For almost thirty years, Agent Ethan Hunt has been disobeying orders to achieve the impossible, sometimes sacrificing a few lives to save thousands. The promotional campaign for Mission Impossible 8 – The Final Reckoning deliberately plays the final reckoning card to give this chapter an end-of-the-world, end-of-cycle aura, suggesting a departure for our hero, either to retirement or to the morgue. A final (or not) mission where Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie are no longer pretending, and not just in the stunts.
The events take place two months after those of The Dead Reckoning (2023). Now in possession of the key, Ethan Hunt and his team seek to reach the Russian submarine Sevastopol in order to hack The Entity, the autonomous AI adept at falsehoods and intent on atomizing the human race (the scenario of Terminator). Along the way, they will have to fight against their digital enemy, governments and other antagonists eager to take control of this computer virus.
A script written by an AI?
Knowing Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie, we assumed that with a three-hour runtime, the film would be delicious and crunchy. Monumental mistake. For over an hour and a half, the script takes us from briefing to briefing in order to re-explain, to the point of paraphrase, the stakes of the story and the urgency of the situation. Rarely has an installment in the franchise given such an impression of being built on its two big stunt sequences, to the point where the rest is almost made up of characters repeating what we already know.
If we could ask ourselves how the threat of The Entity could justify that, exceptionally, the plot is divided into two films, we have the answer and it's not good. Here, we save time at every level, right down to the editing, which doesn't hesitate to happily use flashbacks to eat up minutes, sometimes putting back on screen a scene seen five minutes earlier.
Mission Impossible 8 – The Final Rewind
Speaking of flashbacks, it's worth addressing another black point. Presented as the culmination of the entire franchise, The Final Reckoning has the audacity to call upon its predecessors – on selected pieces of course, we wouldn't want to bring Jeremy Renner out of the closet. Whether it's about recalling forgotten supporting roles or daring to create genealogies that come out of nowhere, this eighth episode intends to connect what didn't need to be connected, even if it means sabotaging several good ideas that don't belong to it, like the famous Rabbit's Foot from the third part.
Missed connecting points or at best useless, giving more the feeling of watching a great maxi best-of menu that we hadn't ordered. An impression reinforced by the intensive use of images from thirty years of Mission Impossible. The Final Reckoning resembles the famous clip show of a series, the episode which is mainly composed of extracts from old ones.
In its defense, when the feature film tries to invent, it dives headlong into hackneyed clichés with a naive, even backward-looking, vision of geopolitics and a proportion of not knowing what to do with its secondary roles, like poor Grace (Hayley Atwell).
Tom Cruise, actor, stuntman, producer, Scientologist, messiah
It's now time for some self-criticism and apologies. Ever since big-screen cinema became a green-screen fair, we've tended to see Tom Cruise as a sort of standard-bearer for old-school filmmaking, preferring analog to digital. We've seen him as the ultimate doer, oozing cinephilia from every pore of his skin. An image he's cultivated, almost ignoring his other role as an XXL promoter of Scientology. Yet, we know the man's ego and how much it has affected his entire filmography. In short, in a sense, we partly provoked this Mission Impossible — The Final Reckoning, because we rolled out the red carpet for it.
The actor has always vampirized the franchise to the point of only keeping the only two elements who have never been a threat (Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg) around him. He has accustomed us to his exacerbated heroism, to this refusal to age, to exceeding his limits and to seducing all women (while remaining puritanical, mind you). We know and accept it. However, this installment pushes the envelope to a point of no return in the veneration of men, which only Vin Diesel seemed to have crossed in Fast & Furious. From now on, Ethan Hunt and Dominic Toretto evolve in the same universe, that of the divine.
Concretely, The Final Reckoning no longer even tries to deny the theological dimension behind the person of Hunt / Cruise. On the action front, this human advertisement for self-improvement is now rewriting the laws of physics itself, crossing London faster than any vehicle, able to withstand the most extreme depths and temperatures with its simple, eternally indestructible body. We are no longer in exaggeration, we are in the impossible made possible because of Tom Cruise.
The entire narrative will revolve around the sacrificial, messianic figure of the hero. He alone is the Chosen One, he alone can save men from their madness (we find several themes inherent to Scientology). A fact previously present through the actions of man. Except that here, this veneration is put directly into the mouths of all the other characters, to the point of inventing new ones to add a few layers. And we can count on this good soldier Christopher McQuarrie to support through his direction all this exercise in self-satisfaction with shots assuming that, if the hero falls, it is always to be brought back to the sky.
Devoted or devout audience?
So what remains of this Mission Impossible 8? Two spectacular sequences, drawn out, well-packaged, reminding us that there is still generosity within the saga and an apparent desire to offer the viewer what they came for. Two moments that could have been a crowning swan song, two moments that would have been applauded. But two moments that ultimately deified a certain person, suggesting that the goal was perhaps not so much to please the public as its main star.
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