The maybe-final ‘Mission: Impossible’ finds Cruise in control, again

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By Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post

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The arrival of “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” puts any knowledgeable filmgoer on alert.

Final? Really? That’s what they told us when we mourned the passing of Iron Man in the final Avengers movie; now Robert Downey Jr.’s coming back as a villain. After announcing that he would no longer act on-screen, Daniel Day-Lewis recently made it known he will star in an upcoming movie directed by his son. Steven Soderbergh, thankfully, has made more than half a dozen movies and TV series since “retiring” in 2013.

Without spoiling anything, let it be recorded that “The Final Reckoning” makes sure to leave its options open. But for now, it’s best to take the wording of the subtitle in good faith. Even if this doesn’t turn out to be Tom Cruise’s last hurrah as IMF team leader Ethan Hunt, it’s as good a time as any to take the measure of a franchise that, for nearly 30 years, has thrilled and chilled its way into our hearts as the movie we can rely on to make us laugh, gasp, scratch our heads a little, and finally applaud for its unbridled – and giddily contagious – love of spectacle for its own sake.

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In 1996, when Cruise first appeared as the boyish, spikily hair-gelled Ethan, it was the era of floppy disks and pay phones and smoking on airplanes. Apps were to be eaten, not downloaded, and characters said the word “internet” with a combination of awe and incipient dread. Cruise was 33 when he starred in the first big-screen “Mission: Impossible.” Now 62, his Ethan is floppy-haired, phones are palm-size computers in our pockets, and the internet has achieved terminating velocity by way of artificial intelligence: In “Dead Reckoning, Part One,” which came out two years ago, an AI blob called the Entity was turning the planet into a self-destructing Babylon of post-truth paranoia and conspiracy theories. As “The Final Reckoning” opens (technically the door’s still wide open for “Dead Reckoning, Part Two”), the Entity is coming for the world’s atomic weapons, with one major power after another kissing its arsenal goodbye. (“The Final Reckoning” ostentatiously includes Israel in the nuclear fellowship, so that secret’s out, apparently.)

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Quick recap: Gabriel is still the bad guy, played with evil-laugh glee by Esai Morales. The IMF team dedicated to stopping him is still attractively ragtag, including the pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell), Q-like gadget monger Benji (Simon Pegg), enigmatic assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff) and super-hacker Luther, played by Ving Rhames in a touching full-circle turn, having survived all eight MI movies. There are other originals here, too – and a callback from the first film that strikes a particularly winning chord of humor and sentimentality.

Director Christopher McQuarrie has enlisted a terrific, if underused, supporting cast that includes Nick Offerman, Janet McTeer and Hannah Waddingham; Tramell Tillman, the breakout phenom from the Apple TV+ series “Severance,” makes a particularly welcome and impactful appearance as a steady-eyed submarine captain who is forced to make an unexpected trip to the North Sea. That’s where Ethan will single-handedly avert global disaster, as only Ethan can do – which McQuarrie and his co-screenwriter Erik Jendresen insist on reminding the audience at every conceivable opportunity.

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The scripts have never been the strongest suit of the “Mission: Impossible” movies; back in 1996, the big moments were Cruise hanging balletically (and beautifully) by a bungee cord in a secret CIA vault, and tearing off a latex mask at the most dramatically opportune moment. That film, viewers may recall, clocked in at a fabulously lean hour and 50 minutes: Now one hour longer – and what an overstuffed, meaninglessly busy hour it is – “The Final Reckoning” exemplifies a more-is-less approach of diminishing returns, whereby the stunts have become exponentially more elaborate while the story has been reduced to talky expository scenes full of arcane techno-speak and variations on Only Ethan Can Save Us.

For all their inflationary bloat, the secret of the MI movies – the reason Ethan Hunt has proved more consistent than James Bond, more enduring than Jason Bourne, more likable than John Wick – is the way they combine contradictory elements: the bluntly effective action and needlessly complicated plotting, for example, or the sophisticated production design and location work with goofy twists worthy of a “Scooby-Doo” episode. It’s all been in good fun, and delivered with gusto and audience-first generosity.

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“The Final Reckoning” stays true to those core tenets, even if it too often feels baggy and redundant. It’s a nesting doll of life-and-death deadlines within life-and-death deadlines, with one wildly improbable stunt leading to another, even more wildly improbable stunt. The inevitable setbacks are met with the inevitable last-minute rescues, or miraculously bloodless fights, or both. Resistance is futile. Just repeat after me: Only Ethan Can Save Us!

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The messianic not-so-subtext of “The Final Reckoning” dovetails neatly with Cruise’s offscreen persona: He’s always presented himself as a man of destiny, whether he’s jumping on Oprah’s couch or off the tallest building in the world. In recent years, he’s set out to save theatrical filmgoing itself, an impossible mission that met a rare hiccup when he dared to stare down Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” and lost. (Cruise’s refusal to move the opening date resulted in the first part of “The Final Reckoning” playing on Imax screens for only one week.) Still, it’s an indisputably honorable endeavor, and Cruise has literally put his body on the line in its service, upping the ante on doing his own stunts with each succeeding movie.

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Last time, he rode a motorcycle off a cliff and helped orchestrate a dazzling finale set on a precariously teetering train; in the really-truly-final “Final Reckoning,” he engages in some eerily spectacular underwater exploits, swimming with lurking naval behemoths, dodging literal missiles and surviving a paralyzing case of the bends. In the film’s climactic sequence, he reaches back to cinema’s earliest days in a flat-out bonkers wing-walking sequence atop not just one but two biplanes, his face distended into a g-force rictus. (Thank the cinema gods for crepe soles and stupid courage.) An entire generation has grown up learning what a movie is from “Mission: Impossible”; in his commitment to physical performance and practical effects, Cruise has taught them that it isn’t a conglomeration of CGI pixels or green-screen fakery, but something of genuine awe and, at its best, sublime artistry.

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The emotional core of “Mission: Impossible” was and still is the team: the team Ethan lost in the first movie, the team he’s fighting for in this one. There are one or two moments when fans will mistily realize that, as Angela Bassett’s presidential voice intones at the beginning of the movie, “the end you always feared is coming.” But, just maybe, this also marks a beginning. The theme of sacrifice that runs through “The Final Reckoning” could just as easily apply to Cruise himself, who his younger fans may not realize once starred in motion pictures that didn’t require him to run, jump, punch, shoot, walk on airplanes or fly off cliffs on a motorcycle.

To paraphrase “The Final Reckoning,” every “Mission: Impossible” he’s made might have brought this world another exercise in escapist amusement, but they have also deprived us of the Cruise who was astonishingly good in “Magnolia” and “Tropic Thunder” and “Collateral” and “Born on the Fourth of July” and so many more movies, going all the way back to 1983’s “Risky Business.” If this “Reckoning” truly is final, Cruise is now faced with tearing off the last mask and admitting his true identity: a shrewd, emotionally fearless actor whose singular brand of intensity is its own best special effect. Leaving behind the disguises and dinguses and derring-do, he’s now free to seek out material that makes the most of gifts that, with luck, will only have seasoned and deepened with age. It’s a daunting mission, but a worthy one. Should he choose to accept it.

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RATING: Three stars

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