(courtesy IMP Awards)
If you have seen more than you fair share of blockbusters, and the odds are if you’re a dedicated popcorn-chomping moviegoer that you have, you will be well acquainted with their propensity to go BIG, go epic and go bonkers bananas with barely a moment of hesitation.
These bigger than Ben Hur, or should that be Jaws, which is generally regarded as one of the first of the blockbusters, films revel in their narrative inclination to push the boundaries, tear open previously pushed envelopes and to strain credibility to the point where it’s not just breaking but torn to barely recognisable smithereens.
The thing is, done right, this kind of bombastic cinematic entertainment can be hugely entertaining, diverting us, as escapist movies should, away from the troubles and travails of our day-to-day worlds; but fumble the ball a little, and yes, even in something as big as a blockbuster that can be noticed, and the spell of credibility suspension is broken and you realise you’ve just glimpsed the very fallible wizard behind the throne.
For the most part, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning aka Mission: Impossible 8, purported to be last in the series ( we will, of course, believe that when we see it; studio bottomlines have a habit of resuscitating even the most narratively empathetic of franchises) keeps the spell well and truly intact.
It may take a while to get going, and honestly it would likely have benefited from tighter editing to trim its sometimes unwieldy 170-minute runtime, but for the most part, it goes big and it goes hard, more than justifying its designation as a big budget action blockbuster.
It is, of course, the sequel to and continuation of the story in 2023’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One which saw IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team including longstanding members (which is saying something – join Ethan and you’re often dead before you know it), Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), and now lover, once thief Grace (Hayley Attwell) finish up with the key which could, in theory, end the spreading reign of a runaway AI known as Entity.
That is though after lots of hair-raising stunts including parachuting off motorbikes and a fight in a train threatening to tumble into a chasm of mythic proportions, and if you are someone who loves your stunts supersized and scarcely believable, then you will love Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning which spends a great deal of its time keeping the bat sh*t crazy vibe of the previous films well and truly percolating energetically away.
Some of these stunts are brilliantly entertaining such as the biplane chase over some fiercely challenging South African landscape which sees Ethan and the Big Bad of the piece, Gabriel (Esai Morales) who sneers with pleasingly arrogant debonair chutzpah, duelling to gain ownership of the pieces which will, eventually, and thankfully at this point not too eventually since the mammoth runtime is relatively near its end at this point, seal Entity’s fate and save the world from a fairly final irradiated end.
But that fun piece of blockbuster bombastic actioning follows what is frankly one of the silliest sequences this reviewer has ever seen in films of this kind which, need we remind you, have a license to go full bore on the bananas bonkers stuff.
Ethan has to journey quite a few hundred feet down – yes, apparently the many decades-old metric system has yet to reach the US military or diving community – with scuba apparatus which will allow him to breathe at depths previously unheard of, enabling him to navigate through a downed Russian sub in which the source code, which can kill Entity, is enshrined.
That in itself stretches credibility to breaking point – POP! No, not that’s not Ethan’s lungs or blood veins but any sense of rationality, scant as it was, that the franchise still possessed – but then Ethan ends up out of his wetsuit in astonishingly cold water that should kill you in seconds, somehow defying frigidity, crushing pressures and relying only on what’s left of his scuba system which frankly isn’t much.
While much of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is sufficiently epically fun to help you embrace suspension of belief and happily go along with it, this sequence, which goes on far too long and has all the tension of paint drying in a CIA complex, absolutely busts it wide open.
It’s laughably silly, and though it’s presented as gripping, edge-of-your-seat stuff, and sort of is in a way, it takes you out of the rush by Ethan and the team, which expands to include an Easter egg character from the first film, and a former assassin, played by Pom Klementieff, who is now an ally, to stop the world ending at Entity’s humanity-erasing hand (the AI construct is aided by human members of a doomsday cult who think we should all die because yes, some people, are THAT stupid).
It’s so silly, in fact, that the usual happy ending – not a spoiler; if you think a Mission: Impossible movie won’t end with a triumphant end, two-parter cliffhangers aside naturally, then you haven’t seen Ethan run like a maniac which he does not once but twice, cliches be gloriously celebrated! – feels a little underwhelming.
While Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One actually made you feel something, and god knows Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning with many a moody glance, and a prolonged to the point of satire, ruminative moment, does it best to do so too, the film feel like it’s tried too hard and has replaced the genuine emotion of the first instalment in the two-parter, with something ersatz and half done.
At the end of the day, one free of bombs falling everywhere hurrah, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is a genuinely fun slice of over the top blockbuster fun and saying goodbye (you know, if that’s what the accountants allow to happen) is bittersweet indeed, but it’s wrecked a little by the final film trying so hard to mean SOMETHING, that it ends up gutting itself more than a little and leaving you feeling, energised by the action though you might be, like it’s all a little hollow and more whimper than the customary bang you might expect.