Mission: Impossible’s overblown ‘Final Reckoning’ still thrills

Pop culture has long had a tendency toward bloat. The catchy two-minute singles of the 1950s gave way to the laborious concept albums of the ’60s. The slim, mind-blowing novels of Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard led to the doorstops of Stephen King and Neal Stephenson.

And then there’s Mission Impossible, which began in 1966 as a tautly unpretentious hour-long TV series with a fantastic theme by Lalo Schifrin. In 1996, it became a 110-minute movie with a megastar actor, Tom Cruise, and an auteur director, Brian De Palma who larded its silly story with big, gaudy action scenes.

Now, seven sequels and three decades later we have Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, the two hour and 49 minute conclusion to the nearly as long Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, pictures so grandiose they require a colon and an em-dash just to write their titles. Predictably, this new movie is overblown, inanely plotted, clotted with expository dialogue and boundlessly self-congratulatory.

But, you know, it’s also fun to watch. Flaunting its big budget — we zoot from tourist London to Norwegian snowscapes to sun-blasted South Africa — this souped-up thriller offers the irresponsible escape that most of us want from Hollywood blockbusters.

As the action begins, the world is being threatened by The Entity, a nasty piece of AI that’s going to annihilate humanity in four days’ time. Naturally, our hero Ethan Hunt (played by Cruise) wants to stop both The Entity and the velvety villain Gabriel (Esai Morales), who seeks to control it.

Ethan enlists his Impossible Mission team. There’s tech whiz Luther (Ving Rhames); Simon Pegg‘s jokey field agent Benji, and the recent addition Grace, a one-time thief played by Hayley Atwell who joins the stream of talented B-list actresses that Cruise seems comfortable with. The story is mainly racing around — toward a gizmo hidden in a submarine, away from the CIA, which foolishly wants to stop Ethan.

Because this is purportedly the last installment — unless it makes a fortune, of course — The Final Reckoning works hard to make the whole series cohere and give it emotional heft. We see flashbacks to stunts from earlier movies — Cruise looks so young! — and call-backs to the deaths of characters who’ve been lost along the way. Yet because Mission: Impossible storylines have always been unabashedly hairbrained, such stabs at depth ring hollow. This isn’t like the second season of Andor, in which we feel the weight of characters dying because they’re sacrificing themselves for a cause.

Nor does the Mission: Impossible series possess any perceptible cultural resonance. James Bond was an icon of both the British Empire and a certain dated brand of masculinity. He helped shape our culture. Not so Ethan. Although Bond had no real inner life (sorry Daniel Craig), compared to Ethan, he’s positively Dostoevskyan. We at least knew 007’s snobberies, cruelties and pleasures: gambling in Monaco, drinking martinis shaken not stirred, sleeping with women then killing them.

What Cruise — and therefore Ethan — lives for is eye-popping stunts. And it’s been so since the first Mission: Impossible had him clinging to the outside of a high-speed train roaring through the Chunnel from England to France. The Final Reckoning boasts two gigantic action sequences — an underwater bit that could’ve been spectacular were Christopher McQuarrie a better director, and a genuinely bravura climax that finds Cruise holding on to the wing of a biplane as it buzzes through and above the Blyde River Canyon in South Africa. It’s this scene that everyone will remember. And of course, they’ll talk about Cruise doing this stunt himself.

Cruise has been on top for over 40 years, as long as John Wayne, longer than Cary Grant. He’s not a great actor, but he is a terrific movie star. Though starting to look his age at 62, he still possesses the boyish energy and commitment of his younger self. Whether sprinting past Big Ben, diving into icy waters without a wetsuit, or simply letting the movie idolize him, Cruise is playing hero ball, and you know what? He’s really good at it.