Knock on Wood

Robert Burns wrote that “the best-laid schemes of mice and men go oft awry,” and over the past 240 years, that famous phrase has found meaning in every conceivable walk of life. In the age of motion pictures, and especially in the domination of franchise filmmaking and content over-saturation, things rarely go according to plan, especially when a global pandemic and numerous union strikes affect a whole slew of industries in less than three years.

The Mission: Impossible franchise, one of Hollywood’s longest-running and most reliable film series, was due to shoot its two “final” installments back-to-back before the world shut down, and now the time is finally upon us. The eighth film, The Final Reckoning, is finally here, and with the budget sky-high and the quality bar set ridiculously high by the past four films, it faces odds that some might deem…impossible.

But not if Tom Cruise and frequent collaborator Christopher McQuarrie have anything to say about it. Cruise, arguably the highest-profile movie star of his generation, returns to the role of Ethan Hunt, a secret agent who once again assembles a team to go up against a rogue artificial intelligence called the Entity that seeks to control the world’s nuclear weapons. It feels both urgent and timeless – this is not the first time that Ethan’s team has faced nuclear annihilation, but these are unequivocally the highest stakes of the franchise so far. This mission feels appropriately impossible.

The Final Reckoning continues the franchise tradition of making Cruise’s movie star complex a crucial part of the series, constantly highlighting Ethan’s unflinchingly righteous nature and his unwillingness to sacrifice any member of his team, all while maintaining the safety of the world. It’s a fascinating trend, but it fits in nicely with the track laid by all seven previous installments. We have seen Ethan Hunt be a Bond-style ladies’ man, a cocky action hero, a devoted husband, a roguish bad boy, and everything in between. This franchise has covered all the bases in the past 30 years, and Cruise has been at its center the entire time, simultaneously honing both his own movie star persona and the core tenets of Ethan Hunt’s character.

That ties back to one of the central aspects of The Final Reckoning – forced reflection. The film’s first hour is a patronizing, exposition-heavy mess, which constantly slips in references to, and even footage from, the previous seven movies as part of an overwrought attempt to inorganically connect innocuous elements from those films to this one. It’s by far the most frustrating part of the movie, but it’s what the marketing promised: a reason for everything that has come before. In a film that runs nearly three hours, there is simply no reason to compel these callbacks, but if this truly is the “final” reckoning, it’s as good a time as any to include as much reflection as possible.

After that, though, the film kicks into high gear, delivering some of the best action set pieces of the entire franchise. Mission: Impossible is international by nature and adrenaline-fueled by design, and The Final Reckoning does not disappoint. We find ourselves in England, Austria, South Africa, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and everywhere in between, all while Ethan Hunt and his merry band of misfit agents fight not just for their own lives, but for the survival of the human race. These films live or die by their action, and the two standout sequences in Final Reckoning, both shot practically, are breathtaking and wildly tense, proving not only that the 62-year-old Cruise still has it in him to flawlessly pull off death-defying stunts, but that the Mission franchise has not yet lost its edge. It knows how to pull off these sequences in a way that is both beautiful and terrifying, and befits its reputation.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is both an exercise in patience and an extraordinarily cathartic release. We’ve been waiting for years to see how Ethan Hunt’s story ends, and although this new entry is oddly unemotional and less dependent on humor, it’s still Mission through and through. There’s nothing else quite like it. It’s hammy and silly in its contrivances, but that’s part of its charm. The Final Reckoning is a triumph, and though I doubt it will be the last we see of Ethan Hunt, it’s a victorious curtain call nonetheless.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is playing in theaters nationwide.