After thirty years, the spark reaches the end of its long fuse; the question facing us is whether it triggers a properly big bang, or simply fizzles out. For one thing, we might have wanted a more dynamic keeper of the M:I flame over this past decade than Christopher McQuarrie: where the sensationalist Brian De Palma seized upon this spy scenario to bombard the screen with spectacle, and the erstwhile animator Brad Bird (in 2011's Ghost Protocol) approached the material as the basis of a live-action cartoon, writer-turned-director McQuarrie has used his stewardship to bring in knottier plotting - more conversation, more complication - as if the TV show that inspired this series wasn't some brisk, peppy Cold War diversion but House of Cards. Far from a natural showman, this filmmaker has set about his task in the manner of a stressy events manager, overseeing the construction of ever more grandiose story scaffolding that producer-star Tom Cruise - the real prime mover here, as evinced by the opening credit "A Tom Cruise Production, starring Tom Cruise" - can dangle off one-handed. That task has got trickier with each new instalment: in the past week, my social media has been awash with the disappointed reactions of folks who've revisited 2023's Dead Reckoning - Part One only to find it lacking, and the opening stretch of The Final Reckoning continues in much the same haphazard vein, comprehensively flubbing the business of scene- and stakes-setting, and instead coming up clutching false starts and loose ends. You could drive yourself mad pondering the fate of Ving Rhames in the new film's first reels: one minute, he's happily soldering kit at his IMF station, the next he's hooked up to a drip in hospital, and a moment later he's hunched, sweating, over a ticking timebomb. The real mission with these films has been ensuring their chicanery remains at least semi-coherent, at least for the all-important opening weekend; The Final Reckoning, alas, hasn't even got that far.
Through this fraying narrative carapace, you can at least spy why the franchise has alighted upon artificial intelligence as its ultimate big bad. As The Final Reckoning opens, big tech has divided the world so completely that nuclear war is back on the agenda, and martial law has been imposed in several nations; AI is as much a marker of where the world is now as, say, the Eurostar was back at the time of the series' first film in 1996, albeit an element that signifies division rather than connection. Cruise, by contrast, has remained steadfast (and business-savvy) in his desire to pull together a franchise that means all things to all people: of our time, in as much as the M:Is have paid lip service to the concerns and conflicts of our time, but not so much of it that they can't serve as Saturday night escapism. Early on here, Cruise's Ethan Hunt wins over one assailant by outlining an altogether utopian endgame (no nations, no dogma, no rival ideologies); his grand plan involves powering down the Internet, which will presumably have the positive knock-on effect of getting everyone back into cinemas. Right to its closing frames, this series has made much of the IMF agents' ability to slip unnoticed into crowds of strangers: what better place to achieve that than the back rows of the IMAX? This profession of unity is an intriguing story idea, and one that hinges on Hunt's team overcoming their own differences to work together as a team: lots of handshakes and hugs, a reunion with a minor player from the very first film, and a setpiece that depends on everybody coordinating their diaries to arrive at the same remote place at the exact same time. That will be trickier than first thought, not least as the M:I ensemble has expanded with each instalment, and only more rapidly after the franchise set up shop in London, availing itself of the best of BAFTA. The sense we're watching a classier Fast & Furious (or pricier Slow Horses) grows with each new familiar face: Mark Gatiss! Nick Offerman! Janet McTeer! Katy O'Brian! The Ted Lasso lady! Yet much as the human villain (Esai Morales, all but an afterthought this time round) plays second fiddle to a machine, so many of these players have nothing to do bar growl their dialogue and stand around watching Tom Cruise in a Tom Cruise production. More than ever this time, everything goes through Tom.
There is a lot of dialogue to growl, admittedly; again, McQuarrie exerts whatever influence he can here, but this also leaves The Final Reckoning as by far the talkiest film of the entire series. It's Hunt asking his superiors to trust him, time and again, despite his broadly unimpeachable track record over the previous seven films; it's those same superiors muttering darkly among themselves; it's Simon Pegg coming up with more of his fanboying schtick; it's extensive exposition, and - more worryingly - lengthy descriptions of events and missions we never get to see. There is so much preamble in the new film you honestly begin to wonder: did the insurers pull their cover after Cruise broke his ankle shooting 2018's Fallout? Is that why so much of The Final Reckoning sounds like people poring at length over a binding legal document's terms and conditions? Is this a Mission: Impossible movie, or some Mission: Impossible-themed podcast? In this cut, there isn't an identifiable setpiece for fully eighty minutes - four-fifths of the original film's running time - and those that come along belatedly won't make anybody's M:I Top Five: some sploshing around inside a sunken submarine, more stifling than stirring; a subterranean shootout during which we learn you can apparently plug in AI devices in caves (?); a final round of stunt flying that merely reminds one how much better Top Gun: Maverick understood its assignment. Were it not for the inevitable NDAs in place, The Final Reckoning might have generated some interesting chatter, on the topic of how a production overseen by a megastar operating close to his commercial peak drifted so far off-course: this does not have the look of an event movie where the assembled creatives were on the same page. (The endless, criss-crossing onscreen talk may be a barely encrypted reflection of behind-the-scenes disagreement on the ultimate direction of travel.) Either way, that spark is now non-existent, and the explosives have been stuffed not with gelignite but flannel and waffle; there's so little holding The Final Reckoning together it looks to have imploded under the weight of its own infrastructure. Cruise can stand unbowed on as many tall buildings as he likes to sell it, but this franchise limps over the finish line in tatters, and summer 2025 opens with a very strange and sorry sort of mess.
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
No comments:
Post a Comment