So here we are, almost a round thirty years since Tom Cruise redefined cinematic action with Mission: Impossible by fighting a helicopter with a train in a tunnel. That franchise spawning creation was a collaboration built with the aid of filmic masters who have each added their own twist to the ratcheting piano wire tension of action-thriller cinema: director Brian De Palma, writers David Koepp & Robert Towne, editor Paul Hirsch.
Cinematic history is built with a chorus of culture, with each voice adding its own mark to the scripture of filmic language. Alongside their learned colleagues, these creatives employed their encyclopaedic understanding of how tension has been employed as a tool throughout the history of cinema to elevate the senses and excite the mind. With The Untouchables, De Palma referred to the early masters to understand danger and risk, pulling from Battleship Potemkin to craft his own version of an inevitably-tumbling house of cards. With Jurassic Park, Koepp understood the role a gentle figure positioned in the midst of a hurricane, building on Spielberg’s notion to make Hammond more like Walt Disney, a knowing mind trying to steady a swaying ship in the storm. While Robert Towne built upon years of pulpy noir tales to create Chinatown, a textbook example of misdirection, mystery, and intrigue, all driven by a need for the screenwriter to be three steps ahead of the audience, always knowing the destination, even if the road may get bumpy along the way. And finally, editor Paul Hirsch built on his collaborative work on Star Wars, using the vapours from his dreams to create the rhythm of a film that is like ‘all the movies you’d ever seen in your life’[1]: matching the rhythm of an orchestra to amplify mood and atmosphere, holding a shot long enough to build the anticipation of romance, executing cuts with the rapidity of action to make you feel breathless.
When we watch a film in a cinema, we become students of the magic lantern, embracing its ability to entertain and enlighten the senses, to engage and spark thoughts in our mind, and, most importantly of all, to move and cajole our emotional state of mind. When I step into the cinema, and I realise that I’m in the hands of someone who understands the true weight of the power of cinema, I can’t help but feel like I’m experiencing one of the true miracles of creativity. That might sound hyperbolic, but it’s the end result of having repeatedly given myself over to a storyteller who knows how to harness the skills of their fellow creatives to make me, a genuine stranger, almost fall off my seat from the unbearable anxiety I’m experiencing from seeing dancing light on a silver screen. It’s something I’ve experienced time and time again in familiar rooms all around the world; rooms that contain windows to worlds we only dream of. When it’s presented perfectly, as it is in Jurassic Park or Star Wars or The Untouchables, their stories become seared in your memories, with each new branding mark acting as a tether point back to that dark room we call a movie theatre.
That feeling of experiencing a miracle of creativity washed over me early in the eighth and final entry in Tom Cruise’s dependable series: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. Cruise pairs up once again with writer-director Christopher McQuarrie to run one last film class for audiences in how modern masters of cinematic tension execute their well-rehearsed swan song symphony. It’s a risky thing too, placing that last note on the page, waiting to see if it’ll make the harmony truly soar, or being left disappointed by an unexpected down note that taints the entire piece.
Within The Final Reckoning, Ethan Hunt (Cruise’s surrogate nomenclature) has to pick up the pieces after the cliffhanger ending of the dull and dreary seventh entry Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning[2] which left the villain (Esai Morales) on the run and Hunt’s team in disarray. Here, Hunt has to build a final orchestra, one replete with members with a unique set of skills. Series stalwarts Luther (an always welcome Ving Rhames) and Benji (a weathered Simon Pegg who looks like he’s glad that this is the last entry) return with their bomb-diffusing prowess and tech geniuses, while pick pocketer and master thief Grace (a sprightly Hayley Atwell) and scorned assassin Paris (a stern Pom Klementieff) both accentuate Hunt’s final mission – one that he’s chosen to accept – to defeat the AI overlord known as The Entity.
This all-seeing computer is presented as an almost transcendental existence in a nauseating narrative-setting scene; circles of blue networks pulse on the screen, a central light increasing in intensity, all while the thumping score from Max Aruj & Alfie Godfrey drones and throbs, pushing the cinemas sound system to the limit. It’s an unsettling motif to kick off this last entry, but it’s one that helps push internal reality of the film, one where The Entity has overwhelmed the computer networks of the world, using its omnipresent reach to spread false information, fuelling conflicts and actively pushing governments to the brink of all out self-destruction as global powers ready their nuclear arsenal, ready to strike in retaliation or as a pre-emptive strike.
You know how it goes, just another day at the office for Hunt and Friends.
McQuarrie has a clear affection for Mission: Impossible lore, peppering Final Reckoning with direct call backs to all entries in the form of clips and audio snippets or the reintegration of long dormant narrative threads and the characters who are integral to them. Some work more than others. Those still reeling from the trauma of Emilio Estevez’s dismissal in the first entry will be retraumatised more than once as McQuarrie revisits shots of Hunt’s colleagues from the series getting dispatched, their deaths playing like a morbid in-memoriam clip show. If you listen in close enough, you can hear the strains of Sarah McLachlan’s I Will Remember You bleeding into the sound mix.
