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The Final Reckoning
The thing I want to make clear first of all about Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part 2: The Final Reckoning is that I don't regret taking three hours out of my limited time upon this earth to watch it, and not only because if I hadn't I'd have always wondered what I'd missed. That said, there was quite a lot of it where I was attending politely rather than being properly engaged and excited; there are large chunks that are unusually slow and sombre for a M:I movie, and when it did come to the energetic nonsense the series does so well, I think they finally managed to find a level of nonsense that my suspension of disbelief was unable to rise to. (It wasn't the handwaving around the computer stuff that did it, because I'd accepted that as part of the price of admission; I think it was the part where Ethan [redacted] and [redacted], only to [redacted].)
Part of the reason for the tonal weirdness is that, while this isn't the first Mission: Impossible movie to posit that if the team fails in their impossible mission it will mean the end of the world as we know it, this one really leans into it. Possibly because metatextually it does mark the end of something: if you come out of the movie not aware that it's Tom Cruise's swan song in the role, it won't be for lack of the movie telling you about it. There are a lot of scenes of people sombrely pondering the imminent end of the world, and the nature of the legacy they'll leave behind them, with loud sombre music to tell you how to feel about it. There are also a lot of call-backs to Ethan's earlier adventures, some of which are fun and some of which are annoying and some of which just are.
It doesn't help that for a large chunk of the movie there's no real antagonist to bounce off. I've always thought that an omniscient faceless AI was an odd choice of opponent for a series where the heroes' stock in trade leaned heavily on mind games and disguises, but in Part 1, the AI was at least willing to adopt disguises and play mind games back at them, and its human sidekick Gabriel filled the antagonist role most of the time anyway. In The Final Reckoning Gabriel is sidelined for a long stretch of the movie and the AI ascends to the level of impersonal force of nature, like the frigid Arctic ocean that is the closest thing to an opponent in one of the movie's key action sequences.
It's not all negatives; I like the IMF team that gets assembled, and the way they interact with each other, and wouldn't mind seeing more of them in the post-Ethan movie that this movie is pretty clearly holding a door open for. The ending is about as close to a good old "they defeat the villain while letting him think he's winning" sting as you can get with a faceless near-omniscient AI as the villain.
It may even be that there's about as much good stuff in this movie as in any given two-hour adventure movie, it's just that at three hours of runtime it's more diluted than usual. (Proposals for how to trim an hour out of the movie are already circulating on the internet, naturally.) Differing opinions are differing about whether the good outweighs the less-good; for myself, I refer you to my opening statement.
Part of the reason for the tonal weirdness is that, while this isn't the first Mission: Impossible movie to posit that if the team fails in their impossible mission it will mean the end of the world as we know it, this one really leans into it. Possibly because metatextually it does mark the end of something: if you come out of the movie not aware that it's Tom Cruise's swan song in the role, it won't be for lack of the movie telling you about it. There are a lot of scenes of people sombrely pondering the imminent end of the world, and the nature of the legacy they'll leave behind them, with loud sombre music to tell you how to feel about it. There are also a lot of call-backs to Ethan's earlier adventures, some of which are fun and some of which are annoying and some of which just are.
It doesn't help that for a large chunk of the movie there's no real antagonist to bounce off. I've always thought that an omniscient faceless AI was an odd choice of opponent for a series where the heroes' stock in trade leaned heavily on mind games and disguises, but in Part 1, the AI was at least willing to adopt disguises and play mind games back at them, and its human sidekick Gabriel filled the antagonist role most of the time anyway. In The Final Reckoning Gabriel is sidelined for a long stretch of the movie and the AI ascends to the level of impersonal force of nature, like the frigid Arctic ocean that is the closest thing to an opponent in one of the movie's key action sequences.
It's not all negatives; I like the IMF team that gets assembled, and the way they interact with each other, and wouldn't mind seeing more of them in the post-Ethan movie that this movie is pretty clearly holding a door open for. The ending is about as close to a good old "they defeat the villain while letting him think he's winning" sting as you can get with a faceless near-omniscient AI as the villain.
It may even be that there's about as much good stuff in this movie as in any given two-hour adventure movie, it's just that at three hours of runtime it's more diluted than usual. (Proposals for how to trim an hour out of the movie are already circulating on the internet, naturally.) Differing opinions are differing about whether the good outweighs the less-good; for myself, I refer you to my opening statement.