For the past 30 years, Ethan Hunt has had a choice. “Your mission, if you choose to accept.” And he accepts; he always does. But what if Hunt never had a choice to start with?
I guess the choice: “Yes or the world dies” limits options. But what if all those disparate missions weren’t a series of repetitive double crosses , disavowals and world-saving heroics but the convergence of every victory and villain in a Mission: Impossible movie since the first installment in 1996? That would be something, wouldn’t it?
That’s why director Christopher McQuarrie and producer Tom Cruise (who also acts) spend the first act of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning convincing the audience of this ridiculous contrivance with flashbacks to the previous seven M:I flicks. And when that doesn’t work, they shrug, toss in some action and paper over the holes with the Bible.
Don’t believe me? Here’s the premise: an all-knowing AI system, the Entity — whose center is nowhere and circumference is everywhere — floods the world with misinformation, decides humanity is expendable, and plots nuclear Armageddon. But only after it gains access to a bunker — an ark, if you will — in the jungles of South Africa. Here, all of history is recorded and stored. If there’s a backup, that means this ark has two of everything.
To stop the Entity, Hunt (Cruise), Benji (Simon Pegg), Luther (Ving Rhames), Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Paris (Pom Klementieff) globetrot with a special crucifix-shaped key in search of the Entity’s source. Hot on their heels is Gabriel (Esai Morales), the Entity’s former spokesman, who has since fallen from grace.
That places Hunt in the savior position — par for the M:I movie course. But in Reckoning, it’s a little much. Ditto for the crosscutting McQuarrie and editor Eddie Hamilton employ to connect conversations across time and space. It’s exposition, no matter how you slice it.
But then Hunt goes on a scuba mission to the bottom of the Bering Sea, steals aboard a biplane in South Africa, and Reckoning achieves the cinematic exhilaration you hope for in a Tom Cruise movie.
I guess Hunt trying to save the world from a biblical apocalypse seems like a logical conclusion after he’s saved it from politicians, rogue states and opportunists. But trying to retcon this movie to the others does Reckoning no favors.
Then that plane does a 360-degree barrel roll with Cruise hanging on for dear life, and my quibbles fly out the window. I know there are wires securing Cruise to the plane, but I can’t see them. All I see is a man tossed around while a plane hurtles through the sky. All I can say is, “Wow.”