‘Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning’ Review: The Cult of Tom Cruise
The action franchise’s eighth installment tilts even further into hero worship, as its star races to save the world from nefarious artificial intelligence.
That need not be a bad thing. The producer-star delivered the two best offerings in the series since the original 1996 feature with 2018’s “Mission: Impossible—Fallout” and 2023’s “Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One” (calling the latest edition Part Two might have been a subtitle too many). This time, though, the story falters.
The series has always been an effort in the sometimes-awkward business of stitching together extravagant set pieces, but the eighth installment’s characterizations, dialogue and villainy are all thin, and the blowout sequences aren’t exciting enough. Too often, the self-serving mission of making Mr. Cruise look cool clashes with the audience-serving mission of making sense. The balance between vanity and sanity leans the wrong way.
In what amounts to the second half of a nearly six-hour movie, artificial intelligence has culminated in the Entity, which is seizing control of the world’s nuclear arsenals and intends to obliterate humanity once it conquers America’s. The U.S., led by President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett), weighs the same options outlined in the Cold War movie “Fail Safe” as a last-ditch effort to avert the worst possible outcome. When the president contemplates nuking the other eight nuclear powers to stave off total war, an adviser informs her this would cause “an unprecedented political crisis.” You think?
But Mr. Cruise’s Ethan Hunt has the two-part cruciform key to a vault on a downed Russian submarine that contains the source code to the Entity, and could simply kill it if he had the thumb drive containing poison-pill software engineered by Ethan’s hacker genius buddy, Luther (Ving Rhames). Gabriel (Esai Morales), the nefarious megalomaniac who had the key in the last movie until Ethan took it, this time steals the poison pill. Moreover, no one knows where the sunken sub is. The only way to get its coordinates is to visit a remote Alaskan island where, amusingly enough, we meet the CIA veteran whose “black vault” was breached by Ethan, dangling like a marionette, in a famous scene in the 1996 movie.
Ethan’s teammates—the pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell), tech nerd Benji (Simon Pegg) and assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff)—are back but get very little to do; Mr. Morales gets even less, popping in for just a few minutes of chuckling cartoonishness. Other fine actors such as Nick Offerman and Janet McTeer are reduced to filling out the background. Instead of making them count, the movie keeps its focus on Ethan’s questionable doings. Why would a 60-something man sprint across Westminster Bridge in London? Wouldn’t any automobile be faster? Why would Ethan jump off a helicopter and into the frigid waters of the Bering Sea, miles from anything? Do we really need at least four scenes of a shirtless Mr. Cruise, two of which also feature him in his briefs? For a superficially brainy spy thriller, the movie is really dumb. When Ethan, having shed his scuba gear and nearly naked, rapidly swims up hundreds of feet from the ocean floor to the surface through Arctic waters so cold there are icebergs afloat, the effect is as preposterous as Batman and Robin surfing to Earth from the upper atmosphere in “Batman & Robin.”
If most superhero movies can be dismissed for being smarmy and frivolous, “M:I 8” goes too far the other way, affecting a pose of somber doomcasting that drains most of the fun. There’s a death cult of Entity worshipers who pray for the worst, and events to counter them take on the same overtone as a weird religion, with Ethan being casually told he’d be a good choice to rule the world. The script, by director Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen, lacks wit, is weighed down by thick gobs of exposition (cut the red wire, grab the glowing thing, etc.) and has a weakness for clunky portentousness. The dialogue features so many howlers it could have been written by the pack of sled dogs who join the mission in Alaska.
The film tries to make a meal out of a leftover with Ethan’s line “Nothing is written” (shamelessly ripped off from “Lawrence of Arabia”), but also contains talk of Ethan as a sort of cult leader destined to deliver us all. A penchant for grandiosity over coherence defines “M:I 8.” Mr. Cruise should remember that his films work best when he’s more of a maverick than a messiah.
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