Do the Impossible: Mission Impossible The Final Reckoning

Their mission is to prevent the future I fear is coming.

Grade: B+

Tom Cruise and Hayley Atwell in Final Reckoning. Credit: Paramount.

Expect the impossible, no matter how absurd it may seem, and you’ll enjoy one hell of a ride.

Several months have passed since the last MI film, Dead Reckoning, and the super-AI called the Entity has infected every corner of the digital world. It’s turning fact to fiction and fiction into fact, destroying public trust and causing civil society to disintegrate. Martial law is the norm and nuclear war is imminent. For the first time, I actually cared if Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team succeeded in their mission. Their mission is to prevent the future I fear is coming. So, Hunt’s teammate Benji (Simon Pegg) said in Dead Reckoning, a super-AI has achieved sentience and is bent on taking over the world…well, it had to happen sometime didn’t it? You may have laughed or gulped when Benji said that or you may have done both. Hunt and his team’s mission is to prevent our apocalypse.

I’ve only seen three MI films, including Final Reckoning, but I can tell that it’s a film series where you shouldn’t expect total obedience to plausibility. In Final Reckoning alone, there’s not just one but two nuclear bombs. Hunt’s old nemesis Gabriel (Esai Morales) brings them out as traps for the heroes. You’ll wonder where he gets all the plutonium. He and Hunt also face off in two duelling biplanes above mountainous South African countryside. Oh, and beneath the mountains is a secret data vault that contains all human knowledge for preservation in the event of the apocalypse. The series’ trademark seems to be action so outrageously extreme and unbelievably death defying (trains going off mountain sides, helicopters flying into tunnels and Tom Cruise riding a motorcycle off a cliff) that they just seem…impossible.

That’s the whole point. Ethan Hunt and his team are heroes who you enjoy watching because they achieve the impossible. For them, no obstacle is too great, no villain too strong and no mission is too impossible. “Our lives are the sum of our choices,” Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) tells Hunt. Many times in your own life, you make the choice to say a challenge before you is not impossible and you race ahead to meet it, much like Hunt does. (There’s so many shots of him running in this film). In those moments, in your own small way, you, like Ethan Hunt, choose to accept your mission. You go to watch Hunt complete his missions, in between your own, whatever they may be (they don’t have to be saving the world), to renew your conviction that like him you can complete your missions. He and his friends help you believe that you too can achieve the impossible.

For those of you like me who have only just come to MI, to you Ethan Hunt may be like the man you only see that you love on his death bed, but Ethan Hunt still lives even if Final Reckoning is the last time Tom Cruise will play him. The film has so many flashbacks to past films and so many characters proclaim this is Hunt’s last mission that the film rings like a deliberate swan song. Hunt’s previous missions are all on video. You can go back through his life and see him achieve the impossible again and again.