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When they started out the Mission: Impossible movies were partly defined by how different they all were. Each of the first three had their own director and, while they were built around a shared conceit and had some of the same characters, they all came out quite varied in tone. Since Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol they have settled into a bit of a groove though, especially with Christopher McQuarrie calling the shots on the last three. However, this last one, even though it also comes from McQuarrie, is once again very unlike any of its predecessors. 

This is particularly unexpected because this was initially planned to be a very close follow up to what came immediately before. The last one was called Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part 1 (although it was the seventh in the series) and this was supposed to be ‘Dead Reckoning, Part 2’. For creative or commercial reasons though (MI:DRp1 did not do well at the box office but that might be Barbenheimer’s fault) this was changed to Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. It remains to be seen if this will be the last in the run as the title suggests, but I suspect it won’t be. McQuarrie evidently thinks it is though (he leans heavily on the full cinematic history of Tom Cruise’s lead character Ethan Hunt) and that is presumably why he’s made some changes. He has really gone for a big finish here and has succeeded it making it feel more epic and more consequential. The stakes and the tension are both higher too, and I get the impression that he didn’t want it to be stylistically akin to any other Mission: Impossible, choosing rather to go for something in the vein of Peckinpah or Friedkin.

As a result, for good or for bad, this film is not what I expected and personally I fear something has got lost in the ambition. Things have got a little bit away from him. The reviews have been mixed with some people saying it is too dour but for me, if he was going for a more earnest vibe it is not as serious as it needed to be. Empire Magazine was one of the publications that applauded it, saying that there are parts that with a less capable filmmaker could feel silly or over-the-top but that’s the problem; beneath the grave tones and portentousness it is a bit silly and over the top. Yet like Empire, it doesn’t think it is. There some groundbreaking action sequences but narratively it feels so heavy that it might just collapse. Perhaps with a less capable filmmaker it would have done, I’ll happily give it that.

To be honest it is almost as though there actually was a whole Part 2 to Dead Reckoning that we never saw. A lot has apparently happened within the narrative between that film and this one and in an attempt to bridge this gap entirely of their own making there is a huge amount on needless and leaden exposition filling out the first half. At the same time other plot threads such as Hayley Atwell’s Grace joining the Agency have been largely skipped over, or like the woman from Hunt’s past that we previously learnt was the whole reason he is here in the first place as well as being key to his animosity toward the latest big bad guy, have been dropped entirely.

With all of this, I am sad to say this is not anywhere near as enjoyable as the best of these films have been. The two standout scenes under the sea and up in the sky are absolutely incredible and genuinely move cinema forward with their technique and audacity, but even they go on a bit. 

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning certainly has successes; it is gripping, the performances are generally very good and the set pieces when they come are magnificent. I’m not sure that as a whole it is a success though. McQuarrie and Cruise, who have collaborated closely on these and a number of movies, have tried to make their Endgame with this but have ultimately shown, like Lucasfilm before them, that doing something designed to perfectly cap a run of big movies is not always easy. Whether you choose to accept it or not, the Mission: Impossible series started loose and free but has apparently ended confused and unbalanced.