REVIEW:
Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning is an okay MI film. It’s better than the last movie, for sure, but it’s also way, way too long. And that hurts both the momentum of the movie and the interest level of the audience. For pretty much the entire first half, this is a solid movie. It fixes the wrongs of the movie that came before it, gets out attention, and delivers thrills in a timely manner. And then it just starts slowing down and dragging on.
This Mission film is a complete continuation from the last movie, which should come as no surprise, since that last film was originally titled Dead Reckoning part 1. This one was meant to be titled Dead Reckoning Part 2. The reason for the change is because the first movie didn’t do very well, and the studio didn’t want the association with it, or for audiences to feel like they needed to see that first one to see this movie too. But they do. They definitely do. Every plot thread here, from the villain to the threat to the henchmen, are all directly spiraling out of that movie.
But here’s the interesting part… in that movie each of these things was terrible, and here they’re somehow pretty decent. The fact that the villain is AI, and has a specific name at least (the Entity,) is a lot more tolerable this time around. They do everything they can to give it personality, including having it actually talk to Ethan Hunt early on, when he puts himself in a chamber, straps himself in, and engages with it. In this movie, the Entity is basically like Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the threat it poses by taking control of most of the world’s nuclear weapons puts this movie in line with other massive threat films like War Games and Crimson Tide.
Now that’s good company to be in. If the movie just kept to that, and kept to it for a two hour film, including some stunts, it would have been great. What is arguable the best movie in the series, Mission Impossible 3 clocks in at 2 hours and 6 minutes. The next best, Rogue Nation, clocks in at 2 hours 11 minutes. And the classic first movie, arguably the third best, clocks in at 1 hour 50 minutes. This new one, Dead Reckoning, 2 hours and 50 minutes. That’s a solid hour longer than the first film. Let that sink in for a moment. Running time does matter. Especially in an action movie. Nobody is saying as a strict rule, it must stay under two hours, but it should definitely be close to that mark.
In the second half of the movie, we get those wonderful stunts that these films are known for. We get Ethan Hunt boarding and climbing through and then escaping from a sunken submarine underwater. Then we get a climax with him hanging from the wings of an old antique plane while fighting. And both of these sequences seem to go on forever. On top of that, they both feel like things we’ve seen before in this series alone. The underwater submarine… we’ve seen Ethan swim through an underwater tank with an electric arm swinging around inside it tryin to smash him to pieces. That was a lot cooler than this. And the plane scene… we’ve seen him hang from the side of the plane while in flight (Rogue Nation,) and hang from the ladder of a helicopter while in flight, (Fallout.) So these latest stunts do not feel all that fresh.
On top of that, there are way too many coincidences and lucky chances, and everyone holding their breath as this one impossible thing has to happen in order for the world to be saved, kind of situations. Yes, the storyline with the president (played by Angela Bassett,) and her team of advisors, (all played by known actors such as Holt Mcneely and Nick Offerman,) is cool, but it’s also a little too over the top. The personal element that some of these movies had is long gone. This has almost become parody, like any of those millions of action movies where they are like, “get the President on the phone.”
One thing that does work about this movie are the references to previous films. I love the callbacks to the very first movie, including a character who reappears here, and also a little bit from the third movie, with the Rabbit’s Foot McMuffin. This movie, being the final one in the series, could have used more of that. There should have been a callback to each film. How cool would it have been to see Lawrence FIshbourne and Anthony Hopkins back in this series again? What about Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Paula Patton. Even Jeremy Renner came and went, appearing in two movies before cutting ties with the series for no good reason at all. More would have been great, but I do appreciate the callbacks they gave us, which were a whole lot from the first movie in particular..
At the end of the day, this latest and perhaps final (I’m not holding my breath on that decisions Sean Connery taught us from his Bond movies, Never Say Never Again,) is just okay. It does right the wrongs of the last movie and it does deliver on references to previous films, but it is also just way too long. That and the action sequences are not all that memorable. Especially when compared to what this movie has done before. It’s not a bad movie, but it also could have been a hell of a lot better.