Clearly, we are screwed. “The end you always feared is coming,” a doomy voice intones, amid references to AI and nuclear stockpiles. “The world is changing. Truth is vanishing.” War is next, we are assured. Welcome to Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. What sort of escapist night out is this, you may well ask?
And yet, in the next moment, your big screen will fill with the leviathan face of Tom Cruise. Technically, yes, it is rogue secret agent Ethan Hunt. But come on. We all know who that earnest squint really belongs to, under the hair luxuriant enough to get a mention in the script. And breathe.
As per the title, the movie is billed as the very last hurrah for Cruise as Hunt, after three decades of acrobatic do-gooding. It is also the second half of a two-part grand finale. (Opener Dead Reckoning Part One came out in 2023.) No small refresher course is needed to get the plot back up and running. Hack through the thickets of exposition, and the story comes down to a world-ending threat from that aforementioned AI.
Avoiding spoilers, the rest may involve a long-lost Russian submarine, that might in turn host one of the deranged action scenes that have become a hallmark of the franchise, performed by Cruise without stunt doubles. Another could feature biplanes and high altitude daredevilry. Who can say?
We shouldn’t be blasé. Cruise risking his own neck is only one reason the series has become a gold standard for modern action movies. Long-term director Christopher McQuarrie also renders them models of blockbuster choreography, working in tandem at vast and close-up scale.
It does also feel like the most playful ideas were all used up in the first half of this long goodbye, whose flights of fancy included a tiny, custard-yellow Fiat causing absurdist mayhem in Rome. (It also helped that back then, that Hunt hadn’t yet actually worked out what was going on, eliminating the need to verbally bullet point.)
This time round, everything is simply less fun. Callbacks to Missions past hint at elegy. But another clue to the uptight mood might be the reported $400mn budget: the kind of money that makes anyone tense. The last thing the movie needs is more explanation, but it might account for a story that feels simultaneously worried-over and oddly slapdash. (As far as I can tell, the whole thing ends up hinged on a plot device cribbed from Superman II.)
Still, there is real wit to a scene of Ethan setting about goons with knives and hammers. Played out entirely through the wincing expressions of co-star Hayley Atwell, it makes a self-aware riff on Cruise’s image as the kind of action man who may leave behind a pile of bodies, but is rarely seen with blood on his hands.
The sequence is also one of several to feature him shirtless, 62-year-old pectorals bared for the camera. How much self-awareness is involved in that? Again, who knows.
You might ask yourself the same question in the many scenes where characters remark to each other, or sometimes Cruise directly, that he — sorry, Ethan — is the only man who can save them, and the Earth. Frankly, the effect is North Korean. The messianic bit gets tiring. Off-screen, you wonder what it must have been like for Cruise to be thanked by Steven Spielberg — among many others — for personally rescuing Hollywood with the post-Covid triumph of Top Gun: Maverick.
Truth be told, though, the last Mission: Impossible was a box office squib by comparison. (Though I gave it five stars, which I’m sure was ample compensation to the producers.) Now, two years later, a plot centred on the threat of AI feels less prescient than self-evident. That also doesn’t make the movie more fun.
And yet the way Cruise and McQuarrie approach the future feels weirdly old world. The tone recalls the 1990s moment when Hollywood first fretted about online life in movies such as The Net and Hackers. (The word “cyberspace” can’t have been used so much this side of the millennium.) Cruise’s very first outing as Ethan Hunt dates back to 1996, but amid the knowing nods to the origin of the series, you sense a still deeper nostalgia. Beyond the floppy disks and VHS tapes, references to a world free of “nations or ideologies” would gladden Francis Fukuyama, the political scientist who famously declared the ’90s “the end of history”.
Of course, it was also an era when a driven young movie star could revive a dusty old TV show as a long-term big screen project, in a medium with an unquestioned place at the centre of culture. It was indeed a nice time to be alive. Now, we can only bid farewell to Ethan Hunt — and wonder what AI will make of this $400mn slab of training content.
In cinemas in the UK from May 21 and in the US from May 23