Rating: B
Dir: Christopher McQuarrie
Star: Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Hayley Atwell, Esai Morales
And, so, it ends. Fortunately changing its title from the clunkier Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two, at 170 minutes long, it still almost feels as if it could have been split into two further movies. And perhaps continued like that forever, never quite finishing off the series. Can’t really blame them: after thirty years of choosing to accept missions, it’s got to be hard for Cruise to let go. Despite a couple of missteps, it’s a decent way to go out, with some nice homages to previous entries. In case you’d forgotten, Ethan Hunt was going up against the Entity, a rogue AI with ambitions of global domination, and turning the human race off and back on again.
To defeat it, requires a remarkably complex plan. Locate a sunken Russian sub, recover a software module on a drive from it, infect the code with malware, and lure the Entity into entering it. What could possibly go wrong? Well, since the film lasts almost three hours, you know the answer to that question. I will admit, there is likely a bit too much plot. The stuff in the government, featuring Ron Swanson as a nuke-happy general, doesn’t add much. On the action front, Hunt swimming around the sub is not as exciting as McQuarrie seems to think, particularly in the amount we get to see of it. And I have some questions about the miraculous acquisition of parachutes.
These could well sink lesser pictures. However, the good here is flat-out awesome, culminating in the biplane chase sequence, which feels like something Buster Keaton would have declined as too dangerous. [I can’t help wondering if it may potentially be a final hurrah for that kind of physical stuntwork, before CGI and AI replace it] However, a surprising amount of the emotional stuff works, anchored by Pegg as Benji, whose devotion to the cause is little less than Ethan’s. What works surprisingly well is a callback all the way to the first film, with the CIA tech whose vault Ethan broke into, returning in a key role. He is played by the same actor as in 1996, which I found just a fabulous nod to the franchise’s history.
I didn’t feel it was quite as successful as its predecessor, despite the latter not being able to have a proper finish. It feels a little Return of the King-like in its ending, lingering on significantly beyond what is necessary, as if the series was aware of its own imminent demise, and reluctant to go gentle into that good night. However, I’m prepared to give it the same slack as King, for similar reasons. I’ve been given a great deal of entertainment over the course of this, and the seven films which preceded it. Cruise, McQuarrie and everyone else involved have earned the right to go out on their own terms; if that’s a little self-indulgent, I am fine with it.