‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’ sends Cruise out with a bloated bang

Although the title would give you that impression, everything and everyone connected to “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” has been extremely coy about this eighth installment in the franchise being the capper. Even the opening to the film – a hall-of-fame induction montage of highlights from the previous seven films – provides yet another mythological introduction for what we infer to be the final mission (should he choose to accept it …) for Ethan Hunt.

How long can one man continually double down at the blackjack table until he inevitably gambles away everything? And by extension, how long can the 62-year-old Tom Cruise expect to perform these death-defying stunts until he inevitably fails to defy their definition?

Of course, going out in a blaze of glory for our entertainment is probably Cruise’s preferred way to go out, just as long as it’s caught on camera.

Those lines of questioning propel the strategy behind “The Final Reckoning,” which is to go big or go home. Even the opening studio logos fly by at an unusually accelerated pace. That sense of urgency never ceases across the nearly three-hour runtime, with every loose end needing to be tied up.

It makes the creation of a few more loose ends all the more puzzling, with the earlier, mostly standalone entries now being connected to the events of this film through some convenient retconning. Jason Bourne may share his initials, but Ethan Hunt is the American James Bond. And just like the Daniel Craig era of 007, the sum of every previous adventure has led to this moment for Hunt.

The story jumps immediately from the end of “Dead Reckoning Part One” (the “Part One” has more or less been dropped at this point), with Ethan and his team in a race against time to find the sunken Russian submarine that contains the kill switch source code for the supervillain artificial intelligence known as The Entity.

It’s already taken command of most of the world’s nuclear warheads and has beaten Twitter at its own game – fully dismantling the line between fact and fiction by altering what everyone sees online. The world has been plunged into anarchy, with a common enemy that can’t be dealt with through traditional means.

To complete this mission, Ethan will need the full cooperation of the U.S. government, a body that’s put a bounty on his head more times than someone can count on one hand.

This leads to the introduction or return of several cast members, such as Angela Bassett as President Sloane; her cabinet (Nick Offerman, Holt McCallany, Charles Parnell, Mark Gatiss, and Janet McTeer); Hannah Waddingham as a U.S. Navy ship commander; and Tramell Tillman as a submarine captain.

Of course, there are also the more notable characters played by Simon Pegg, Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, Ving Rhames, Shea Whigham, and Esai Morales.

To accommodate a cast like this that would make Wes Anderson blush, co-writer and director Christopher McQuarrie doles out the exposition like a dealer at a poker table. Thankfully for the ensemble, there’s plenty to go around, as each hopscotch to a new location means a plan has to be devised, broken and improvised.

Everyone sits in a circle and waits their turn, one sentence at a time. It’s an amusing, overdramatic cheat to get around the “boring” parts, although it gets quite distractingly repetitive the more times it goes on.

McQuarrie and Cruise also overplay their hand at the sentimentality of this adventure, cramming several reminders of how much Ethan cares for his friends. “More is more” is obviously the mantra of this franchise, but less would have been more in this case.

The more you insist upon something, the less genuine it becomes, especially when it’s coming from someone like Cruise. He’s not a normal person with normal emotions, which makes him both an incredible movie star and impossible to fully empathize with.

Words and emotions are not the weapon of choice for this franchise, with its visual arsenal being just as fully stocked here as it has been in the previous few entries. Each setpiece would be considered the showstopping climax in any other action franchise. Here, they’re just one piece to this extremely kinetic puzzle.

A clear highlight would be Ethan’s solo descent into the submarine to retrieve the source code. It’s an almost wordless extended sequence, with panicky editing and heightened sound design playing on our fears of being at the bottom of the ocean.

Then there’s also a moment when Ethan/Cruise dangles from a biplane thousands of feet from the ground. It’s astounding that within the context of this franchise, that statement seems pretty tame. But it’s anything but that in practice, the wind whipping as one finger separates Ethan from the plane and the ground.

“The Final Reckoning” will play significantly better later once you’re able to watch like a kid again and skip all the talking bits. Then again, this movie should also never be seen on anything less than an IMAX screen. Anything less would deserve the same level of vitriol that David Lynch has for telephones.

My cynicism leads me to believe that this isn’t the end of this franchise and that Ethan Hunt will return one day. But for the sake of argument, let’s say this is the end. In that case, mission accomplished.

Paramount Pictures will release “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” in theaters nationwide on May 23.

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Eden Prairie resident Hunter Friesen is a film critic who owns and operates The Cinema Dispatch, a website where he writes reviews, essays, and more. He currently serves as the president of the Minnesota Film Critics Association and travels the globe covering film festivals both big and small. To view his entire body of work, you can visit his website and Instagram.