Better executed is the manner that McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen revive forgotten characters, giving them substantial arcs that carry an unexpectedly profound weight. It’s here that McQuarrie’s affection for the series and its characters is keenly felt, with an integral moment from the first entry getting a satisfying pay off here in a way that made me regret not packing tissues for the screening. Pro-tip: a box of Maltesers does not make a suitable substitute for Kleenex.
For some, this might feel like nostalgia tourism, making this closing entry akin to a ‘greatest hits’ mix tape, but for me it felt like the welcome denouement of a series that I’ve spent three decades immersing myself in, with McQuarrie relishing the chance to close narrative threads we had no idea were left open all this time. The Mission: Impossible films have become appointment viewing; the kind of film that I would clear the calendar to ensure I could catch them on opening weekend, letting the enormity of the big screen overwhelm me as Cruise and co saved the world once again.
And it’s in that world saving that the Mission: Impossible entries work best, with Cruise having perfected the formula of action storytelling, utilising his physicality to amplify the immersive nature of the films. Across the films, we’ve seen him cling to the façade of the world’s tallest buildings, hold his breath under water for minutes on end, smash cars through the corridors of the world’s streets and cities, engage in an unsimulated HALO jump, kung fu fight with motorbikes, and, most impressively in this final entry, pit two biplanes against one another in an aerial chase to end all chases.
Like De Palma with his legion of influences, McQuarrie and Cruise are scholars of the medium, paying homage to the classics by delving into the past to borrow images and iconography to enhance their action series. Take Buster Keaton’s The General for example, a film that still manages to illicit gasps some 99 years on with some of the greatest practical stunts captured on film. Each time I revisit that classic I’m left in awe as I watch the silent master knock a log off the track of a moving locomotive, only to later crash said locomotive into a ravine. McQuarrie and Cruise echoed Keaton’s work in Dead Reckoning with its climactic train crash, applying a modern sensibility to the stunt, closing the film with an extravagant explosion that left your ears ringing. Keaton might not see himself in Dead Reckoning, but McQuarrie clearly had him in mind, with Cruise as a suitable steel faced surrogate.
There’s a grace to Keaton and Cruise’s work that’s imbued by an understanding of how physicality and motion on film can elicit unexpected emotional reactions. These are driven by our mirror neurons, which spritz when we see someone dance in chase across a moving locomotive or cause us to pop in our seat as Cruise leaps with faith, narrowly latching onto an opposing building. Keanu Reeves John Wick flicks, a series built on the bloodied borrowed blueprints of Cruise’s films, also carry a level of grace with its balletic ballistics acting as a hyper-extension of Keaton’s aesthetic. It's no surprise then that John Wick: Chapter 2 director Chad Stahelski turns the buildings of New York into a cinema, splashing The General across the walls of a brick building as Reeves hero burns the tarmac in his car. ‘Look at how these men move. Look how their body bends. Look at the tangible fear in their eyes. Feel this. Watch them redefine heroism.’
The place that we experience films in – the movie theatre, the picture house, the flicker show, the home of the magic lantern, in the pines, the cinema – creates a space for these films to be in conversation with one another. We build memories in them, memories that layer upon one another over time, leading to Keaton to be in conversation with Ford who talks to Frankenheimer and De Palma, who then carries it forth to Cruise and McQuarrie, giving way to Stahelski and Reeves to add their own voices to the chorus. We can’t arrive at Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning without having journeyed through The General, The Train, 25 James Bond films, or even John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum.
McQuarrie & Jendresen are conscious of this, embedding the Final Reckoning script with nods and hints to cinematic landmarks, some more practical than textual. Take the presence of clouds in the final flight sequence, a notion which seems inconsequential given the non-CG created stunts, until you consider William A. Wellman’s Wings where the role of clouds in added depth and gravity to the plane sequences, making them feel all the more – excuse me for this one – grounded and believable. The sly nod to that enduring classic acts as a looping motif, with McQuarrie pulling audiences back to the foundations of practical stunts in cinema, nudging them in the process to say 'this is real.' Adding another layer to the nod to Wings is this discussion from Cannes where McQuarrie outlines how Tom Cruise shot, focus-pulled, and positioned the imagery of the scene, all while flying the plane solo; just like some of the actors had to do when making Wings.
On a more cerebral level, McQuarrie & Jendresen include direct references to Walter Murch’s pivotal book In the Blink of an Eye by way of explicit dialogue from characters who talk about the power of a moment and how swiftly our futures can change. The audiences attention is a key aspect of why Final Reckoning works as powerfully as it does, with McQuarrie, as a director, dosing us with ‘chunks of reality’, injecting moments where we’re forced to keep our eyes open, and others where we’re invited to blink and breath in tune with the film. No doubt once this film arrives on home video, there will be video essays digesting the way editor Eddie Hamilton splits and splices this film, fraying our nerves in the process.
