Mission: Impossible was once upheld as one of the great spy franchises, displacing Bourne and Bond.
For a while in the last decade, I thought they were doing better Bond movies than the official franchise.
Ironic that the series should come to an end(?) with an overlong, mythology-obsessed finale.
At least Ethan Hunt had no time to die…
This movie is a real disappointment.
I was not a fan of the previous instalment either - I have tried to rewatch it, and I dropped out halfway in.
The movie is off game - both for the series and for franchise helmer Christopher McQuarrie.
The opening act is a dump of exposition. We flit between multiple locations and characters as the film tries to set up all the key players and the central caper.
Once the film starts really moving, with the threat of a Cold-turned-Hot war between the US and Russia, the film finds its footing. Tramell Tillman brings a welcome sliver of charm as the submarine captain stuck in the middle of duel with a larger Russian submarine.
This whole section, of Ethan and his team in a race against time to reach the sunken submarine, is vintage.
But even here there is a weird sense of diminishing returns.
I felt a weird dissatisfaction from that sequence - the stakes are almost too high. He has to go from the bottom of the arctic ocean to the surface in the Bering Strait.
This extends to the final set pieces - the movie throws so many stakes at you that the denouement feels like de-heightening.
One noticeable missing component is humour.
Post-Ghost Protocol, the films had managed a tonal balancing act - a deadpan awareness of how ridiculous Hunt’s escapades are.
By contrast, this movie is almost completely self-serious.
So obsessed with plot, and shoving characters toward a final showdown, and terrified of losing the viewer’s attention.
We are also burdened with constant flash- and callbacks to previous movies.
It was meant as a quip earlier, but the film reminded me so much of No Time To Die - overburdened with plot and a broader narrative that just makes everything so much smaller.
Its ambition should make for something bigger.
There is an universe where an AI villain is terrifying - not only terms of the ways it is affecting and will affect our world, but also in terms of the series.
Mission: Impossible started out as a play on con artists - making people fall for a false sense of reality. The Entity is the logical extension of the franchise’s original premise.
Finally the IMF, and Hunt, are faced with a foe which can match and overwhelm their capacity to deceive.
This is a thematically fascinating movie - it is not powerful as a viewing experience.
What makes it worse is that the film also has a human villain it does not know what to do with.
Esai Morales, a fine actor, is burdened with a cypher of a character.
Who is Gabriel? Why should we care?
We are given a vague sense of shared history - but nothing else. And since he is no longer linked with the Entity, he is just another cog in the machine, another signifier of the film’s bloat.
The same goes for the leading lady.
Hayley Atwell is a great actress - in another era she would be a mega-star. A gifted thief, she feels like a partial redo of Thandiwe Newton’s character from Part 2. She also feels like an attempt at crafting a new non-romantic love internet for Ethan.
They have spent so little meaningful time together. When she saves him, it feels off. I did not get the kind of catharsis of them being together.
As the film moves toward its finale, it is hard not to compare it to the climaxes of the previous McQ instalments.
The final battle with the villain, the final catharsis lacks punch. Part of the reason is that Gabriel means nothing to the audience. But if you have watched any of the last couple of instalments, it will feel like deja vu.
While the setpieces in the back half of the movie are good, there are few real highlights:
My favourite moment was a hilariously abrupt death for a villain that feels completely in step with the previous movies.
I was mildly unhappy when the series became the McQ show.
Gone was the franchise’s sense of eclecticism, of adaptability and variation.
What could Doug Lima’s or Joseph Kosinski (to pick a few Cruise collaborators) have made of the series formula?
If Cruise makes good on his promise to make another movie, hopefully it is with a refresh behind the camera.
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