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.