Here it is: the eighth and final film (for now) in the spectacularMission: Impossibleaction-thriller franchise, which manifests itself like the last segment jettisoned from some impossibly futurist Apollo spacecraft, which then carries on ionospherically upwards in a fireball as Tom Cruise ascends to a state beyond stardom, beyond IP. And with this film’s anti-AI and internet-sceptic message, and the gobsmacking final aerial set piece, Cruise is repeating his demand for theechtbig-screen experience. He is of course doing his own superhuman stunts – for the same reason, as he himself once memorably put it, that Gene Kelly did all his own dancing.
Final Reckoning is a new and ultimate challenge (actually the second half of the challenge from the previous film) which takes Cruise’s buff and resourceful IMF leader Ethan Hunt on one last maverick, deniable mission to exasperate and yet overawe his stuffed-shirt superiors at Washington and Langley. And what might that be? To save the world of course, like all the other missions.
With his doughty team including Grace (Hayley Atwell), Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), Hunt must now confront a sinister and metastasising AI brain called “the Entity”, the ultimate MacGuffin-slash-baddie which is undermining truth all over the world with lies and deepfakes, setting nation against nation, nuclear power against nuclear power, so that it will be the anti-God, the evil ruler of all. And to stop it, Ethan has to take the low-tech “cruciform key” he salvaged in the last film and apply it to the “Podkova” device which is on board a wrecked Russian sub, the Sevastopol somewhere on the seabed. (Wait - should they actually have called in James Cameron in some sort of nifty submersible?) The combination of the two will be a “poison pill” which will destroy the Entity.
It is a wildly silly, wildly entertaining adventure which periodically gives us a greatest-hits flashback montage of the other seven films in the M:I canon - but we still get a brand new, box-fresh Tom-sprinting-along-the-street scene, without which it wouldn’t be M:I. Moreover, this eighth film gives us a terrific new character, US sub commander Capt Bledsoe, played with suavity and the tiniest hint of camp by Tramell Tillman (from TV’s Severance) who has the chops for M:I9 whenever that happens.
And just as it wouldn’t be M:I without a sprinting scene, it wouldn’t be M:I without Tom hanging on for dear life at some unfeasible altitude; here he gets to cling to the wing of an old-fashioned prop plane in the blue Empyrean. As Anthony Hopkins put it way back in MI:2: “It’s not ‘Mission Difficult’, is it?”
It is at this point that I realised thatTom Cruiseisn’t exactly Gene Kelly so much as superhuman action hero Harold Lloyd, hanging from the clock in Safety Last! in 1923, dangling from the minute hand, preventing it from mounting towards 12, defying gravity and holding back time. That is what Cruise has done: forever young, forever fit, never saying die in the face of this preposterous Armageddon clock. What a rush!
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning screened at theCannes film festival, and is out in Australia on 17 May, the UK on 21 May, and the US on 23 May.