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When “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” concluded, a villainous Artificial Intelligence program called the Entity was threatening global destruction, but super-duper Impossible Mission Force agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his motley crew had acquired a key that could unlock the AI’s source code to stop it. It’s just, that source code was aboard a Russian submarine sunk deep in the Bering Sea. A scintillating and simple set-up, and yet, “The Final Reckoning” takes too long to engage thrusters, laboring under the weight of addressing the Entity’s human emissary Gabriel (Esai Morales) also having gone rogue, an American government that wants Ethan to bring them the key, and myriad callbacks to characters and moments from previous movies as a kind of feting of the entire franchise. Maybe this would have worked had it been rendered with the joie de vivre that defined McQuarrie’s other entries, but the overall mood in “Final Reckoning” is oddly funereal, not festive, underlined in both an early twist and exposition scenes without the wit of those in “Dead Reckoning Part One.” None of this is helped by the absence of Vanessa Kirby, something like the co-villain of the previous two movies; Morales’s lack of verve is all the more conspicuous without Kirby’s delightfully bemused evil around to counteract it. Paying so much tribute to past characters that left no impression and they can’t even pour one out for The White Widow.
Despite this protracted wind-up, however, the sequence in which Ethan does finally break into that submerged sub is sensational, taking the titular notion of an impossible mission and even by the standards of these movies stretching it with exuberant abandon. It is not merely the escalating complications that he encounters underwater but everything that gets him to the submarine in the first place; from the intervention of the President (Angela Bassett) to an aircraft carrier where Hannah Waddingham as its commander lays down the law (her line reading of “mister” is to die for) to a surprisingly sexy American submarine with a pair of powerful bit players in Tramell Tillman and Katy O’Brian and finally to the sunken Russian sub. And just when you think McQuarrie doesn’t have one more damn thing to heap on top of everything else, he pulls an ace with a reference not to May 22, 1996, a date that keeps echoing through “Final Reckoning,” but to August 5, 1983. I’ll let you figure it out for yourself. Suffice to say it’s the sort of moment that hits the action movie sweet spot, so ludicrously thrilling (thrillingly ludicrous), it makes you laugh out loud.
The DIY nature of Ethan’s mission, however, is also telling. “Rogue Nation” had fun with Ethan’s absurd invulnerability by having Alec Baldwin’s CIA director deem his IMF nemesis “the living manifestation of destiny.” “The Final Reckoning,” however, douses the knowing twinkle of that assessment by taking this living manifestation into some other sort of megalomaniacal dimension. Ethan, after all, proves the only one able to hold the Entity in the palm of his hand without fear of being tempted for ultimate power. And for as often as other characters insist that Ethan has always operated primarily from deep loyalty to his IMF cohorts, it’s noticeable how little impact those cohorts make. Paris (Pom Klementieff), Gabriel’s henchwoman from “Dead Reckoning Part One,” has switched sides to Ethan’s team, though despite Klementieff’s indelible presence, she is given virtually nothing to do. Hayley Atwell’s Grace has gone from an argumentative love interest to a cult member. Even the unexpected face from a previous impossible mission, not to be revealed, makes sure to thank Ethan for saving his life.
The conclusion in which Ethan battles Gabriel aboard a biplane while his team attends to bomb-diffusing business on the ground comes out of nowhere and is essentially a loose remake of the climactic parallel by air and by land storylines of “Fallout,” as sure a sign as any that McQuarrie’s creative tank is approaching empty. Even so, it’s hard to deny that in and of itself this sequence doesn’t deliver by taking us back a hundred years to the barnstorming tours of the 1920s, as if this really all is just about the stunts, and wowing us in transforming wing walking into wing hanging. It’s a virtual Looney Tune, as Cruise’s face and hair stretched and squished with what might be amusing exaggeration if we didn’t know all this was real. No other actor, I thought, would be so willing to let himself look so ridiculous onscreen, the ultimate renunciation of vanity even if at the same time, that he was up there and performing this stunt at all was the ultimate vain exercise. Both are true, and it’s the moment where once and for all, whatever divide was left between character and actor falls away, the two physically and spiritually merging in service of blockbuster entertainment, a fitting coda to what came to be a phenomenal franchise, so long as Cruise has the paradoxical temerity to finally say, “Enough.”
