Of course, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is ridiculous. It’s preposterous and excessive and just so very, very much – and that’s kind of why I love it and Tom Cruise’s dogged, determined drive to entertain the hell out of us all for nearly 30 years, whether we want it or not.
It’s insane that Cruise has been playing gritty intelligent agent Ethan Hunt for 29 years. As a point of comparison, if Sean Connery had played James Bond as long as Cruise had played Hunt, he would’ve been in Bond movies from 1962 to 1991, well into his bearded balding Hunt for Red October/Untouchables elder statesman era.
The MI movies kicked off with Brian DePalma’s twisty, relatively restrained 1996 original, and derailed a bit with John Woo’s lavishly dated 1999 style overdose in Mission: Impossible 2.
But for me, the series staged a remarkable comeback beginning with 2006’s Mission: Impossible III, with the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman’s sneering villain and Cruise’s Hunt given just a little more of a personality. Simon Pegg’s twitchy Benji and Ving Rhames’ sturdy Luther coalesced into the heart of a solid little team for Ethan, who is, as more than one character has noted, always going rogue or about to go rogue from his vaguely omnipresent Impossible Mission Force.
Cruise and his creative partner for most of the last few movies, director Christopher McQuarrie, settled into a solid routine of dastardly global threats, sneering villains and incredible stunt scenes that the rest of the plot basically is there to support.
The sixth instalment, 2018’s Mission Impossible: Fallout, reached an improbable high point for the series. This, Cruise whispered in audience ears as he bounced off mountain ranges and airplanes and ran, always ran, to the next plot point – this, is an action movie.
To bring James Bond back again, Cruise quietly surpassed that franchise for reliable action thrills some time ago. While Daniel Craig starred in some of the best Bonds, studio meddling and creative fumbling also stuck him in some of the worst. Cruise and McQuarrie had a clear vision for their series. Even at the series’ nadir – John Woo, hello – a Mission: Impossible movie has never been less than a good time, check your brain at the door.
I like to think of what I call “the piano move” from 2023’s Dead Reckoning as a symbol of the series as a whole and its amiable desire to please. After surviving a pitched knife battle on the roof of a moving train, after that train then crashes off a cliff, after Ethan Hunt and partner clamber dangerously through the train cars before they fall into a canyon, after all that, in the final car, we see a piano, hanging on by a single strap, about to hurtle down through a train car and into Hunt and partner. Will that piano fall? You bet it will. In Ethan Hunt’s world, there’s always another piano about to fall on you.
The best moments of the MI movies are nothing but piano moves, where Cruise fascinates you with his ingenuity and escape skills. I’d be dead about 5 seconds into trying to have a knife fight with a madman on the top of a moving train, for instance. For Cruise, that’s just a Wednesday.
Final Reckoning, at nearly three hours, does suffer a bit of end-times fatigue – the two-part story Dead Reckoning and this comprise, about a rogue artificial intelligence, is timely, but it’s all tarted up with an absurd amount of MacGuffins and missions that are, well, impossible. Watching parts 7 and 8 over two nights, as I did, exposes you to nearly six hours of Tom Cruise running like mad – it’s like mainlining energy drinks while eating popcorn. Gradually, Cruise has become a messiah figure in the movies, as the challenges get ever more impossible.
You’d expect part 8 of a series to run low on steam, and the opening act of Final Reckoning is a little sluggish, but when it gets going – especially with two stunning set-pieces involving a submarine and a biplane – all your doubts fly away, and you find yourself asking, “how is he doing that?” I don’t care that in real life Tom Cruise would’ve died like 50 times over by now. I just go for the ride.
Yeah, yeah I know, while Cruise does a lot of his own stunts there is a certain amount of movie magic and digitally erased safety gear behind it all, but that doesn’t distract from the tactile reality of seeing a man scale the Burj Khalifa towers as he did in 2011’s Ghost Protocol or clutching feverishly onto a spinning biplane in this romp. He was there and not just in some green screen studio laboratory. And the fact that the man is now 62 is astonishing.
In his dogged quest to be the impossible entertainer and singlehandedly save us all as The Last Movie Star, Cruise has largely abandoned some of the more interesting acting choices he made before he went all-in on the impossible. His turns in movies like Magnolia, Edge of Tomorrow, Interview With A Vampire and Collateral showed a brooding range. I kind of hope he might take some more chances if this, as it probably should be, is the last impossible mission.
These movies aren’t deep, but they’re fine machines of movie magic – mostly devoid of the CGI-slathered blurs that are starting to make superhero and action movies all feel like the same unreal videogame slurry. Mission: Impossible movies are ridiculous, absurd, over the top. And I reckon that both me and Tom Cruise wouldn’t have it any other way.
Nik Dirga 