The Mission Impossible movie franchise has been around my entire life and, as such, I’ve seen every film since the first debuted in 1996.
However, like with most long-run action film franchises, there’s a need to increase the difficulty and pizazz of stunts and fight scenes.
And it makes sense when they’re competing with viewer fatigue and interest.
When you’ve seen one intense action scene it might be repeated across other storylines and pop culture references – the “bullet dodging” slow-motion sequence in “The Matrix” (1999) has been repeated several times over as a perfect example.
I think that Mission Impossible has suffered from a similar issue and it’s more prevalent in the last two films with “Mission: Impossible-Final Reckoning” taking the cake in my book.
Reckoning’s submarine dive is the worst and only aggravated me the most until the film ended in true spy-action flick ambiguity.
For something toted to be the end of a franchise I can’t stand the way they ended the film and it soured the flick even further for me.
Final Reckoning is an American action spy film directed by Christopher McQuarrie from a screenplay he co-wrote with Erik Jendresen.
As the sequel to Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), it is the eighth and final installment in the Mission: Impossible film series.
Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Esai Morales, Henry Czerny, Pom Klementieff, Greg Degas, Shea Whigham, and Angela Bassett reprise their roles from the previous films.
It clocks in at 170 minutes long and is rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence and action, bloody images, and brief language.
Two months after retrieving the key to the source code for the malevolent artificial intelligence known as the Entity, Impossible Missions Force agents Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and Grace (Atwell) pursue Gabriel (Morales), once the Entity’s main human proxy.
Instead, Gabriel captures them, reveals that the Entity has abandoned him for failing to keep the key from them.
He attempts to coerce Ethan into retrieving the core module, revealed to be the “Rabbit’s Foot,” from the sunken Russian submarine Sevastopol, which would give Gabriel control over the Entity’s source code.
Ethan and Grace escape with the aid of IMF agent Benji Dunn (Pegg) and recruit Gabriel’s former lieutenant Paris (Klementieff) and Theo Degas (Davis), a CIA agent previously tasked with apprehending Hunt.
They discover a device that Gabriel used to communicate with the Entity, which shows Ethan a vision of a coming nuclear apocalypse.
Ethan realizes the Entity needs access to a secure digital bunker in South Africa to ensure its physical survival.
Ethan sends his team to retrieve the Sevastopol’s coordinates, while he rejoins Luther Stickell (Rhames) to disarm a nuclear device Gabriel planted in London.
Luther reveals that he developed malware for the Entity loaded on a hard drive, the “Poison Pill,” but Gabriel has stolen it.
Luther sacrifices himself to disarm the bomb by preemptively triggering one of its conventional explosive detonators.
Ethan then surrenders and is brought to Mount Weather, where US President Erika Sloane (Bassett) urges cooperation due to the Entity’s escalating control over global nuclear systems.
In true MI fashion, it’s a race to beat the clock before the world ends and there’s a lot to trip Ethan up – but as always, the IMF team does win this one.
I just hated the ending and submarine scene, but if you’re a Cruise or MI fan then I’m sure you can overlook those points to enjoy the flick.
