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Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning Is a Huge Mess. But It’s a Fun Mess.
Sometimes it feels like they’re still not done editing The Final Reckoning. Sometimes it feels like they’re still not done shooting it.
So, it’s dispiriting to find so much of this new film suffering from Solemnity Overload, as Final Reckoning ’s first hour drowns us in dumb, endless litanies about the many achievements and transgressions of Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), conveyed through montages of the previous installments and ladlefuls of grim voice-over. It achieves this by tuning out the broody chatter of its first act and giving us a lengthy, ingenious (and refreshingly silent) sequence inside a sunken submarine, a wreck whose unstable spot on the sea floor ensures that our hero will wind up bouncing and rolling around a room inconveniently filled with floating torpedoes. Not just the repeated cutaways to the earlier movies but also the reintroduction of long-forgotten side characters and the revelations of secret identities, as well as stupid little Easter eggs (as if Mission: Impossible fans are somehow supposed to have memorized the original’s release date, like it was Star Wars Day or whatever).
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