Tom Cruise and team fights AI, concedes to age
All good things must end, or so they say. But do they have to? This part deux to 2023’s “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” does have a sheen of finality to it, with plenty of nostalgia.
The key to the MI series is Tom Cruise: No Cruise, no movie. He’s a transcendent (and ageless) actor who sells the brand with bona fide stardom, a renown for performing his own stunts and a drive to be forever outdoing himself – and he usually doesn’t disappoint. In “Final Reckoning,” he succeeds with the help of writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, back for his fourth MI go-round.
Obviously, Cruise has a lot of faith in McQuarrie – and why wouldn’t he? After winning a Best Screenwriting Oscar early on for “The Usual Suspects” in 1996, McQuarrie has had a meteoric shot of a career in Hollywood. Besides these MI shuffles, he was one of the pens on another Cruise franchise, “Top Gun: Maverick,” back in 2022 and four others, directing Cruise in“Jack Reacher” (2012) and with scriptwriting creds on “Valkyrie” (2008), “The Edge of Tomorrow” (2014) and “The Mummy” (2017).
If you’re uninitiated in the “Mission: Impossible” films, seeing “Dead Reckoning Part One” would be wise before heading to the theater, but in “Final Reckoning” (originally “Dead Reckoning Part Two”) McQuarrie layers in visual crib notes with some tightly edited, perfectly dropped flashbacks. There’s a scene midway in which Cruise’s super agent, Ethan Hunt, gets sealed in a high-tech cyber sarcophagus or something of the sort and is given the reasoning for the existence and intent of The Entity – the ubiquitous AI villain of this two-part thriller – in the digital blink of an eye. That’s how McQuarrie gets us on the page lest we forget, and it works. It’s a neat (and effective) parlor trick, though there are turns where it tries to link together disparate MI chapters and plot elements a bit too arduously and feels clunky.
So what’s to know? Hunt and his Impossible Mission Force team have gone rogue and underground in an effort to try to take The Entity offline. The human face of the AI is the gleefully diabolical and debonair Gabriel (Esai Morales), a Hunt nemesis who, for strange, loose philosophical reasons that may align with those of Sam Altman, wants to promote The Entity to godlike status by giving it control over all nine nuclear-armed nations’ world-obliterating arsenals. If you thought of this as “War Games” (1983) with an AI reboot, you wouldn’t be wrong, but instead of Matthew Broderick talking to a 1980s digitized computer voice in a bunker somewhere, you have Cruise in his skivvies 500 feet below a polar icecap or dangling from a biplane wing somewhere over Africa.
Hunt’s regular nerdy compadres, ace computer hacker Luther (the beautifully baritoned Ving Rhames) and spy-tech-savvy Benji (Simon Pegg) are back in the mix, as are plucky pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) and French assassin Paris (the ethereal Pom Klementieff, “Guardians of the Galaxy”) and U.S. intelligence agent Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), former antagonists from “Dead Reckoning” now down with all things Ethan. And you’d have to be all in, because Hunt’s plans – baiting the Russian fleet into an oceanic shootout, recovering a MacGuffin device from a dormant Russian sub at the bottom of the Bering Sea before it tumbles off an ocean shelf into a crevice of oblivion – are one-in-a-billion gambits with the fate of the world hanging in the balance.
If that all sounds nonsensical, it is, but McQuarrie, Cruise and crew go far to sell it. The action sequences are top-notch, well-choreographed, taut and effusively edited. Angela Bassett is nice to see back as Erika Sloane, the CIA deputy director in the last two chapters and now leader of the free world – that’s right, our first woman president, and a confident and commanding one – and Tramell Tillman of “Severance” is on deck as the sly, cagey captain of a U.S. sub that has to deliver Hunt to a secret destination with a monster Russian sub on its tail. His scene-stealing is refreshingly (and hauntingly) reminiscent of the indelible, cigar-chomping CO in James Cameron’s “Aliens” (1986) rendered with aplomb by the late Al Matthews.
Probably the biggest reason this is likely the final MI is that Cruise, now in his 60s, is facing some stiff, uphill challenges in topping his “I do it myself” stunt scenarios, even with the help of CGI and stand-ins. It’s impressive what he’s accomplished, and more impressive to take in. You feel exhausted just watching him run and hop from one speeding object to the next with measured calculation and Buster Keaton ease. All this as you pop popcorn into your maw and ease back the recliner to better see. The film has a bit of an Ethan Hunt hagiography to it too, something that’s underscored by Luther’s voiceover extolling the virtues of Hunt as the everyman Superman doing his quiet heroics silently in the shadows. Is this the last we see of Tom as Hunt on the run? To be continued …
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