LOS ANGELES, May 14 (UPI) -- Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, in theaters May 23, delivers on the level of the franchise's most recent films once it gets going. It does, however, have the slowest start of all eight Mission: Impossible movies.
In 2023's Dead Reckoning, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) took on the villainous Gabriel (Esai Morales) to retrieve the key that unlocks the source code of the rogue artificial intelligence known as The Entity. Final Reckoning opens two months later, with Ethan unsure what to do with such power.
As The Entity holds hostage all of cyberspace and the world's electronics, including military weapons, there is a deadline before the AI will control the world. That is, if Ethan doesn't stop it first.
The plan to destroy The Entity requires Ethan's teammates, hackers Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Gabriel's turncoat assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff). The mission is complicated by U.S. President Sloane (Angela Bassett) sending agents to recover The Entity's controls for U.S. purposes, which Ethan knows will backfire.
The missions live up to the movie's title by devising ways to keep making the task harder for Ethan. For example, he's already diving to crushing depths to activate computers in a sunken submarine when the sub rolls towards an abyss.
Not only does this add another ticking clock to his task, but the water level rotates around Ethan and causes missiles to fall and shift, blocking his path and exit route.
The climax, which has already been shared during the film's publicity, features Ethan hanging from a propeller plane. The scene is more than just a spectacle -- writer/director Christopher McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen craft a sequence that justifies the stunt and continues to build as the pilot attempts many different ways to shake Ethan.
Final Reckoning does play the same trick one too many times, where Ethan's team goes to meet someone and finds someone else waiting for them. The second and third iterations lack surprise, but the interlopers at least complicate Ethan's plan, necessitating some fun improvisation.
Leading up to such sequences, this Mission: Impossible unfortunately becomes tedious and repetitive. The problem could easily be solved by cutting 40 minutes out of the film -- which would still leave it at over two hours long.
Final Reckoning recapping Dead Reckoning is the least of these worries, as it gets handled before the title sequence, which admittedly comes some 20 minutes in. What does become redundant are long sequences of Ethan walking through a war room looking at models as the DEFCON clock ticks down to The Entity's takeover.
Ethan explains to Gabriel, then to the President, then to Admiral Neely (Hannah Waddingham), how dangerous The Entity is. There's buildup and then there's just wallowing, and this leans towards the latter.
He keeps warning that The Entity expects them to act a certain way and advising they should instead surprise the AI. He says it enough times that the audience has surely caught on, if not The Entity itself.
Furthermore, The Final Reckoning becomes the most convoluted of all the Mission: Impossibles, which is no small feat, by connecting the plot to all seven previous films. It is an odd choice in a series predicated on standalone entries, and a mistake also recently criticized in the James Bond films starring Daniel Craig.
Bringing back some characters from previous entries is fun and gives them satisfying character arcs to imagine in the time between films, while others concoct unimportant connections. Just let some people be new characters.
For example, tying in The Entity with the Rabbit's Foot from Mission: Impossible III is wholly unnecessary. The Rabbit's Foot was one of that director J.J. Abrams' trademark unanswered mysteries, so saying now that it was a component of The Entity adds little to the current film.
The pieces of The Entity could be any Maguffin. Making Ethan feel responsible for it just forces more spurious connections. Ethan was going to stop The Entity anyway, whether he indirectly helped build it or not.
This is not to criticize the scenes explaining the missions, which effectively establish the impossible tasks at hand. Those scenes are not included in the superfluous 40 minutes of exposition.
Potentially interesting threads are also abandoned, such as a doomsday cult that worships The Entity but never becomes a factor in the mission.
When the screen expands to fill the entire IMAX frame, rest assured the show is about to start -- and it is worth it. The unfortunate issue is that it happens about 80 minutes into the film, not including a few earlier IMAX shots of The Entity's core. The submarine is the first proper IMAX action scene.
During the intense scenes, the film has a sense of humor about its own tropes of deadlines and cutting wires. It's only when it's taking itself seriously that it drags.
Gabriel becomes more of a mustache twirling, cackling villain in this film. It's motivated by his loss in Dead Reckoning but still a drastic shift, though the film has a sense of humor about his behavior too.
The second half of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning makes up for earlier mission failures, and this level of craftsmanship is still worth experiencing. Otherwise, the script problems would be unacceptable.
