Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning

Ethan Hunt and the IMF team race against time to find the Entity, a rogue artificial intelligence that can destroy mankind.

For me, watching each entry of the Mission Impossible franchise has always been a little bit like entering a narrative fugue state. For two or three hours, you sit there, glassy-eyed, adrift on the low hum of the characters discussing the plot points, and then occasionally being roused by the sudden fireworks. And afterwards, you don’t really remember anything save for a distantly-remembered feeling of happiness, or maybe a hazy sense of having been entertained in some way. As a result, I couldn’t really tell you what exactly happened in the last film, the first part of this two part franchise finale, which was called Dead Reckoning, while this new one is called The Final Reckoning. All I can really recall is the usual stuff... Tom Cruise running. Tom Cruise jumping. Tom Cruise parachuting. Tom Cruise speaking emphatically about stuff. And Tom Cruise driving a motorcycle off a cliff. I'm sure he probably pulled off a face mask once or twice too, maybe three times. I think there was also a lot of punching people on a train as well, in a very similar set-piece to the one in the last Indiana Jones movie, but other than that? I couldn't really say. But let's be honest… the specifics of these plots don’t really matter. The bad guys may change, sure, as do the McGuffins, but who cares? These films are all the same. They’re all about the spectacle, right? The vague adventure of it all.

This time out, the bad guy is a rogue AI. An idea I am totally for. After the bigot Christian fascists of white America, as far as I'm concerned, AIs are the best bad guy to watch get blown up. But just so we're clear here, because a lot of idiots out there are very confused about this… in this movie, the bad guy is a real-deal AI, an actual artificial intelligence, and that is something that is completely made-up, it is a concept that is completely fictional, and doesn’t actually exist.

I say this so that people will understand that the AI in this film, known as The Entity, is nothing at all like those dumb parrot "AI Assistants" out there, the ones that were built by nerd racists and nerd con men, the ones that are generally used by lazy dipshits, dumb rubes, and stupid children to write their emails, or to teach themselves how to make a sandwich, or who fucking knows what, or why they use it, but rest assured, whatever these idiots do use their "AI Assistants" for, it's really stupid. This is especially true if they use them on their job, as all the while, they are also unwittingly training these programs to eventually replace them. So, yeah, "AI Assistants" are worthless plagiarism machines that steals from artists and poisons the planet. The Entity is nothing like that shit. This AI can actually think for itself. It can lie and plan and want and hate just like you, except much better and much, much faster. This AI, the fictional AI in the movie, can even be stupid. Like, it can buy into self-delusional religious bullshit, and all while it has total access to the entirety of the internet, and also everything that is connected to the internet... like nuclear missiles, for instance, and then it can decide that it's God and that the only way to save the planet is to cleanse it in holy nuclear fire. This kind of AI, the true Artificial Intelligence, can do all of that, unlike the "AI Assistants" dumb people currently use to provide them with the wrong answers to easy questions. In short, the Entity, because it’s a complete fiction, can actually do all the things that stupid people think ChatGPT or Gemini or Grok or whatever they’re fucking named, can do, but can’t. And while both of the fictional version and the real life version are very, very bad for the planet, only the former can act completely independant of the stupid people using it, while the ramifications of using the latter is all on us.

My point is, I’m all about blowing up AIs.

And also stunts.

So let's watch the final Mission Impossible movie!

Luckily, this film begins with an info-dump that not only brings us up to speed on the events of the franchise, it also serves as a quick jaunt down memory lane. It not only takes us on a tour of the many, many stars that have appeared in these films, it also reminds us of all the running and jumping and hanging off of things that Ol’ Tommy has done for our entertainment over the past thirty years too—years which are now very apparently hanging off of Tom’s face.

