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‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’ Review: The Sky’s The Limit In Ethan Hunt’s ‘Last’ Adventure – Cannes Film Festival
‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’ review: The sky’s the limit in Ethan Hunt’s ‘last’ adventure – Cannes Film Festival
When the idea was first mooted at the back-end of the 20th century, making a big-screen adaptation of the hit 1966-73 show Mission: Impossible smacked of studio IP-grab desperation, the kind of lazy thinking that, at around the same time, gave us The Saint(1997), a film now best forgotten and humbly described on Rotten Tomatoes as merely “watchable,” mostly by fans of the late, great Val Kilmer. This dedication to the image started to fluctuate in the films that followed, and, notably under Brad Bird ( M:I3) and J.J. Abrams ( M:I4), a lot of expository rot set in, spending too much time on plot (cut down in the first movie by Commander Swanbeck’s withering line, “This is not mission difficult, Mr. Hunt”) and stopping for chat where John Woo ( M:I2) would have revved up a monster dirt bike and chucked in some doves. In the meantime, McQuarrie does a good job of pretending we think that the Impossible Mission Force is, like the three/four musketeers, a one-for-all-and-for-one kind of outfit, but, although certain IMF members (like Simon Pegg ’s Benji Dunn) have their moments, the crux of the matter is the martyrdom of Ethan Hunt, who, thanks to some smart retconning, bears more responsibility for the rise of the Entity than he knows — and he needs to make things right.
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