Last Action Hero
Paramount Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)
This is going to date me, but Tom Cruise’s first stab at “Mission: Impossible” in 1996 was also my first review assignment for my college campus newspaper. Even though my editor went at it with a heavy hand, the result was still fairly amateurish. Thankfully, my most embarrassing writings were at the infancy of the internet and left no digital trace. In 2011, I critiqued the fourth entry in the series, “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” on this very site when it was still somewhat thriving. And here I am again, checking out the eighth installment at its Cannes Film Festival premiere and sashaying down the same red carpet as the cast and crew. But enough about me.
I am bringing all this up because Late Cruise has been mostly trafficking in nostalgia. Hollywood’s last movie star reminds us all of the good ol’ days when marquee names could make or break the box office, the days before Netflix and venture capitalists spoiled everything. “Top Gun: Maverick” was the template. Sure, it had “it” boys like Glen Powell, but the most memorable moment for boomers and Gen-X had to be Mr. Cruise’s reunion with an ailing Val Kilmer. “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” sort of does the same thing. It gathers the likes of Henry Czerny and Rolf Saxon from way, way back. There are even montages of earlier films peppered throughout.
Up until “Ghost Protocol,” the series employed “it” action filmmakers like John Woo and J. J. Abrams. But since then, the reins of the series have remained in the hands of Christopher McQuarrie, Late Cruise’s trusted go-to collaborator. Aside from “The Usual Suspects,” Mr. McQuarrie’s name has been inextricably linked to Mr. Cruise’s. Indeed, loyalty emerges as a recurring theme with Late Cruise both in front of and behind the camera. It’s just that every returning cast member is showing their age except for him.
The plot of “The Final Reckoning” is basically a whole lot of baloney, something that Verbal Kint might have thought up during an interrogation. There’s this thing called The Entity, which is basically HAL 9000 meets The Matrix. It deploys deepfakes to create mistrust and incite chaos around the world. Sound familiar? Its goal is to eliminate humanity by compromising various countries’ arsenals of nuclear weapons.
Ethan Hunt (Mr. Cruise) holds the key to Padkova, which contains The Entity’s source code and is embedded deep inside the wreckage of a Russian submarine. His bestie, Luther (Ving Rhames), has formulated an antidote to be attached to Padkova. But Gabriel (Esai Morales) from “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” comes into possession of the antidote with designs on world domination. Meanwhile, Ethan’s ragtag crew must find the coordinates of the Russian sub’s wreckage and then head to a South African data center to capture The Entity.
It’s fine that the plot is nonsense, because the main attractions of these films are ultimately the daredevil stunts Mr. Cruise performs. Case in point: the trailer of “The Final Reckoning” is rife with spoilers. In this one, he dangles from a pilotless biplane midair while attempting to hop onto Gabriel’s biplane. Who is operating Ethan’s plane? How does Ethan survive the landing when his parachute catches on fire? Like, does it really matter? The supporting actors are mostly stiff, delivering lines with less conviction than someone reading off a teleprompter. Inexplicably they all run into each other at the same time outside the Leicester Square Underground station after saving the world from apocalypse with only seconds left. That’s movie magic for ya.
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