Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

By Joanna Langfield

Try as it might to divert us with storyline and verbiage as heavy as its assignment, this “final chapter?” completes its true mission with action scenes that are impossible not to love.

The band is back together again, as Ethan Hunt has been summoned to save the Earth from an AI nuclear threat, led by the super bad guy Gabriel (Esai Morales). If only the filmmakers had summarized the exposition this efficiently, that could have saved us all about an hour or so of flashbacks that amp the movie’s running time to a tush-numbing 2 hours and 49 minutes. Happily, once things get rolling, and the action scenes blast off, so does the fun. There are bruising group fights, a resurrection of airplane dog fights and fights to stay alive. And there’s an outstanding underwater scene that truly takes the franchise to terrific depths.

Not that this is particularly a series about plot, but props for making its female characters as strong as their male counterparts. And for kicking this one off with a politically shaded urgency that is vaguely worded, but will punch the gut of anyone paying attention. While the threat of artificial intelligence has been the subject of many films before, the timing for it here is pretty on the mark, too.

Oh. And there’s some acting going on as well. Cruise, the physical marvel, doesn’t short shrift the emotion behind why Ethan’s slamming away. And it’s as sentimentally rewarding to see Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, Angela Bassett, Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames return, as it is to hear Lalo Schifrin’s iconic theme song carry us along. Is it really surprising that Tramell Tillman and Shea Whigham work their supporting stuff into something much more memorable? No, because for them, nothing, it seems, is impossible.