The basic gist of the story goes like this… an evil AI known as the Entity is doing the same things in the movie’s world that Trump and his white fascist supporters are doing in the real world. It’s wrecking global economies. It’s disrupting resource distribution networks. It’s creating division and fomenting armed conflicts. It’s spreading misinformation. It's probably barring Middle School transgirls from playing girls volleyball. So, regularly disavowed and often loose cannon, rogue IMF agent, Ethan Hunt, needs to destroy the Entity’s source code, all while avoiding its fanatically devout apocalyptic death cult of poisoned-brain dipshits and weirdos who watched too many tiktoks and are now dedicated to hastening the End Times. Driven by the typical kind of delusional belief common to religious nuts, the cult thinks that after the Entity destroys humanity, it will raise up the survivors from the ashes of the Old World, and bring them into a new perfect one. And again, this all feels very much like a metaphor for everything that Trump–and the ugly bigot fuck-nugget white christian fascists who support him–are actually doing in the real world, but... Tom is a Super Scientologist, so it's probably actually more about some weird Scientology bullshit.

Once all of that is established, the film gets up to its usual hijinks of globe-hopping, and pulling off face-masks to reveal who’s actually underneath, and getting the band back together… ah, good times. First up, it’s Simon Pegg as Benji, the nebbish British guy who… maybe makes the tech? Then there’s Ving Rhames as Luthor, a hacker who can hack anything, even the planet. Then there’s Pom Klementieff as Paris, the sexy French mime assassin. And finally, there’s Haley Atwell as Grace, the sexy catwoman to Ethan’s Batman.

Bottom line? Ethan needs to save the world, and he’s the only one who can do it, so… “What’s the play, Ethan?” People ask him that a couple of times as the film stumbles to get started. In order to stop the Entity, Ethan must choose between accepting the AI as the new god and master and allow it to enslave the world, or risk it all, knowing that if he fails, the world will be destroyed in nuclear fire…

(Theme song starts….)

Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning is decent. It's fine. Bombastic, yes. Melodramatic, sure. A little slow and a little repetitive, definitely, not to mention pretty obvious, but… decent enough.

That said, cards on the table... I don’t want to brag or nothing, but I got second and third recently at a restaurant's local trivia night, and y’know what, it doesn’t matter that there were only two teams total playing either, because I won not only a $10 gift certificate to a coffee shop, but some of Fulton Brewery’s non-alcoholic cannabis sparkling waters too. So I had one of those when I sat down to watch this film, and let me tell you, I think it helped with my overall enjoyment. Still, at nearly 3 hours, I was definitely feeling the drag by the end.

Otherwise, the film is fine. Just fine. It’s the cinematic version of a spy-themed roller coaster at a family fun park. That means that it’s kind of fun, if not a little bland and also pretty sexless for the most part, except for one scene where Haley Atwell squishes her cleavage against Tom, and for Pom Klementieff’s occasionally at-attention nipples. Not bare, of course! Good god, no! There is no nudity in this spy film! What do you think this is? A movie about a British spy? Because it’s not! This movie is about an American spy! We may love blood and boobs here in the ol' red, white, and blue, but we’ll never admit to the boob part, no way, no how. So all we get here is a mere whiff of boob. It’s like the boob version of when someone is burning a pile of leaves a few blocks away, and then the wind shifts just right, and you catch the scent, so you raise your chin and sniff at that hint of smoky leaves in the distance, just a hint, but still, you smile, and nod to yourself: “Yes, that is nice. I like that.” But then it’s just as quickly gone again, the wind shifts, and it’s like the scent never existed… 

Also, Paris, the French assassin, clearly understands English, but she only ever speaks French, and all despite being completely surrounded at all times by English speakers. I don’t know if this is a deliberate and rather pointed commentary on the French people or what, but it’s… weird. It’s like how Han Solo clearly understands Chewie, and Chewbacca clearly understands Han, but neither one ever speaks the other’s language. That’s not a deal breaker or anything, of course, it’s just odd that she’s like that and no one ever mentions it. If there is a dealbreaker, it’s the film’s weird decision to sometimes leave some of the action to happen off camera, opting instead for a held breath moment right at the climax, a “did they do it?” moment, before the characters all heave a sigh of relief when they find out that they have indeed found yet another way to save the day.

