If a Stunt Hall of Fame existed in the real world (it doesn’t, but it should), it’d have to set aside an entire wing to the 30-year-old Mission: Impossible series headlined by Tom Cruise. Across seven, now eight films, including the latest, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, each entry would contribute at least one, sometimes two or three stunt-heavy set pieces. They would include, but certainly are not limited to, the first entry’s nail-biting, nerve-shredding vault heist inside CIA headquarters, the first sequel’s over-the-top motorcycle duel, and right on through the heart-stopping HALO (High Altitude, Low Opening) jump from 25,000 feet in the sixth entry, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, and the motorcycle-jump-from-a-cliff and the train derailment sequence that capped the last film, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (Part One). All, of course, featured Tom Cruise’s super-spy, Ethan Hunt, risking life and limb to save the world from multiple rogue threats while delivering sphincter-tightening thrills for maximum entertainment value.
The eighth, reportedly last, entry in the series, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, certainly doesn’t shortchange the audience set-piece-wise. But with a slightly bloated three-hour running time, it takes a long, winding, and sometimes meandering road to get to the first major set piece somewhere around the mid-point. It’s an eye-catching underwater sequence involving three submarines—one American, two Russian—and multiple life-threatening dangers for our intrepid super-spy, including a deep-sea dive in experimental equipment, a salvage attempt aboard a sunken sub roiling on an unstable sea shelf, and a potentially fatal rapid rise to the ocean’s surface.
The film picks up after Dead Reckoning left Hunt and his makeshift IMF (Impossible Mission Force) with the literal key to the hard drive containing the source for the film’s Big Bad—the so-called “Entity”—a sentient AI and Skynet super-fan bent on world domination and/or world destruction (whichever comes first). You might remember that the two-part, mated key wasn’t enough to bring victory. Neither was knowing where the aforementioned hard drive could be found (i.e., the sunken Russian sub), leaving a major loose thread meant to be addressed in the second part, hopefully in the opening moments.
It is addressed eventually, but not before Cruise and co-writer/director Christopher McQuarrie turn the eighth film’s first hour into an extended in memoriam segment for past characters, a rundown of Hunt’s greatest victories and periodic failures, and a nostalgic look back at the franchise’s greatest hits. Unfortunately, all that wheel-spinning inevitably feels like time. It’s all the more noticeable without a memorable set piece during the first hour. A brief sequence involving the Entity’s human avatar, Gabriel (Esai Morales), capturing and torturing Hunt and Grace (Hayley Atwell), the crackerjack thief and con artist-turned-IMF agent, ends almost as quickly as it began. A second, first-hour set piece involves Hunt and the team breaking out Paris (Pom Klementieff), an onetime antagonist-turned-ally, from a lightly guarded, insecure European prison.
With the obligatory, self-congratulatory back-patting in the rear view, the eighth entry finally returns to the central conflict: the Entity. Having grown in power since Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (the Part One no longer applies title-wise), the Entity has taken control over not just the dissemination of information, making objective truth almost impossible to discern, but almost all of the world’s nuclear arsenals. This leaves world leaders, including the U.S. President, Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett), facing a nuclear apocalypse, either when the Entity gains control over the remaining nuclear arsenals or when one of the other nuclear powers decides to strike first. The result remains the same: Everyone dies, except for the Entity, as long as it can find digital sanctuary somewhere in an underground bunker protected from nuclear fallout.
Not surprisingly for a series that’s turned Cruise’s super-spy into a superhero with the ability to evade death, only Hunt, firmly in saviour/messiah mode, and his team, Grace, Paris, Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), stand a chance to defeat the Entity before it ends humanity as we know it. To add to the film’s already overstuffed, overcomplicated plot, the world’s powers, including some of the U.S. president’s senior leadership, don’t want to destroy the Entity; they want to bring it to heel.
Given the potentially world-shattering stakes involved, it’s obvious that one and only one individual can control the Entity’s fate: Ethan Hunt. Only Hunt can resist the temptation of controlling the Entity and destroying it for the good of humanity, essentially equating Hunt not with a saviour complex, but a purity of soul comparable only to Frodo’s in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Anyone else simply couldn’t resist having that much power in their grasp, nor should the audience consider anyone except Hunt to use that power for good.
With so much time onscreen spent mythologising Hunt into godhood status and, by extension, Cruise himself, the three-hour running time for an ostensible final entry in the series starts to make sense. Luckily, McQuarrie and Cruise don’t forget that mythologising alone won’t sell tickets: Cruise-centred set pieces will. In addition to the Abyss-inspired sequence set in and around the sunken Russian sub, McQuarrie, Cruise, and their stunt team give audiences a final set piece worthy of inclusion in that future Stunt Hall of Fame. Hunt and Gabriel engaged in one last duel, this time aboard two brightly coloured biplanes, for control over the Entity and the fate of the world, exactly as Cruise’s Hunt would want it.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning opens theatrically on Friday, May 23, via Paramount Pictures.
