Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, the presumed conclusion to Tom Cruise's stunt-packed series, trades the lighter touch evident in earlier episodes for a portentous self-seriousness that crushes the connective tissue arranged around the film's spectacular set-pieces. As with the previous Reckoning, Cruise's Ethan Hunt is attempting to drag and drop an all-powerful digital application into an almighty recycle bin before it can worm its way into the world's steaming nuclear arsenal. Indeed, the level of threat in director Christopher McQuarrie's sequel is so great, so all-encompassing, that it becomes ephemeral and abstract - a dark pall that hangs over a succession of anonymous, military-adjacent interiors. McQuarrie's film, already packed with winking excerpts from previous instalments, feels especially weak in its early passages where characters, very slowly, talk us through the sort of religious revelation now associated with Cruise's secret agent. This clip show (the sort of storytelling seen in 1990s television when overworked staff needed a mid-season breather) isn't just disappointing because it regurgitates extant material, it also fails to re-contextualise these inherited moments from the all-knowing perspective of Hunt himself. 

The character's overworked headspace - in which key moments are turned over and dissected - has been part of the series' visual language since the first episode, with that rookie agent embellishing the fragments of recall that remain in his head to make sense of the conspiracy unfolding around him. McQuarrie's second pass, Mission Impossible - Fallout, even played around with this character's vivid interior landscape: Hunt now able to imagine entire action sequences before they even play out. A zen-like advantage seemingly inherited for the sword masters of chanbara cinema. Unfortunately, Final Reckoning proposes nothing quite so potent when combing through previous victories. What this film does offer though is an exceptional, perhaps even series best, action sequence set in and around a sunken submarine. Cruise begins this claustrophobic, dialogue free delight by hand-cranking away the film's widescreen borders to make way for a towering, IMAX frame. Like Virgil Brigman before him, Hunt plunges down an icy trench then climbs into a rotted, rolling mausoleum. During the swim up, the throat-sung soundtrack suggests an undead leviathan being disturbed from its eternal slumber. Once inside this cramped, flooded beast the film's music is a cacophony of screeching and buckling metal as a stomach packed with unfastened ballistic missiles bump up against wincing, freezing bodies and rusted bulkheads. Every second of this expertly crafted sequence works to transform Hunt's already ludicrous objective from a scheme that really does seem impossible into one that feels genuinely insane.