Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning | review by Rafe McGregor

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, by Christopher McQuarrie (Paramount Pictures)

Better on the big screen.

The cinematic experience has changed a lot… and I mean since the COVID-19 pandemic, not over my lifetime. Vue, which has been my local ‘provider’ for some time now, recently refurbished all of its cinemas so that every seat is now what would have been called ‘luxury’ pre-pandemic. This must have cut the number of seats that can be squeezed into each theatre significantly, but I suppose it’s good business as fewer and fewer people venture forth from the comfort of their living rooms. At the same time (and probably for the same reasons) it has become increasingly difficult to find a cinema screening what one wants to watch, as my three most recent choices reveal: MI8 (at my local Vue, but only for a single week), Warfare (straight to streaming as far as I can tell), and The Return (apparently released last year, neither screening nor streaming in the UK).

By its eighth and final instalment, the Mission Impossible film franchise is firmly in the science fiction genre, with the antagonist of seven and eight (a single narrative divided into two parts) being a sentient AI program called the Entity that has inspired its own death cult, members of which have infiltrated various levels of America’s (and other nations’) governments and militaries. (Though perhaps the bit about members of a death cult infiltrating the government isn’t quite science fiction if one reads the news at the moment – I digress.) The franchise is of course based on the very successful Mission: Impossible television series, which ran from 1966 to 1973 and was revived for two seasons in the next decade. It was in fact less than a decade after this revival when the film series started as Mission: Impossible (MI1) was released in 1996. Since then, MI has emerged as something of an American version of the James Bond franchise, with Tom Cruise in the leading role of Ethan Hunt. Following a six-year hiatus at the beginning of the century (between MI2 and MI3) there has been an MI film every two to five years, a roll that even the pandemic couldn’t break.

The running time of MI8 is 170 minutes and my only real criticism of the film is that this is about 30 minutes too long and just a little too self-indulgent from Cruise (who is heavily involved in production), director Christopher McQuarrie, or both. For example, there is some very pedestrian exposition at the beginning that could easily have been shaved off. The scene (or sequence, if you’re a filmmaker) is both too lengthy – an attempt to remind audiences of not only the events of MI7, but that this is the culmination of the whole film series (it includes flashbacks to all of the other films) – and pointless. Pointless because the plot is so complex (and implausible, but this is science fiction so I won’t quibble) that I’d completely lost track by the time the explanation ended, in spite of having watched MI7 relatively recently.

Cruise is now 62 and remains determined to show us that with dedication and a few hundred million in the bank one can stay in peak condition in one’s seventh decade, spending much of the film with his shirt off (even in the Bering Sea – look it up on Google Maps). One thing that did strike me, though, was that for all of Cruise’s flexing, the franchise has become very child friendly. It’s always been fun and full of over-the-top stunts, but MI1 and MI2 (the latter in particular) had scenes and themes aimed at an adult audience. There is only one scene with extreme violence in MI8, which all occurs offscreen, and when Cruise does get horizontal with co-star Hayley Attwell (playing Grace, a former thief) it’s for a chaste cuddle in a decompression chamber. Which is fine, but the flashbacks to the earlier instalments reminded me that those films had a little more appeal for grown-ups. Notwithstanding, if you’ve watched one or more of the first seven, I recommend seeing how the story ends and, if you can find one screening it, seeing that ending at the cinema. ***