Movie stars live in such bizarre, distorted realities that you almost can’t blame them for developing messiah complexes. Being the center of attention wherever you go can’t be healthy for anybody’s ego. This is why there’s always a phase in superstardom — usually right before a precipitous fall — when actors start gravitating toward humorlessly noble, godlike roles. It’s how an affable romantic lead like Kevin Costner ends up playing a post-apocalyptic savior in multiple flops, or why an underwear-model-turned-hamburger-salesman would think it’s a good idea to make a movie in which he solves the Boston Marathon bombing all by himself. (I still shudder whenever I remember that “Patriots Day” ends with the real David Ortiz thanking Mark Wahlberg’s imaginary policeman for his service to our city.) Fame makes people strange.
Tom Cruise — a man who has been so insanely famous for so long he has presumably not had a normal interaction with a regular person since the early 1980s — understands this better than most. It’s why he typically plays Nietzschean supermen whose extraordinary abilities become something of a punchline. In 2015’s “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation,” when Alec Baldwin’s blowhard intelligence official calls him “the living manifestation of destiny,” it’s like a sly nod to the audience that it’s okay for us to laugh and enjoy the absurdity of Cruise’s whole deal. I don’t find his messianic tendencies nearly as annoying as Will Smith’s or Mark Wahlberg’s, probably because a part of me believes Tom Cruise really could save the world.
Or at least the movies. Cruise’s endlessly endearing, one-man crusade to get butts back in movie theater seats in spite of executives trying to sell the industry out to streaming was the none-too-subtle subtext of 2023’s delightful “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning.” Analog Tom and his scrappy band of rogue agents had to use sleight-of-hand magic and old-school practical stuntwork to defeat The Entity, an evil AI algorithm trying to enslave the world. (Cruise was basically fighting Netflix.) Luckily for all of us, the best way to battle the most powerful supercomputer ever created is by driving your motorcycle off a cliff and parachuting onto a speeding train. I enjoyed that silly movie very much.
The pesky algorithm is still at it in “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” a far more solemn and inelegant affair that attempts to tie together 29 years of Cruise’s “M:I” adventures in a last hurrah for his agent Ethan Hunt. The film begins with the first of far too many montages reminding us of Ethan’s heroics throughout the previous seven pictures, while President Angela Bassett calls him “the best of us” and begs him to return to the United States with the gold cruciform key he stole at the end of the last movie. That little key is the only way to defeat The Entity, which we are told has now corrupted the entirety of cyberspace with dangerous misinformation and reduced the world to chaos.
When we last saw Ethan in “Dead Reckoning,” it was clear that he and his fugitive buddies were going to need that key to unlock something on a submarine that we watched sink somewhere in the Arctic at the beginning of the picture. Bafflingly, “The Final Reckoning” takes half of its nearly three-hour running time to send them on this mission. The first 90 minutes are a blizzard of endless exposition and narrative busywork, frantically cutting back and forth between characters having the plot explained to them and them explaining the plot to other characters, often at the same time. (I’m pretty sure we see people repeating information they haven’t been told yet.) The whole first half is a shambles, punctuated by some uninspired gunplay and a lot of Cruise’s trademark piston-pump running, except this time he doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere.
The movie is top-heavy, wobbling under its own doomsday stakes. There’s no room for anything as playful as the piano almost falling on Ethan’s head in “Dead Reckoning,” and there’s only one of those goofy mask gags I love so much. The gist this time is that The Entity has poisoned all of our screens with misleading information designed to make us hate each other, sending nations to war over phony intel until there’s a remake of the 1964 film “Fail Safe” brewing in President Angela Bassett’s bunker. “You spend too much time on the internet,” Cruise quips while beating the tar out of an attempted assassin, and the movie is adorably earnest in its insistence that we the people need to start trusting and listening to each other again if we want to avert a digital apocalypse.
But “The Final Reckoning” gets tangled in knots trying to pull together threads from the earlier movies, which were originally designed as one-offs and weren’t treated as a continuing saga until 2018’s “Fallout,” which similarly doubled down on Ethan’s personal sacrifices with a self-seriousness ill-fitting for films this fundamentally silly. There are more tiresome callbacks to 2006’s dreadful “Mission: Impossible III” — the lowest grossing film of the franchise that famously got Cruise fired from the Paramount lot. (I feel like he keeps referencing it out of spite.) An attempt to tie Shea Whigham’s seething Javert from “Dead Reckoning” in with the first picture made me laugh out loud, but not in the way these pictures usually do. It’s so exhaustive, you half expect one of the doves from director John Woo’s 2000 sequel to fly through for a cameo. Pop culture’s current obsession with serialization and continuity is lame. It makes movies feel like television.
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(Before everyone reminds me that these films are spun off from a 1960s TV program, I would argue that Brian De Palma’s first — and still the best — “Mission: Impossible” movie was a cruel rebuke to the kind of fan service this series now celebrates. The 1996 film revealed the show’s hero Jim Phelps to be a turncoat who brutally murdered his entire team, which is kind of like if the first “Star Trek” movie had started with Captain Kirk killing everyone on the Enterprise.)
The one subject of conversation is how amazing Ethan is and how he’s the only person who can save the world. An unseemly amount of the dialogue in “The Final Reckoning” is like Baldwin’s “living manifestation of destiny” speech, except not played for laughs. There are films about the life of Christ that spend less time proclaiming the divinity of their protagonist. (The movie ends with a recording of a character who has been dead for two hours, still going on about Ethan.) He’s such a holy man that this is the fourth “Mission: Impossible” movie in a row in which our Action Movie Jesus has not had sex, nor even a love interest. As with his oddly unconsummated relationship with Rebecca Ferguson in the previous three pictures, there are several scenes in which Cruise and co-star Hayley Atwell seem like they’re about to kiss, but instead just nuzzle their foreheads together like baby koalas. It’s weird.
Yet, just like in the movies, right when all seems lost, Cruise miraculously comes through. After Ethan finally finds his way onto that damn submarine, “The Final Reckoning” rights itself with one of the most spectacular sustained suspense sequences in the entire franchise. Spelunking into the wrecked sub on an unstable ocean floor at crushing depths, this talky, overly-busy film shuts up and slows down for a stunning, wordless setpiece that plays out like if Stanley Kubrick had directed “The Abyss.” (I can’t wait to see it in IMAX.) The eerie vastness of the underwater imagery recalls “2001: A Space Odyssey,” as does the sequence’s wildly expressionistic climax that goes for broke and turns Tom Cruise into the Star Child.
And in that moment, I believed he really could save the world. After all, he’d just saved this movie.
“Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” is now in theaters.