was exposition, and the solution was audiovisual tweaks – not that, say, what was being exposited was fundamentally flawed. That they then “shot the shit out of” those scenes is not the revelation he seems to think it is (via Josh Horowitz / Happy Sad Confused):
Proving my point: the most fun sequences in both films are purely about sight and sound. And, perhaps not coincidentally, they seem to borrow from other thrilling moments in cinema – including in Tom Cruise’s own career:
“The design of this suit was incredible. Tom took the time to explain how it had to be built for safety & cinema & just how much study & effort the props team put into it. Was amazing to watch it function practically underwater. I so appreciate the human artistry in this film.” (via Katy O’Brian):
A far better sequel to Dead Reckoning in two minutes than Final Reckoning managed in nearly three hours:
One example of how practical stunts and unintelligible exposition in a big-budget blockbuster can be done far more effectively: