Bless This Mess

The final Mission: Impossible doesn’t hold up to the franchise—but it’s still fun.

- BILGE EBIRI

PERHAPS THE GREATEST sin that Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning commits is buying into its own self-importance. For years, the Mission: Impossible movies stood as a bulwark against the world-building extravagance of Hollywood’s franchise craze. Every installment was a new task, a new heist, a new series of outrageous stunts with minimal crossovers from one picture to the next. This not only let the films stand on their own; it allowed them the grace to be ridiculous. We didn’t take their plots too seriously, which paradoxically involved us even more in what was happening; we could focus on the action without grand ideas or ornate mythology distracting us. And it was usually exhilarating.

The strains of grandiosity had already crept into the previous installment, Dead Reckoning, but that movie had great fun putting its insane set pieces in motion. Christopher McQuarrie, who has directed the last four entries and deserves credit for crystallizing the elements that now distinguish this series, is an expert engineer of anticipation and misdirection. He knows how to toy with us. So it’s dispiriting to find so much of this new film suffering from Solemnity Overload, as The Final Reckoning’s first hour drowns us in endless litanies about the many achievements and transgressions of Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), conveyed through montages and ladlefuls of grim voice-over. (“Every personal sacrifice you made has brought this world another sunrise,” “You were always the best of men in the worst of times,” etc.) It's enough to make us worry the whole movie will turn out to bea glorified series of clip packages held together by different voices eulogizing Hunt's sense of destiny, which of course is also Cruise’s own sense of destiny.