Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning marks the end of an era.
After nearly 30 years, the franchise starring Tom Cruise has come to an end. Will
it be rebooted? Or reimagined in a few years? It’s too early to tell, but the
final film leaves some questions.
Can a general audience still appreciate old-fashioned action
pieces? Films used to be known for their epic battles, lasting twenty minutes
or more. Now, it feels a little long. Have our tastes changed? Do we prefer
meatier monologues and quiet character moments over stunts? It didn’t help that
the fights didn’t seem organic, or not all of them. Instead, it felt like you
could set your watch and if there was 10-15 minutes of drama and character
development, then there would be a fight coming because the formula
necessitates it.
Along with the exciting fights hidden among perfunctory
pieces, there were some questionable decisions about editing. It’s
understandable to remind viewers about previous plot developments and attention
spans have decreased, but was it necessary to have a flashback to a scene that
happened just five minutes before? It felt like Austin Powers should pop up
behind a pillar and it would veer into a comedy. Again, attention spans are
shit so major plot points are explained multiple times, but other stuff is just
implied and never explained? Of course, it could just be the risks of a
franchise milestone like what happened with Avengers: Endgame.
The other problem with the Mission: Impossible franchise is the
women. The majority of them have been little more than love interests for Ethan
Hunt (Tom Cruise) to be put in peril when stakes need to be raised. At least
now there’s Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) to share in that role.
Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) returns from a previous film and has been
upgraded to President of the United States. She does get a few nice moments. Grace
(Hayley Atwell) gets to do a couple of things. Paris (Pom Klementieff) is a
breath of fresh air; not an Ethan fangirl in any respect and with her own
motivation. However, when that motivation is taken away, there’s no payoff or
reaction from her character. It doesn’t appear that any of the films pass the Bechdel-Wallace
Test.
The true villain of Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning is
up for debate. Is it our own human hubris? Is it just like Dr. Ian Malcolm in
Jurassic Park, “Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or
not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should”? The Entity is an
Artificial Intellgence program born from a need to build a bigger weapon and be
smarter than their enemies; smarter than a human might be capable of. However,
the weapon went rogue; using all our traits like mistrust, weapon hording and a
need to believe in something greater against us. As the last film from 2023, Mission
Impossible: Dead Reckoning, proved, A.I. can make for a very hard villain to
showcase on screen. Thus, most of the antagonistic behavior comes from Gabriel
(Esai Morales). Sadly, a lot of his tricks seem ordained by the script rather than
character motivations.
Of course, the main selling point for the film is the
bombastic, larger than life feel of it all. These are carefully executed stunts
with minimal computer-generated effects in far flung locations like South
Africa. They aren’t the same on a palm sized device. You can’t experience a
whole theatre of people with bated breath while you’re by yourself in a Burger
King. Event films are important, but perhaps it’s also time that we demand the
writing measure up to the spectacle, too.
