Saving the world often enough has a way of inflating any superstar’s ego. Early in “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” the bulky, sentimental, slightly pious but nonetheless satisfying capper to an eight-film franchise, the U.S. president (Angela Bassett, returning to the role) refers to espionage all-star Ethan Hunt as “the best of men,” and by inference the first man you call when you need someone to run an errand in a Tom Cruise hurry.
Later in the movie, another character sneers that Hunt is way past ordinary greatness; he’s now “the Chosen One.” Not just a world saver, but a world savior! By this point in the sanctification of our hero, “Final Reckoning” has made it relentlessly clear that only these two superstars — Cruise (real, and a proven industry savior thanks to the pandemic-era “Top Gun: Maverick”) and Hunt (fictional) — can prevent the “truth-eating digital parasite” and next-generation artificial intelligence troublemaker known as The Entity from destroying the world. Its mission, clearly accepted, is to redesign Earth according to its own controversial notions of progress and preferred sentient AI-to-human ratio.
The Entity emerged two summers ago in “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One,” with Hunt’s rogue Impossible Mission Force scrambling after the literal and metaphoric key to vanquishing its renovation plans. The AI source code, we learned from the earlier outing, lies at the bottom of the Bering Sea, stashed in a sunken Russian submarine. Much of the new picture concerns the retrieval of that plot device. In one of “Final Reckoning’s” most compelling sequences, finessed nicely for maximum intentional audience breath-holding, Hunt risks the bends and death itself to complete this piece of the mission, as he rolls around amid massive cylindrical nukes in the hulk of the sub rolling around and upside down on the ocean floor. A little “Inception,” a little “Poseidon Adventure.”
In league with its sniveling human colleague Gabriel (Esai Morales, cackling with evil intent as if being paid by the cackle), The Entity conducts a good deal of digital foreplay in the new movie, co-written and directed by “M:I” franchise veteran Christopher McQuarrie. This means the AI monster is hacking into the world’s nuclear defense systems and taking control of the missiles, one paralyzed and panicking nation at a time. Meanwhile Hunt’s team, back in reasonably good graces with the U.S. government despite Henry Czerny’s welcome, born-to-distrust return to the franchise as CIA director Kittridge, follows a travel itinerary spanning the U.K., the U.S., Norway (subbing for St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea off Alaska) and South Africa.
McQuarrie’s script, written with Eric Jendresen, manages to stretch a fairly simple, easily summarized plot into the longest of the eight “M:I” films. At 169 minutes, it’s about an hour longer than director Brian De Palma’s 1996 swank, cynical, quite beautiful diversion based on the hit TV series. The grandiosity and solemnity of the stakes in “Final Reckoning” test the very limits of what some of us want from an “M:I” movie. Maybe it’s a matter of real-world confidence in some of our leaders; watching a film about what might happen in a case of uncertain nuclear intentions, and wondering how your own leaders would handle it, well, it’s basically the opposite of escapism.
The dialogue scenes all have two or three too many reiterations of the mission’s importance per hour of running time. Elsewhere, “Final Reckoning” becomes a festival of callbacks and flashbacks to the entire series, with dozens of Easter eggs for the superfans, including the release date of the De Palma movie. Just in time, for my taste, the climax goes old-school for old times’ sake, per the producer and star’s wishes, featuring Gabriel’s biplane winging its way through narrow gorges while Cruise dangles off the wing, making sure we see that it’s him there, not a stunt double. In “Dead Reckoning” two years ago, the big wow was the motorcycle plummet and parachute routine, pretty amazing, and nicely compact in its duration and impact. The climax of “Final Reckoning” is likewise impressive and scenic, but also what you might call lengthy. Show-offy. Paced and edited less for the good of the overall movie and more for risk-verification purposes.
That said, this franchise has class. Always has. Plus, it has the virtue, taken as a 29-year entity, of having had a striking variety of directors at the helm. McQuarrie’s ideal in many ways, devoted to both traditional ’60s-derived “exotic” locations and spy games, and to star maintenance and ever-higher threat levels. Stalwart regulars from Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg to more recent series ringers Hayley Atwell and Pom Klementieff act as grounding points for this purported wrap-up, which may be more at home in the air or underwater but there it is.
And there’s this, a small thing in theory, but a huge bonus in practice. It’s not a spoiler, since he’s foregrounded, conspicuously, in the “Final Reckoning” trailer, but the movie boasts a real dinger of a callback: the very minor role of CIA analyst William Donloe. He’s the fellow who failed to notice Cruise hanging from wires in that vault in the bowels of Langley in the first film. Last we heard, 29 years ago, then-IMF head Kittridge promised to exile Donloe to a radar tower near the Arctic Circle.
He’s back, in a happily expanded role, and from my perspective, “Final Reckoning” exists primarily to allow the actor playing Donloe, Rolf Saxon, an opportunity most character actors never get in this lifetime. He’s not just there for nostalgia’s sake, but for real scenes, in which Saxon’s nearly forgotten minor player performs with an equally welcome series newbie, Inuk actor Lucy Tulugarjuk, who plays Donloe’s resourceful wife. In a franchise built on extremes, and the grandiosity that tends to come with a near-$400 million dollar production budget, Saxon’s own personal mission appears simply to have been: Play this material nice and easy, not like a callback or a punchline, but a relatable human being in unusual circumstances. He may not hang off a biplane, but the year’s unlikeliest franchise MVP makes “Final Reckoning” something better than superhuman: human.
“Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” — 3 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: PG-13 (for sequences of strong violence and action, bloody images, and brief language)
Running time: 2:49
How to watch: Premieres in theaters May 22
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