Then there’s the MacGuffin of the piece, an impossible box that will capture knowledge and information, lighting up like a beacon when its role is fulfilled, adding a layer of magic and wonder to the entire proceeding. I won’t go into detail here as to not spoil things, but I’ll say in those climactic moments I was barely able to exhale, left weeping at the layered brilliance and majesty of the moment.
McQuarrie has embedded these aspects into the film in such a way that isn't overt and doesn’t distract from the overall experience, but rather adds a subtle flavour to the meal that hits the mark for those who seek this kind of stuff out, making them go ‘ahh’ when they realise what he's done.
The Mission: Impossible series is sustained by collective breath-hold moments that emerge from the sustained tension of Cruise’s stunts in the series is like nothing else. Final Reckoning contains an all-timer nail biter sequence where Cruise delivers an almost wordless dive into a sunken submarine; my knuckles are still white from being held so tight. The audience safe experience of getting to the see the spectacle of one man doing the unthinkable by throwing his body into his art and risking his life in the process is part of the reason behind why we go and see films in cinemas.
If you'll humour me one more moment of hyperbole, it was in these moments that felt myself ascending out of my seat as an unwilling angel. I had to remind myself to sit down. As I floated out of the cinema, I was steadfast in my understanding that Cruise has saved the best for last, making Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning the best entry in the series, a perfect climax to a decades long thrill ride. That's one for the Instagram praise post Paramount, this one's certified fresh.
Cruise and McQuarrie are advocates for the theatrical experience, encouraging audiences to be changed by the sound and spectacle of seeing a film like this with an audience. It’s why Cruise eagerly held back Top Gun: Maverick from heading straight to streaming during the pandemic, pushing for an exclusive theatrical experience. This also isn't just a money garnering exercise, with many pivotal sequences in The Final Reckoning shot with IMAX cameras, aka sense annihilation devices.
At a rare breathing moment during Final Reckoning, my mind was transported to the barn storming, instant classic scene in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, one which sees a rousing blues song rip a hole in time, melding past, future, and present together and conjuring a miracle of cinematic energy. The sound, the visuals, the overwhelming nature of it all, meant that that moment will be seared in my mind for years to come. As I write this, I’m conscious of the conversation that Final Reckoning will be having with an entry in another violence focused series, Final Destination Bloodlines. These are films that are made for that communal experience where we get to feed off the energy from one another, all driven by what we’re seeing and feeling on screen. The gasps, the laughs, the cries, the deathly silence, all of this is a vital aspect of the film itself.
I’m not old, but I’m certainly not young. I’ve grown up alongside the Mission: Impossible films. I saw the first one with my grandfather, and subsequent entries have been impacted by the thrill of that original viewing. If De Palma was in conversation with Hitchcock, then my memories of that viewing have been in conversation with subsequent entries, a chat that continues with its imitators. You see enough films over your life, and you start to dream in celluloid.
Cruise dreams in celluloid too - that chunky IMAX strip runs through his mind. Some have posited that if he weren't making these films, he'd be off climbing El Capitan with no ropes; but I contest that notion. Cruise is all about the spectacle, and he's all about inviting the audience into that spectacle. If Tom Cruise jumped from a plane in space and nobody filmed it, did he really jump at all?
If I think about my relationship with him on screen over the decades - from the defiant ‘Did you order the Code Red?’ cry in A Few Good Men, to his shouting for money in Jerry Maguire, to his wild delve into misogyny with Frank Mackey in Magnolia, to the one-two punch of sci-fi spectacle with Spielberg in Minority Report and The War of the Worlds, to his more managed, curatorial turns in the 2000s era action flicks - it's been one of intrigue and excitement. Here is a man who knows how to excite an audience, and he knows how to use cinema to do just that.
Your tolerance and patience for this kind of excess may vary, but for my dollar, there's simply no one delivering a better, more satisfying action experience on a Hollywood level than Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie. If this is truly the last of the Mission: Impossible series, then what a way to bow out. Bring forth the generations of future filmmakers who will converse with McQuarrie and Cruise via the Church of Cinema.
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Cast: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames
Writers: Christopher McQuarrie, Erik Jendresen, (Based on the television series created by Bruce Geller)
Producers: Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie
Composers: Max Aruj, Alfie Godfrey
Cinematographer: Fraser Taggart
Editor: Eddie Hamilton
Screening or Streaming Availability:
[1] https://www.creativeprocess.info/interviews-5/paul-hirsch-mia-funk-academy-award-film-editor-tea-prerodovic-ma9tm-6bde9
[2] For the purposes of this review, I’m not going to even entertain the notion of discussing the whole ‘Part One’ of it all.