Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
How many times can one man defeat the impossible? What is the expected lifespan for a field agent for the Impossible Missions Force? How many times can Ethan Hunt defy the odds and break the rules and the law and get away with it? His mentor, Jim Phelps, did the same and finally went rogue and died for it in an explosion in the Channel Tunnel; after thirty-five years, is this now the end of the line for Hunt?
It has been two months since Dead Reckoning and while the IMF and its operations remain secret, the repercussions of those events are global; the Entity has taken hold of computer networks in every nation of the world, manipulating the truth and predicting outcomes, now preparing for the end game as it takes control of the weapons of the eight nuclear powers, planning to eliminate humanity while it retreats to a digital stronghold, the end rapturously received by a doomsday cult which has sprung up.
The only hope of defeating it the source code of the Entity, locked in the core of the Russian downed submarine Sevastapol, its precise location unknown, while Hunt wishes to secure it to tie it with the digital “poison pill” Luther has developed to disable the Entity, Gabriel is also hunting for the same to use the Entity for his own aims of global domination, and the governments of the world, including Hunt’s own, are in disagreement over how to proceed and whether an agent with a history of going off-book is the best man for the job.
All the previous Mission: Impossible films having been largely standalone other than the core characters, even then a rotating roster as it was in the original series, with occasional plot points picked up as an element of a subsequent film, Dead Reckoning was always intended to be told as a single story split in two, yet The Final Reckoning is something different again, a summation of the history of Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, the men and woman around him, their missions, and the cost of their failures.
With the digital world compromised and unreliable, the mission briefing from President Eirka Sloane (Angela Bassett) makes its way to Hunt hiding out in London under martial law via self-destructing videotape, though in deference to its position as the closing chapter of a story told over decades the structure of the film is significantly different, absent the opening heist to prompt excitement and establish the what is to come and with the first hour heavy with exposition, backstory, revelations and duplicity.
A wild ride which finds its culmination in The Final Reckoning, there is little time for reflection; Hunt remains opaque, absolutely dedicated to his mission, never doubting himself or those around him, Grace, Benji Dunn, Luther Stickell, former assassin Paris and new inductee Theo Degas (Hayley Atwell, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Pom Klementieff and Greg Tarzan Davis), that blind trust that others will have done what is required to put the pieces in place for him to succeed extending to a blind jump from a hovering helicopter into Arctic waters.
Hunt split from his team for a significant portion of the three hours and Gabriel (Esai Morales) little more than a scheming background presence until the finale and the Enitity an idea rather than an enemy, the peril feels somewhat abstract yet The Final Reckoning is exhausting in the right way, a marathon effort with the stakes and pressure mounting among the frozen dead in the flooded chambers of a dead submarine slipping off the seabed into a chasm as the larger countdown to apocalypse continues in the President’s underground bunker.
Cruise a fearless performer known for executing his own stunts throughout the series, the extended aerial chase and fight sequence may feel removed from the central plot but sets its own high bar of impossible stakes, defying expectations and gravity and reminding that while the series has occasionally been uneven it has never failed to push for unparalleled levels of astonishment and excellence to which others can only aspire, a suitable swan song.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is currently on general release and also screening in IMAX
