For nearly 30 years, Tom Cruise and his collaborators on the Mission: Impossible series have made a series of what are cosmetically spy movies that, at their core, have really tried to perfect the art of the heist movie. With the latest entry, The Final Reckoning, he and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie have certainly made the biggest heist film of all time, if an imperfect one.
The blow-by-blow plot is so inscrutable that I don’t think it would be possible to spoil or even explain. Cruise, as Impossible Mission Force agent Ethan Hunt, along with his team, have to find the woman so they can find the guy who stole the thing that plugs into the other thing that they have to bring to the place to stop the AI by putting another thing into a thing while Cruise does aerial acrobatics or else all the nukes go off. The overall plot is pretty simple: Ethan has to stop a self-aware artificial intelligence from destroying the world with nuclear weapons.
To the extent that the movie’s presentation of AI as an armageddon-inducing threat is worth taking seriously, Final Reckoning is less goofy than the preceding entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise, Dead Reckoning Part One. “The Entity” now ominously and quietly takes over each nuclear power’s command and control structures instead of tediously interfering and toying with Ethan’s team members. The risk of AI making it difficult to tell the difference between reality and hallucination, among other AI dangers, also seems more plausible now than even two years ago, when Dead Reckoning Part One was released.
Within the movie, AI’s control of worldwide computer networks has forced the U.S. government to go offline: Our military forces around the globe are tracked in a vast war room of real-time, physical mapboards like in the Battle of Britain. All of the technology in the film is more Cold War than Silicon Valley, which is for the best, because it looks great and makes the heart yearn for a 600-ship navy. Final Reckoning joins The Hunt for Red October as perhaps the only movies ever made that give the Navy’s SOSUS sonar warning net a cameo.
The Entity’s control of the internet does prompt one head-scratching bit of dialogue. When discussing how to deal with The Entity, the president (Angela Bassett) says it would be “catastrophic” to destroy it entirely because it would take down all of cyberspace with it. Cards on the table, this reviewer already feels that the internet has been a mistake every time he gets a work message on his smartphone while reading in bed at night. But it feels as though if we created an artificial general intelligence and its first and only goal turned out to be the nuclear annihilation of the human species, surely we should all conclude that the internet, in fact, should be destroyed.
Nuclear armageddon, control of the internet, artificial intelligence — it’s not worth thinking about too hard. The point is that the stakes and stunts here are bigger and better than ever. And, by God, Cruise wants you to see it in a movie theater. My IMAX screening opened with a message from him letting us all know that the movie had been filmed in IMAX and was made to be watched on a big screen. Many of Cruise’s promotions for Final Reckoning have included some variation of “we’ll see you at the movies,” and the internet has half-jokingly dubbed him “president of the movies” for making and advocating big entertainment that you’ll be disappointed to have missed in a theater.
There aren’t that many franchises or original movies that do that these days. The 007 series is reportedly in development hell and has no leading man after Daniel Craig’s final outing in 2021. Audiences seem to have hit their Marvel limit for any superhero film not starring Robert Downey Jr., and even the most diehard Star Wars fan has been burned by that series so many times that new entries are met with skepticism and a check of the Rotten Tomatoes score before purchasing a ticket. Mission: Impossible and the Fast & Furious films are the only big tentpoles that I can think of where the filmmakers are still routinely throwing down $300-$400 million per movie and putting every one of those dollars on the screen.
In Final Reckoning, the results are undeniably cool. The core of the movie remains the action. In an era of mediocre CGI, Final Reckoning is a love letter to big, practical effects, centering on a star who does his own stunt work. This is a rad movie made possible in large part because Cruise is a weird guy whose personal hobbies all seem to be translatable to stunt work. He flies planes. He rides motorcycles. He parachutes. He scuba dives. In one underwater sequence involving the interior of a sunken submarine rolling off a cliff, I couldn’t work out how they did it as a practical stunt unless they had created a giant enclosed water tank and then physically rotated it, like Fred Astaire’s ceiling dance in 1951’s Royal Wedding, except on a vastly larger and possibly more dangerous scale. Sure enough, based on behind-the-scenes footage, that appears to be exactly what they built, with McQuarrie giving Cruise underwater directing signals.
Like Top Gun: Maverick, Final Reckoning is refreshingly pro-American. While there are some bad elements working in the U.S. government, it is taken for granted that American leaders are trying to do the right thing, that the U.S. military is served by highly competent people, and that China and Russia are up to no good. “If you want to poke the bear, oh, you’ve come to the right man,” a submarine captain tells Ethan when asked to get daringly close to a Russian foe beneath the ice caps. A decade ago, there would have been enormous financial pressure on the filmmakers for Ethan to get an assist from a token Chinese government counterpart, but thanks to the Sino-Hollywood split, there’s no hint of that here.
The most interesting story decision, one that doesn’t entirely land, is to try to tie virtually every previous entry in the franchise into this one, which, as the title suggests, may be the final impossible mission, at least with Cruise, 62, in the lead. Some of those tie-ins are ham-fisted and unnecessary, as when it’s revealed that one of the G-men opposing Ethan is the son of a previous villain. But the return of one minor character from the first movie is one of the film’s best elements and is treated with a surprising amount of grace and humanity.
As with nearly all of the Mission: Impossible films, there are oddities and plot weirdness. For a film with a nearly three-hour run time, there are rushed setups, and it’s often unclear why the team needs to be split up or perform certain actions in a certain order. Where lone nuclear weapons on the loose previously made up the entire threat of Impossible Missions 4 and 6, here in M:I8, one of the bad guys inexplicably has so many nukes lying around that he uses 30 megaton weapons as traps for individual friends of Ethan.
These are quibbles. Final Reckoning is summer popcorn fare of the highest order and a compelling case for the continued relevance of the big screen. Find the biggest one near you, connect to your inner 13-year-old, and let yourself be submerged in the spectacle like a nuclear submarine diving beneath the waves.
Andrew Bernard is a correspondent for the Jewish News Syndicate.