Mission: Impossible - The Franchise Reckoning

the end of your franchise, should you choose to accept it

There’s an argument that has been made time and time again that Tom Cruise is the last great movie star. I’m not convinced he’s necessarily the last one, but there’s a decent case to be made that he’s the last truly great one. Everyone and their mother and their grandmother knows him. He is the ultimate living A-list actor. We won’t all agree on his role in the Church of Scientology or his treatment of Nicole Kidman (which led to those iconic post-divorce-paper-signing photos), but we can pretty much agree that he makes some damn good movies and that he clearly loves doing so. For better or for worse, he’s a mad man.

Cruise has devoted the last three decades of his life to the Mission: Impossible franchise, a career choice some would consider to be a waste of time (like people often do with James Cameron and his loyalty to Avatar), but it’s clear that these movies are bigger than Tom Cruise, even to someone with an ego as insanely big as Tom Cruise. His image clearly means something to him, but the quality and effort he injects into these films makes it evident that Ethan Hunt, wild stunts, and getting people to the movies means even more.

So, how does he come to terms with saying goodbye to the franchise he’s spent half of his life running? If it goes out an dud, where does he go from here, and if it “goes out” on a high note, does he just keep going? Who is Tom Cruise without Mission: Impossible, and is his hyperawareness of his own mortality as both a man and a movie star to blame or to thank? This is the franchise reckoning — your mission, should you choose to accept it.

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The doomsdaying about this film began when the unenthusiastic social media reviews dropped. I’ll admit that negative initial reviews are never a good sign, but I think people went into this film already with a movie in mind and were inevitably disappointed when they didn’t get it. This doesn’t follow the typical Mission: Impossible formula, and instead, it tries something new. It doesn’t always excel at that, but the fact that they recognized this film was never going to break even and decided to play the “fuck it, we ball” card for the fun of it shows some serious balls and takes some serious audacity. I was pretty much always going to respect a move like that.

I’ve been hearing a lot of doomsdaying when it comes to any and all kinds of cinema these days, but once again, I should not have listened to the naysayers, and I should probably have that ingrained in me by now. If anything, I think going in with such low expectations and having already come to terms with the fact that they might not have stuck the landing is what made me enjoy this film even more. It surprised me and kept surprising me until the second the credits rolled.

I would agree that the first act is fairly forgettable. I’m writing this review after sitting with the film for a few hours, and gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you what happens in that first act. It’s a mixture of the fact that the first act is extremely reliant on unloading exposition, but also the fact that the rest of the nearly three-hour runtime is completely unforgettable. Of course, the exposition act is going to flounder when placed side-by-side with some of the greatest action sequences I’ve ever seen on the big screen.

Besides AI and some random guy who is Ethan Hunt’s opp for no explained reason, the primary villain of this film is Barbenheimer. Yes, you heard that correctly. Raise your hand if you saw Dead Reckoning in theaters? Exactly. You didn’t because you were saving your time and money for a Barbie and Oppenheimer double feature (not me, y’all stay safe though). McQuarrie and Cruise are hyperaware of this fact, perhaps to their detriment. They know that Dead Reckoning got lost in the blockbuster madness of summer 2023, and for a good hour here, they’re overcompensating for it big time. They’re constantly bloating the runtime and hijacking the pacing with expository flashbacks to the previous film, you know, the film that was supposed to be part one to this film but was renamed because of just how under the radar it went. It’s a frustrating back-and-forth between whether they want you to forget that film exists or whether they want to get you up to speed by cutting it down into unnecessary flashbacks and entirely expositional conversations.

When they lean into the absurdity of this decision by going all in on fan-service, it only makes things worse. They clearly want us to trust them, but when they don’t even seem to trust the audience in this regard, it brings the film down a few noticeable notches and seriously tests the audience by the time Tom Cruise asks us to trust him one last time. He needs us to trust him that the next two hours are going to be some of the wildest we’ve ever seen on the big screen and that everything that has been set up so far is going to pay off despite the fact that they’re literally making the final chapter of this story up as they go. The craziest thing is that, in the end, this all somehow works. These mad men make it freaking work.

Much can be said about the plot and the exposition, but truthfully, that’s not what I come to the Mission: Impossible movies for. I come for the action sequences (which we’ll get to in a second), and yet, I found myself genuinely overcome by the weight of emotion this film asks of me at multiple points. Angela Bassett, in particular, runs her own, equally important B-plot with all the dedication that this film and this role requires of her. At the end of the film, when she steps off the plane and reunites with her son after making the decision not to go through with nuclear war purely because of how much faith she has in Hunt and humanity was incredibly powerful. She truly holds her own, keeping up the tension while also providing a diplomatic break from the Hunt hijinks going on elsewhere in the world. I wasn’t expecting her to have this big of a role, but I was pleasantly surprised and she did the thing like always.

There’s also lots that has been said about whether this film is made purely to stroke Tom Cruise’s ego, but I couldn’t disagree more. He’s leaving it all on the line and once again proving how much of a movie star God he is. However, what stuck out to me the most was how content not only Hunt but Cruise himself seems to be by the end of this film. From the time Hunt goes chasing after Gabriel’s plane to his last look back to the camera and the franchise, he doesn’t speak once. He becomes a silent movie star for the third act, slyly making the argument that he isn’t one of the last movie stars, but one of the first. We’re only about a century into film history after all. Statistically, how could he possibly be the last?

