Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025)
This is not so much a movie.....it's more like a 170 minute religious ceremony, in which we're expected to bow down and worship our Lord and Savior......Tom Cruise.
Nobody should enter this Holy Church Of Cruise, expecting the exhilarating action and suspense of his previous 'Mission Impossible' movies. 'Final Reckoning' exists as a deification of Cruise as our very last God-like movie star......the star who takes our breath away with his death defying stunts while scooping up gazillions of dollars for his tireless efforts to dazzle us.
Cruise finally reached the point where he longer felt compelled to give this new film any structure, pacing and or even a smidge of believability. It's a superhero movie whose one and only goal is to celebrate its glorious superhero.....everything and everyone else in it remains strictly in the peripheral vision of the Almighty Cruise, like small planets circling around the brightest of all suns.
These films no longer require a flesh-and-blood adversary. Here, as in the previous 'Dead Reckoning', his principal villain is an A.I. entity who goes by name of....The Entity.
In the towering shadow of Cruise, the film didn't need to give The Entity a personality for us to latch on to, like Hal in '2001' or the robot who calls to tell us our car warranty has expired. Not necessary. All we need to know is that it's a world destroyer and needs to be Cruise-ified.
And though appearing weary and sporting age lines that somehow snuck past the make-up department, Cruise soldiers on, battling Entity's primary human minion (Esai Morales) and confounding our star's oily, original CIA boss Kittridge (Henry Czerny) from the first film.
Cruise could always be depended on to deliver breathless wham-bam action sequences, but the two major set-pieces aren't really designed to knock our socks off. Their true purpose - to force us to gaze endlessly at the glory of Cruise's immortal stamina and lunatic bravado.
The first one of these interminable whoop-dee-doos involves Cruise searching a sunken Russian submarine in lethally frigid arctic waters. Surviving obstacles that would easily kill any of us ordinary mortals, Cruise punishes both himself and the audience with an ordeal longer than a trans-atlantic flight on a plane with clogged bathrooms.
The second, more photogenic of these tortuous episodes finds Cruise punching it out with Morales while he precariously dangles from the biplane the villain's piloting. What could have been one of the most jaw dropping scenes in the series gets ruinously sabotaged by its ridiculous overlength.....(we'd direct you back to the previous analogy about that trans-Atlantic flight.)
And no one should hold their breath waiting for a final showdown with The Entity. The poor A.I. isn't even allowed to sing a last gurgling rendition of "Daisy...Daisy...Give me your answer do...". In the Church of Cruise, there's no room for anyone but the main Deity.
Unlike the other 'Mission Impossible' films, we left this one with a sad sigh......because for the first time, we couldn't imagine ever wanting to go back and re-watch this one.
At the end of the day, for all his money and clout, we hold not a drop of envy for Tom Cruise the last Superstar of the movies. His volcanic intensity and weird devotion to the grifting cult of Scientology garnered him gazillions, but little else (and a young daughter who wants nothing to do with him).
Moviegoers forgave him his strangeness because he always put on a good show for us. But in 'Final Reckoning', it's all about him.......
2 stars (**).
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