I was disappointed with this movie for two reasons, one general and one personal:
- The ending didn’t feel final, after so much buildup.
- There was entirely too much water.
To elaborate on the lack of emotional finality: Some reviews say the ending was a gracious and moving send-off that tidily wraps up the whole movie series with meaningful callbacks and clever retconning. That is, of course, what they are supposed to say, so even if such assertions are sincere, they sound hollow. It’s an expensive movie, made by experienced people; naturally, we are expected to like and approve of it. But other reviews agree with my view: whatever the moviemakers may have been trying to do, it didn’t work as well as one might have hoped.
To elaborate on the excess of water: Classic case of “Well done, thanks, I hate it.” I personally hate underwater scenes. Hate hate hate them. They make me disproportionately anxious. I do not find them fun and entertaining, unlike other forms of danger (e.g., precipitous heights, car chases). I enjoy action movies in general, and action movies are exciting because the fictional hero (and in the case of Tom Cruise and Jackie Chan, to an unprecedented extent, the actor playing the fictional hero) is placed in life-threatening danger. But I hate water scenes. And this movie had one that went on for… I dunno, 20 minutes? I Googled and couldn’t immediately find the duration online, but one article said there was a single take in the movie that was 4 minutes long, so I don’t feel like 20 minutes is an unreasonable guess!
More thoughts on Final Reckoning below, including plot spoilers.
Too much water
I think I first noticed my intense dislike of water danger in 1999, when watching the James Bond movie The World Is Not Enough, whose climactic sequence takes place on board a damaged and leaking submerged submarine. Strangely, I had the same kind of unpleasant feeling not long after, when watching one of the scenes in Fantasia 2000, a collection of Disney animations set to classical music pieces. In the second segment, “Pines of Rome,” a whale gets lost inside a maze inside an iceberg, and seems (though only briefly) to be trapped underwater. Whales are mammals, they don’t have gills, they need to breathe air! Yeah, okay, I know that whales can stay underwater a long time, but this whale—a baby, not a death-defying adult secret agent—was trapped under the ice! Afterwards, I completely forgot that this segment of Fantasia was about flying whales, which is actually a pretty cool concept, and beautifully executed; years later, all I remembered was that a little whale nearly suffocated. Fear is a powerful thing.
I’ve watched countless action movies with water scenes in the last 25 years; but if the water scene goes on too long, I close my eyes and just listen until the water sounds and dramatic music stop and the story moves on. There’s a water scene that I didn’t watch near the end of Blade Runner 2049 (2017), for example. All I really needed to know was who survives the fight—but that’s easy enough to guess at the beginning of the fight, and in any case, easy enough to ascertain afterwards. However, in the case of Final Reckoning, it’s possible that keeping my eyes closed for most of the submarine sequence took me out of the story so much that I wasn’t able to care much about whatever was left of it. I resented being made to endure that scene. (YMMV.)
Not enough laughs
More than one review complained the movie was “self-serious”. I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. Is that how we say “pretentious” now? Could we not just say “self-important”? Another review said it was “portentous”, which might or might not be the word the reviewer intended to be spelling, I’m honestly not sure. I don’t have a problem with the high stakes, or the abstractness of the stakes; the destruction of truth is a timely theme, after all, and it’s not like this was an action movie with no action.
I do think the movie could have done with a bit more comic relief, though, which is probably part of what the negative reviews are complaining about, even if they don’t say it in so may words. The truth is, Dead Reckoning was a fun movie to watch, and Final Reckoning wasn’t. There was some comic relief, but not a lot. The motorcycle/car chase sequence in Dead Reckoning was utterly hilarious, before during and after; there was a bit of a car chase in Final Reckoning, but it didn’t go on very long, and it wasn’t funny at all.
More plot than character
Another big complaint I have is that multiple members of the ensemble cast didn’t have much to do.
In particular, all Grace does is unplug a glorified USB drive. Oh, and bring the drowned/frozen Ethan back to life inside the decompression chamber by sheer force of needlessly sexualized grief. Yay. Whereas, in my clearly very inaccurate view of the future of the franchise, she’s the next Ethan: she has a different set of personal characteristics and skills, but she’s younger, and has a similar history and at least some grasp of the relevant ethical principles. Do we get to see her develop into a more responsible role in Final Reckoning? Nope. She and Ethan get abducted, and he saves her. Then she tags along until the decompression chamber, and tags along some more until it’s time for her to unplug the glorified USB drive. True, she accomplishes some useful and impressive pickpocketing before she and Ethan get abducted, but you see, that’s just to set her up to snatch that USB drive later. In other words, what she does is determined by the plot, not by who her character is; the plot just slots her in as the pickpocketer. I expect these action movies to have a bit more heart.
