MISSION BLOCKBUSTER

FINAL RECKONING BRINGS DOWN THE MOVIE HOUSE

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Director Christopher McQuarrie opens the 8^th installment of the Mission: Impossible film franchise with a montage of film clips and background information that closes the loop on what was apparently a continuous story in the spy genre.

The splash of images though may suggest more mission trauma than the reality of seven or more independent films in which even the black ops mission impossible team changed characters, often without explanation from film to film.

Nevertheless, actor/producer Tom Cruise once again channels his charisma and adrenaline fueled energy into the story line for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025).

The action adventure film series was left in a cliffhanger in the previous franchise film with team leader Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and mission specialists Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) returning for what has been teased as the final installment featuring this particular team composition.

Hayley Atwell and Pom Kiementieff rejoin the cast as part of the covert spy team in the continuing two part story tasked with destroying a sentient Artificial Intelligence developed by Russia that has now gone rogue.

Essi Morales returns as the villain, Gabriel, who races against time and the IMF team to gain control of the Artificial Intelligence and destroy the world.

The Final Reckoning does weave together the recurring threats to world peace and the survival of the human species, such as sophisticated, tech heavy urban terror organizations, the security of the world’s nuclear weapon stockpiles and just the ongoing need to wrestle with humanities many frailties, such as greed, betrayal and hate.

The tension creating, special effect of mission specialists swabbing out roles with the use of identity masks may have come to an end as Ethan takes the lead through most of the scenes once the storyline does eventually get started, while the other team members take secondary roles, for the most part, providing mission support in the background.

For some reason the camera in this action film franchise spends a lot more time panning around situation rooms where military and government officials discuss the mission obstacles and give context to the current global threat, often for the benefit of an imaginary first time audience.

For devout fans of the 8 film franchise, the long drawn out opening scenes, before and after the classic opening theme introductions, becomes a bit of a psychotropic experience inducing flashbacks all the way back to the first film, 30 years ago.

McQuarrie brought back the government handler, Kittridge, played by Henry Czerny, for the final two films. And William Donloe, played by Rolf Saxon, is brought back for the final reversal scenes of The Final Reckoning.

Saxon played the CIA Intelligence analyst who gets dupped by a pretty face and has his secret computer at Headquarters in Langley compromised in Mission: Impossible One (1996).

Cruise likes to do his own stunts for the film, which gives everything, even the various, hard to believe spy fantasy conspiracies an air of reality.

McQuarrie does drop one CGI scene sequence involving Cruise’s extraction from an arctic submarine through a missile tube that is obviously just too fantastical to be humanly possible. I got flashbacks to Cruise’s unrealistic show jumping film sequences in previous franchise films where in realty he would have broken both his tibias, and perhaps, all 26 bones and 33 joints in each foot.

This computer generated stunt ads to the plausibility that this final film may be more of a psychotropic end-song for Cruise, and the production team, saying goodbye to audiences that have participated in one of the most successful film franchises in the history of film.

Cruise, like other franchise leading actors, has struggled with the typecasting that occurs when a recurring role makes such a dramatic impact on the movie market and audiences. Cruise dealt with this career obstacle by moving more towards science fiction films for intermittent acting breaks between impossible missions.

As this chapter in Hollywood times out to a logical conclusion, McQuarrie helps loyal fans feel and think in sync with Cruise and the cast and crew.

The action sequences are without a doubt some of the best in the movie business. And the real time fictional reality becomes a bit disjointed as a reflection of the collective consciousness becoming fragmented when the world once again struggles with the notion that modern civilization is on the brink of nuclear apocalypse.

McQuarrie does a good job of infusing the real on-line cyber threats with the storyline, although there is a bit of a jolt in understanding how the Artificial Intelligence from the previous film has so quickly taken over human consciousness with deep fakes and didactic social media control.

This accelerated decrepitude may just be how everything plays out if government and civilian overwatch do not remain vigilant.

In the end, with the credits rolling, the whole spy reality morphs into an emotive dreamscape from the moment Ethan blows up an aquarium in Prague to climbing the outside of a skyscraper in Dubai and then, eventually, formulating in the moment, a deep sea Artic escape.