Mission impossible: The Final Reckoning review: gigantic ambitions, scale, duration and a heartfelt farewell!

Mission impossible: The Final Reckoning review: gigantic ambitions, scale, duration and a heartfelt farewell!

Tom Cruise, 63. Mission Impossible franchise, 30. Memories, countless.

Mission impossible: The Final Reckoning movie review

Agent Ethan Hunt has always been special. His missions, his team and his death-defying stunts have etched indelible impressions in the cinephiles' hearts.

‘Mission impossible: The Final Reckoning’, a continuation of the 2023's ‘Mission impossible: Dead Reckoning’ and helmed by Cruise's frequent collaborator Christopher McQuarrie, sees him in a world saving assignment but has terrifying risks associated.

He unites with Grace (Hayley Atwell) to apprehend Gabriel (Essai Morales) working for the Entity which has the power to wreak havoc on humanity. Instead. Gabriel captures them and forces to retrieve the source code for Entity from Sepastopol - the sunken Russian submarine.

Hunt escapes, but also has a vision of a devastating nuclear apocalypse and he must stop it with the help of his former team mates - Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg) and new recruits – Paris (Pom Klementief) and Theo Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis).

‘Mission impossible: The Final Reckoning’ plays out as a swan song for Hunt, with abundant montages from the previous instalments, warranting a strong flush of nostalgia. McQuarrie who co-writes Final Reckoning with Erik Jendresen has a language and expression that is accessible despite the film's inclination to meta physics and nuclear phenomenon. But in the process, it implodes with a flabby first half and sequences that needed acute editing precision.

McQuarrie's and Cruise (as a co-producer) gigantic ambitions pay little regard to the duration and the result is evident in the overstretched submarine sequence.

It redeems the slog only before the high adrenaline climax action with the entire ensemble involved in the high stakes game, and Cruise waltzing in the sky, while clinching to a 1940s biplane. The passion is clearly evident in the actor where you can actually see his cheeks getting battered with the pace of the wind.

Reckoning observes him flirting with the staggering heights, the deadly underwater abyss and also the land where he sprints endlessly. The camera caresses his bare but sculpted body while he engages in a furious fight of fists.

Here's an actor who can still drive you crazy at 63. At one point, Atwell casually remarks, " long hair looks great on you", and I took more vindicated with the philosophy of age being just a number.

Many actors associated with the franchise reprise their characters after such an hiatus, including Henry Czerny (as Eugene Kittridge) who plays the skeptical boss from the past.

Angella Vasett returns to the game but as a different character, something which she played in Netflix's Zero Day, the Black Female American President.

Resilience, authority and vulnerability collide and come in equal measures for her character who symbolizes America's moral prowess amidst the looming apocalypse.

 

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