Meanwhile, Paris, formerly quite a formidable opponent of Ethan, also seems to be merely along for the ride. They rescue her from jail because they need her to help find Gabriel. Except they don’t really need her, because Gabriel finds Ethan. So Paris just tags along because she wants to kill Gabriel. But she never gets the chance! Gabriel dies in the biplane fight before she has a chance to shoot him or whatever. His death is horribly graphic and also unfair to Paris. The plot arranges for her to tag along so that she can do emergency surgery to keep Benji alive long enough to do the computer stuff that is necessary to defeat the evil AI. (I don’t like and often don’t watch surgery-type shots in movies and TV, so… I closed my eye in that scene too. Again, resentfully. Call me crazy, but I go to the movies to watch a movie. It would be nice if I could actually stomach watching it.)
The most useless person in the group is the black guy who joins up with Ethan, Benji, and Paris at the beginning of the movie when Ethan and Benji wear masks and rescue Paris from jail. Apparently the character’s name is Theo Degas, but I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that without looking it up. Anyway, he’s the IMF agent who suggested to the IMF guy who was trying to catch Ethan in Dead Reckoning that maybe Ethan always had a good reason for breaking the rules. But I don’t think he says anything as meaningful as that in Final Reckoning, and I can’t recall that he does anything meaningful, either. He’s just… there. He didn’t even die a redshirt death to show how dangerous Ethan’s team’s situation was. If he’s supposed to be part of the next generation IMF dream team, then he should have had something important to do.
Nope, the important stuff is mostly Ethan, then Luther (who dies after creating the MacGuffin and saying goodbye to Ethan), and then Benji. Ah yes, Benji. Benji definitely should have died. This, too, seemed foreshadowed in Dead Reckoning. Also, Ethan made him team leader, which is too much for the guy; he’s a geeky support guy, not a team leader. He should have done his best, succeeded, and died. Instead, what happened was that he got shot and seemed to have died, but… magically still appeared in the final scene. I was so confused by that, I thought maybe it was someone else wearing a mask and not actually Benji, and we’d find out in a mid- or post-credits scene. Nope.
Fake finality
That disappointing ending leaves us with almost the entire old team (Ethan and Benji but not Luther), plus more than enough new members to make up for Luther: Grace, Paris, and Theo Degas (the young black guy). Also, it leaves us with the AI in the hands of Ethan. Grace has insinuated that he should use it, not destroy it. So now the stage is set for Ethan to refuse and Grace to pickpocket it back from him and use it in spite of him, or for Ethan to be corrupted by the idea of absolute power because of Grace’s suggestion. I can’t imagine the franchise would ever make Ethan evil, even if it should, and I don’t really think it would make Grace evil either. It’s just that logically, given the dialog in this movie, that’s where the plot should go. If they don’t want it to go there, they should have ended this movie with Ethan actually destroying the USB. Possibly in the manner of the destruction of the ring in Lord of the Rings: maybe Ethan does get seduced by the power, but someone else tries to snatch it (for good or likely for bad reasons), and destroys it and him/herself at the same time, saving Ethan from a big mistake.
But yeah, the actual end of the movie, with all the still-living IMF characters looking at each other between gaps in the crowd in a public place (Trafalgar Square, London) and then separating, with Ethan getting the USB, is so meaningless. Like, who wants to have an emotional goodbye in a noisy public place? The ending could have been a secret, small, serene funeral for Luther; the team gets on a boat and spreads his ashes in the Mediterranean during a beautiful sunset, or something! Speaking of beauty, there wasn’t a lot of pretty scenery in the movie. As one review I read pointed out, the characters were indoors, underground, or underwater an awful lot. They were in different countries, but there wasn’t a sense of “Aha, yes, we are watching a sophisticated, exotic, international spy movie” the way there was in Dead Reckoning. There were shots of a statue that I thought was Napoleon, so I thought maybe there was a lesson about overreaching one’s ambition. But the Wikipedia page for Trafalgar Square indicates that it’s actually a statue of Horatio Nelson, who died fighting the French and Spanish. (Yet another sign that Ethan’s hypothetical “last battle” should have cost him his life.)
Final Reckoning is an apt title if the stakes are the nuclear annihilation of the human race. But we’ve also been led to believe that this is the last Mission Impossible movie, and is final in that sense too. I don’t believe that anymore, and I’m angry about being misled. The movie summarizes Ethan’s career, foreshadows his death (it opens with a shot of a coffin-like box, for Pete’s sake), and sets him up as the savior of the world. He saves the world. But then he doesn’t die!?! That’s just… not how you tell these stories. It’s as if McQuarie, or whoever was in charge of the storyline, never read J.R.R. Tolkien *or* C.S. Lewis when he was a kid. Realistically speaking, Ethan would have been suffocated, drowned, frozen, and killed by the bends ten times over. That’s not what I’m complaining about. It would have been better for him to survive all that and be killed by a human. Because that is how you tell a story.
Oh well.
