End Times:MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - THE FINAL RECKONING

There’s something genuinely apocalyptic in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. It sure does feel like an ending. The plot finds a rogue artificial intelligence wants to extinguish humanity. We’re told it has invaded the controls of half the nuclear weapons in the world and stokes geopolitical tensions with misinformation and deep fakes—all ways of hoping those missiles will drop one way or another. Though we really only learn that from blinking screens, since the tension is all on our ensemble’s faces. The score rumbles darkly, the camera tilts and looms, and every ridiculous turn of tension brings with it a somber sense that a fan favorite character will die. (Some do.) The previous entry, Dead Reckoning Part 1, had hugely enjoyable pleasures. It’s ebullient and energizing despite its weight and melancholy, a three-hour action extravaganza that, like all the best of this series, rockets through one sensational sequence after another. It was wholly satisfying and even complete in its way, though it leaves off on a literal cliffhanger. The first hour or so of The Final Reckoning is atypically tedious setting it all up to be a grand finale, regrouping and reorienting an audience it doesn’t have faith will remember, or even have seen, its immediate predecessor. We get several flashbacks to previous movies, some played multiple times, in this stretch, and endless exposition that shifts the characterization of a few characters and reassembles the team for a new last-ditch mission with those world-ending stakes. In this hour I found myself befuddled that it’s all gone so wrong.

Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie’s work in this series is usually so joyfully clockwork precise, a delightful dance of complications and stunts that escalate well and resolve brilliantly. This one’s tedious and ponderous at first, endlessly explanatory, and laboring under the weight of retcons and loose threads. For a series that’s often been dinged as difficult to follow—I wouldn’t agree, until maybe now—this one doubles down on inscrutability and referentiality. They’re the same impulses that hold back Deathly Hallows Part 2 and Endgame and Rise of Skywalker and most other attempts to coast a lumbering franchise narrative to something like a finale from being fully satisfying. Mission: Impossible has the good sense to have a mission, though. Once Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is back in the field, the movie steadily picks up momentum and builds to a truly ecstatic sequence of cross-cutting between various team members pulling off their own impossibilities—hanging off planes, cutting wires on a bomb with a countdown clock, waiting to flip a switch in a split second. Because it builds up such a head of steam on its commitment to feeling like the world truly hangs in the balance, the release of the climax is satisfying enough. It hits that classic sense of teamwork and underdogs and long odds and preposterous close calls and real death-defying stunts. I'll miss it.

Family Style: FINAL DESTINATION BLOODLINES

The Final Destination movies are dances between predictability and randomness. Of course they’re about dying. The fun conceit is that a character’s vivid premonition of a mass casualty event causes them to prevent said event. Death then stalks the survivors to claim them with random acts of mayhem. Small details accumulate through insert shots—loose screws, leaky faucets, groaning chains—until a quick pile-up of calamities leads to a sudden accidental death. The movies are structured more or less identically, but the renewable novelty of these accidents keep them fresh. Blissfully free of tortured lore or a villain morphing into a mascot, here’s a horror franchise that has a consistent quality, a modest groove, and evergreen appeal. The sixth and latest entry, somehow the first in 14 years, is Final Destination Bloodlines. From the directors of Disney Channel's live-action Kim Possible remake, it somehow disappoints by hitting the right beats while going even bigger and broader. Where the franchise started with gore as delayed morbid punchlines, it’s now fully cartoony and excessive, over-the-top at any given chance. 

Part of it is the tone, a light and casual breeziness even when dread should be kicking in. A larger part of it is the style—an overly clean digital look with bland straight-to-streaming sitcom lighting and animated effects that make everything look totally artificial. The movie’s one new wrinkle is making the victims a family. It starts with grandma as a young woman preventing a collapsing sky-view restaurant. (The sequence has a fun rhythm but a totally phony look.) Decades later, the last of those survivors are finally dead and the curse descends the family tree, whacking branch after branch on the way down. This should escalate the tension, but it somehow evokes the flimsiest emotions of the already just-south-of-comic premise. They never feel like a convincing family, and by the second or third death their behaviors make little emotional sense. There are some good gags in the sequences—a tattoo parlor up in flames has some sly twisting humor, and a thwack from a soccer ball in the background of a shot is a fun jolt. But by the time, after nearly two hours, of the movie’s final deaths—a typical blackout gag in classic Final Destination style—the specifics of the variables are too outsized and the violence not too far removed from Frogger splats. This may be an official continuation of the series, and has some of the surface-level appeal of all of its superior predecessors. But the aesthetics make it feel like a knock-off. It left me craving the real deal.

Partially Assembled: THUNDERBOLTS*

If you’re looking for signs of life in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thunderbolts* has you covered. It gets back to what these Marvel movies did best in the first place: gathering a fun ensemble of character actors, turning them loose on eclectic comic book characters, and making the audience care about their plight as they banter and battle through a simple set of genre set-pieces. The larger world-building post Avengers Endgame remains a muddle, but this one goes a long way towards righting the ship and establishing a new normal—before it’s probably exploded in the next Avengers, but that’s next summer’s problem. With this kind of interconnected storytelling, this entry’s needs for the stage cleared for a straightforward plot even go a long way toward explaining why Captain America: Brave New World had to be about mopping up loose ends from The Incredible Hulk and Falcon & the Winter Soldier (plus the most conspicuous one from Eternals). It doesn’t explain why that movie had to do that badly, but, hey, you can’t win them all. And anyway, Thunderbolts* is pretty fun. It leans into our ambient cultural suspicions that the MCU has lost its way by centering characters who’ve lost theirs. Best is Florence Pugh’s Yelena, a sad black-ops freelancer who hasn’t had a passion for her spycraft since the death of her sister. She was a bright spot in Black Widow, but here her light is dimmed. So says her father (David Harbour), a once-super hero now down in the dumps as a limo driver. They’ll be pulled back into the action as the story kicks in. It’s about a ragtag group of misfit antiheroes targeted for elimination who, to the surprise of the villain, instead team up to take their collective antagonist down.

It’s a typical Marvel group project with snarky asides and sentimental heart, collecting supporting villains from other projects—Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), Falcon’s U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell), Ant-Man 2’s Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Widow’s Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko)—and sets them through their paces of quick-cut, well-choreographed action. As proficiently and capably directed by Beef’s Jake Schreier, the characters bounce off each other well, physically and in prickly chemistry. The CG action doesn’t get too outsized, and accentuates the team dynamics without drowning them out in the third-act sci-fi threat that’s actually deployed cleverly. It helps that it is all done up in pop psychology, playing off metaphors for emotional repression and depression, with flashbacks in settings overtly labeled The Vault and The Void. It’s all rather neatly pulled off, light and suspenseful in the right proportions, with characters made improbably lovable and leave you wanting more. That used to be the MCU’s stock in trade. We’ll see if they can sustain that again, but this is a good (re)start.