The Mission: Impossible film franchise has always dabbled in the, well, impossible. We’ve seen Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt climb his way up the Burj Khalifa, have a motorcycle joust to prevent the spread of a bioweapon and hang off the side of an airplane. Even the most grounded entry, Brian DePalma’s 1996 Mission: Impossible, featured Cruise leaping off of an exploding helicopter onto a train in the Chunnel. But with the previous film, Dead Reckoning, and this year’s follow-up Final Reckoning, the series has jumped completely into science-fiction territory with an AI villain called The Entity. It has the power to control anything that touches the internet, manipulate digital information to suit its needs and potentially wipe out humanity through a global nuclear annihilation.
Stopping the Entity is a mission Ethan Hunt has no choice but to accept. But as a fan of this series from the start — hell, I even like John Woo’s gloriously operatic Mission: Impossible 2 — I can’t help but see the move into true sci-fi as a huge mistake. It makes both Reckoning films far too plot-heavy and impenetrable (Final Reckoning clocks in at three hours!), and they also just don’t have much to say about AI beyond a Terminator-esque extinction scenario. But perhaps worst of all, the shift towards sci-fi inadvertently (or perhaps purposefully) turns Ethan Hunt into some sort of Messiah. Apparently, only Scientology’s greatest son can save us.
The best M:I films are the ones that don’t get bogged down in the intricacies of plot mechanics. That’s a trend that truly kicked off with the JJ Abrams-directed Mission: Impossible 3, which relied on a standard MacGuffin (the “Rabbit’s Foot”) and a powerhouse Philip Seymour Hoffman villain performance to send Ethan and his team gallivanting around the world. With Ghost Protocol, director Brad Bird used his experience in animation and love of silent film to turn Cruise into a modern-day Buster Keaton, hopping from one elaborate set-piece to another.
The series found a new life when writer/director Christopher McQuarrie hopped aboard for Rogue Nation, which introduced Rebecca Ferguson’s enigmatic Ilsa Faust. McQuarrie has previously likened his approach to the franchise as something like action film jazz, wherein he and Cruise would develop some set piece ideas and build a narrative around that. At the same time, they also sought to develop Hunt’s inner-life and team dynamics more than previous films. Plot, once again, was mostly a vehicle to reach those spectacular action set pieces and character-defining moments (which were often one and the same).
McQuarrie mostly repeated his formula for success with 2018’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout, which was notable for featuring a real-time high altitude skydiving sequence. But with 2023’s Dead Reckoning, he faced the limits of trying to improvise a movie as it was being shot. Production was significantly delayed by the pandemic, and the film also had to go through several reshoots. Perhaps not surprisingly, it also became increasingly more complex and plot-heavy.
That movie couldn’t just treat The Entity’s AI like another plot MacGuffin, instead it practically became an anchor for the film’s momentum. We had to learn what the Entity was, why it could be bad and also introduce new characters who were devoted to its ambitions. The final film feels like a hodgepodge of ideas trying to string together a few notable action sequences, like that aforementioned motorcycle jump. The prolonged production also led to the departure of Ilsa Faust, who was immediately replaced by Hayley Atwell’s Grace, an expert thief who’s so thinly sketched she doesn’t even get a last name.
I had hoped that McQuarrie, Cruise and co-writer Erik Jendresen would learn from the sloppiness of the last film and refocus on the characters and action we love in The Final Reckoning, but unfortunately things get even more convoluted. We’re presented with a world where the Entity has already taken over most information systems, can easily reshape digital reality at will and is in the process of taking over nuclear weapons systems around the world. There is no hope but Ethan Hunt, who must seek out the Entity’s source code in a sunken Russian submarine and try to stop it from annihilating humanity (while also trying to survive the apocalypse in an underground data bunker). And if that all sounds tiring as you read it, it’s even harder to swallow as you sit through the film’s three-hour runtime.
Once the film actually starts moving around the half-way point, it delivers some of the most complex set pieces we’ve seen yet. Hunt’s dive into Arctic waters feels as claustrophobic as some of the best scenes from The Abyss, and it’s still thrilling to see Cruise hang onto bi-planes during the climactic chase. I just wish it actually did something interesting with the AI at the center of the story, instead of giving us a basic-ass Terminator/Wargames scenario. We’re told that the Entity has inspired a cult-like following, and that it can completely reshape the idea of truth, but we don’t actually see how it affects people around the world.
That’s a particular shame since the Mission: Impossible series’ has always been about genuine human effort, you’d think McQuarrie and crew would actually have more to say about the impact of AI. Fans want to see practical stunt work being accomplished by a movie star who’s desperate for attention. Now with real-world AI threatening to dumb down the act of creativity and recycle existing content, turning the film’s AI into a simplistic villain just seems like a total waste.
The Final Reckoning also wastes far too much time extolling Ethan Hunt’s virtues as humanity’s savior. No government can be trusted, no elected leaders — just one man who never follows orders. The one man who has given up love and bled for an ungrateful world. Even the people whose lives he has ostensibly ruined can’t help but love him.
The Mission: Impossible franchise has always been a vanity project for Cruise, but he also balanced out his ego by working with talented directors who pushed him and the series in new directions. Now, in his fourth film with McQuarrie, and possibly his last as the main character, Cruise can’t help but remind us how much he’s suffered. And it’s as dull as yet another world-ending AI villain.