The concept of a movie star will never cease to exist, but it will evolve. It’s as if the film is arguing that Cruise isn’t the last movie star, but if anything, he is (or should be) one of the last straight white guy movie stars. And that’s where the supporting cast comes in to largely steal the show outside of the signature Cruise showstopper set pieces. With The Final Reckoning, Cruise is passing the movie star baton to the next generation, evidently a much more diverse generation. Each member of the supporting cast gets adequate time to prove their chops, and I left the theater thinking I’d love to see any one of them, or better yet, all of them, leading a franchise. I’m pretty sure that’s what McQuarrie and Cruise intended for me to think, and they certainly pulled it off.

While I still don’t feel like Hayley Atwell entirely fills the void left by the incomparable Rebecca Ferguson (or even Vanessa Kirby), I’d be lying if I didn’t say I sat straight-up when she popped up in Paddington in Peru. She just constantly carries the screen like it’s no big deal despite the fact that she’s been relegated to playing supporting characters for so much of her career. She’s been on the sidelines for so long that her eager to prove herself radiates through the screen, and these last two Mission: Impossible movies have been the perfect vessel for her to do so.

I’m going to continue to be a contrarian cinephile, and say that I actually liked Pom Klementieff and Greg Tarzan Davis’ addition to the main cast. They didn’t have much of anything to do, but they gave me some lethal face cards to stare at while Hunt was talking my ear off. If I say what else I think about Greg Tarzan Davis, I’ll be suspended six months. I want his face card in everything ever. I want to be staring at him forever. What a man! He’s part of the batch of Top Gun: Maverick supporting stars that Cruise has been successfully grooming for movie stardom, and all I’m saying is that I’d much prefer to see him (and Manny Jacinto) leading a franchise than one of the boring white boys in that cast. Moreover, Tramell Tillman and Katy O’Brian have small roles in the second act, but are the unanimous scene-stealers. They had the audience right in the palm of their hand their entire screen time, and if I was a casting director, I’d be doing everything in my own power to get those two on the line immediately.

This is the end of McQuarrie and Cruise’s franchise should they choose to accept it, and if even the casting indicates anything, I think they have. If they do bring this franchise back someday, I doubt we’ll be seeing a senior Tom Cruise running and jumping around the world solving these impossible missions. It’ll be someone in the new class of movie stars in the same way Keanu Reeves is handing the reins of the John Wick franchise off to women like Ana de Armas and Rina Sawayama. McQuarrie and Cruise are more than willing to acknowledge that it’s time for them and Ethan Hunt to trust the next generation, and that’s for the better of this film and the lifespan of cinema, as a whole. This is for the movie stars that Cruise will never meet.

But just like the movie, we do have to talk about Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise loves cussing people out. He’ll cuss you out if you don’t follow COVID protocol on one of his sets, he’ll cuss you out if you try to fire his agent for being pro-Palestine, and he’ll probably cuss Trump out too if he dares go through with the foreign film tax. Cussing people out is kind of his whole thing, besides Scientology and movies, of course. The thing with movies though is that what matters most is the audience, and well, you can’t exactly cuss out your audience. All you can do is earn their respect, time, and money.

Yes, this is one of the most expensive movies ever made. It won’t break even. As Zack Snyder would say, “Truth is? It doesn’t matter. The movie got made.” You can see every single dollar at work by the sheer scale of this film alone. It’s all laid out on the big screen for you as Cruise and crew battle the extremes of every element. There’s multiple underground explosions, a masterclass fight scene in the fire, a glorious underwater submarine sequence, and a final plane battle that goes toe-to-toe with the Fallout helicopter battle (all of which are elevated in IMAX). There’s obviously CGI at work at some points like any movie made in the 21st century, but the authenticity oozes from both the budget and the screen. The stakes feel real. Ethan Hunt (and Tom Cruise, for that matter) has some God-tier plot armor, but the threat of nuclear war is so much bigger than him that it doesn’t even matter at this point. This whole franchise, up until now, has relied on the question of whether he would be willing to lose one person if it meant saving the whole world. Here, Luther dies in the first act, so that dilemma goes out the window. He literally has to save the whole world. He has no other choice.

Tom Cruise dies on camera and comes back alive to save the world and cinema over and over again within the span of these three hours. It’s your movie money at work, folks. So far, this year alone, Robert Pattinson blew up Donald Trump, Michael B. Jordan killed all white people, and Tom Cruise destroyed AI and stopped World War III. I don’t know how many times I need to say this. Go to the movies! You could not possibly imagine the revolutionary stuff going down, as we speak, in the passion project blockbusters that aren’t populist capeshit slop and unimaginative remakes.

In my personal and seemingly unpopular opinion, this franchise has only gotten both bigger and better over time, and The Final Reckoning is quite a high to either go out on or leave things for now. Some would and do disagree, but all I could think about while watching this was the fact that Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise must be over the moon at the fact that they pulled this off. It’s not the greatest movie of all time, and no Mission: Impossible movie could ever top Fallout, but making and releasing a movie at this level with this scale and this much passion must be the most exhilarating feeling on Earth.

You guys might not be ready for this one yet, but your kids are going to love it. I can’t wait to show this to my little brother. If I saw this when I was his age, my mind would be blown. Even as an adult, my mind is blown. My jaw was dropped the entire third act. They did it. These crazy sons of bitches did it. Whether you, as an audience member, are willing to accept the end of this franchise ultimately doesn’t matter. This is bigger than Ethan Hunt, and this is bigger than Tom Cruise. This film was less about wrapping a bow on the Mission: Impossible franchise than it was about setting the future of cinema up for success. It might be too ahead of its time for certain people, but I truly believe film history will be looking back on this one fondly.