I get it, maybe they just had too many action sequence. I mean, to be fair, the final cut of the film is nearly three hours long. But still, even then, that’s a really weird decision. Especially when they do it maybe three different times in the film.

Now, like I previously mentioned, I would expect, due to all of its “anti-god” and “lord of lies” melodramatic talk, that the story of this film is maybe a metaphor for the tenets of Scientology somehow, and I don’t see it because I’m not familiar with the general belief system of Scientologists, but y’know what… who cares? I mean, except Scientologists, of course, but fuck those guys.

So, whatever deeper message or theme that the film is attempting to make aside, what you have here is a seemingly never-ending “blink and you’ll miss ’em” parade of movie stars and “hey, it’s that one person from the one thing” actors. It’s a film that is not just the final nail in the franchise, but also one last hurrah for what has long been Tom Cruise’s biggest personal vanity project. This means that the film is an extreme sport spectacle, tied together by a recap of the franchise’s greatest hits, which are all Tom Cruise’s greatest hits, in a somewhat methodical attempt to tie all of the franchise’s crazy bullshit together into one story. It’s a film that patiently explains the stakes of each moment to the audience, all presented through a lens of “hey, we’re all in this together, guys” bit of positivity, while venerating Tom Cruise, and giving the man one last chance to hang off stuff, run really fast, jump as far as his little legs let him, and sometimes take off his shirt. It’s an extended goodbye to a series of films that's gotten a little noticeably long in the tooth. There’s a lot of noble sacrifices, deep kisses farewell, and shared nods between brothers, all as it not only wraps the franchise, but seemingly plays off an era of filmmaking that is now probably gone forever, and the kind of film star that hails from a previous Age that has now come to end. After this, Tom Cruise will probably use his star wattage and wealth to make billions Producing films, as least until he achieves his final form and becomes a new Howard Hughes, holed up somewhere in the Hollywood Hills, shuffling about some dusty and cluttered old Spanish-style mansion, wearing tinfoil on his body and Kleenex boxes on his feet, rambling on about Scientology, while pissing in Mason jars. "Watch me jump off of this," he will wheeze as his final words before leaping from a colonnade to the cold marble below.

The main takeaway here seems to be the subject of inevitability, of the facing of one’s mortality. That’s why AI is the enemy here. The digital seems to stretch on for infinity, while Tom visibly sags beneath the weight of years. The final Mission Impossible movie is the story of an aging cinema god as he wages a metaphorical war, taking a defiant last stand against the undying digital demons that wait like lions in the tall grass for him to begin to slow, to show signs of weakness. Then they will strike, and drag him back into the howling cacophony of the streaming darkness to consume his essense and use his likeness for cheap advertising until the heat death of the universe. This film is all about a once luminous being raging against his own personal dying of the light, railing against the inevitability of his own mortal death, and even worse, the death of his relevance. Both of these fates are now clearly unavoidable to him, but I think it’s the latter that has his full ire here. The loss of relevance no longer promises to just replace him with a younger, stronger, and more beautiful model, not when paired with the possibility of AI and AI Avatars. Now, he will be replaced with a twisted funhouse digital mirror of not just of himself, but his daring, of his very art itself, some soulless and dead-eyed creature laughing like him, running like him, jumping like him, hanging off things like him, a caricature who will not only be younger, stronger, and more beautiful than he is, but will remain that way forever.

This film is about Tom Cruise as John Henry, showing the world that he still has it, that he—a living, breathing person—is better than any machine, and that what he does is better than anything that a machine can do.

Rage, Tommy, rage.

For in the end, the struggle is all we have, and in Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning, it’s clear that Tom Cruise is now well aware of this.