“Madam President, in order to save billions of lives, it is imperative that you sign off on nuclear attacks on London, Paris, Moscow, Beijing, Islamabad, Delhi, Pyongyang and Tel Aviv, and sacrifice one American city as contrition.”
“You know as the President of the United States of America, I could never do that.”
“I understand completely. We’ll nuke two American cities and spare Tel Aviv.”
Bad! I’d consider myself somewhat ambivalent on the Mission: Impossible franchise as a whole—even the good ones are sort of patchy—but as derivative as Dead Reckoning was, I considered it still a jolly good time at the movies. This however is interminable. The first sequence explains what’s going on as if you’re going to suddenly be prompted to press start, but then every sequence after that, for what feels like three hours, is just characters saying over and over again how Tom Cruise (I mean… Ethan Hunt) is the ultimate human, not simply humanity’s chosen defender but the only one who could possibly defeat the antagonist. And that everything he had ever done was correct, even though it didn’t seem like it at the time. And if they’re not saying that, they’re recounting that the stakes are the complete annihilation of all life on Earth to the point where it feels completely meaningless.
And bizarrely for a film that goes to such efforts to heighten the stakes, the action sequences badly lack them, because Tom Cruise (er, Ethan Hunt) is an invincible godlike being. There’s a lengthy underwater sequence that’s tense because Cruise is told repeatedly “if you do this, or that, you’ll 100% die” but then he breaks those rules and is completely fine. Then there’s an entire biplane sequence over a macguffin that legitimately makes no sense because it was already established that Cruise was trying to give the baddie the macguffin anyway!!!
It does end in the most hilarious dispatching of an antagonist since probably Beyond The Black Rainbow, though. I seriously couldn’t believe how goofy it was.
If you like any of the non-Tom Cruise characters, well, they get pretty much nothing to do. Excited to see Pom Klementieff again? Well, her character stands around to say a sentence in French now and again and to get absolutely no closure—and to be honest, she’s one of the lucky ones.
Also this movie ends without Tom Cruise even doing what he said he was going to do? They spend all this time talking about how destroying the “Entity” would “destroy cyberspace”—literally they never refer to the internet, it’s always “cyberspace”—so I was kind of hoping for an Escape from LA ending here (greatest ending in cinema history) but no.
The only reason that I’d assume this movie keeps the door slightly open for a sequel after all is that Tom Cruise was certain that this was finally going to be the one where a stunt killed him and he could finally rest.
No such luck for him, but I don’t know why they have to punish the rest of us for it.
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