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The Mission: Impossible franchise, whether you like Tom Cruise or not, remains some of the best action flicks out there, so it’s with a fair amount of excitement that fans are eagerly awaiting the release of The Final Reckoning.
Running in the footsteps of the last two films directed by Christopher McQuarrie, Fallout and Dead Reckoning, the final chapter in this 29-year movie series is another high-voltage, gargantuanly envisioned test of Cruise’s bodily limits.
With every passing Mission: Impossible, the question becomes less “Will Ethan Hunt survive” than “Will Tom Cruise?”
Sixty-two-year-old Cruise still sprints across London’s Westminster Bridge past Big Ben like he’s a flesh-and-bones missile, and that’s not even mentioning the film’s showcase stunt – Cruise climbing into a biplane thousands of feet in the air above South Africa and then dive-bombing it as his skin looks like it’s about to peel off.
Whatever Kool-Aid the Scientologists gave Cruise, it’s working.
Yip, the new film is non-stop Cruise madness, and despite the ridiculousness of some of the stunts, it’s still better than anything Marvel has come up with in the last 17 years.
At two hours and 49 minutes – the lengthiest mission yet – Final Reckoning is an endurance race in itself, but it never lets the energy level drop a millimetre, so the film clips along nicely. With cool hand-to-hand combat and athletic and funny running scenes, the story keeps on finding new ways to tickle audiences.
The ensemble of oddballs – Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg’s neurotic Benji, Atwell’s glaring Grace, Henry Czerny’s Mojave-dry Kittridge and Esai Morales’ unhinged assassin Gabriel – is as rip-roaring company as ever. The locations of the movie – London, Alaska, Africa – offer a beautiful background for Cruise’s death-defying feats.
Whether it’s really the ‘final’ film in the Mission series is up for debate, but we reckon that while Cruise can still run, jump, fight, fall, dive, and make serious bank doing it, there will likely be another.
