Final — oh yeah, sure. How is the rickety Hollywood mansion-shack going to stand with one less pile column to hold it up? It becomes clear: Tom Cruise hasn’t just been saving the world from destruction these past four decades, he’s been saving the Industry from obsolescence, in an escalating, breathless race against time. Unfortunately, the march of entropy is hardly done with him, or it, or us, and though Cruise might get to climb atop planes and trains in London or Cairo or the canyons of South Africa, all we get is this crummy movie.
This is not one of those reviews that will be speculating on whether Cruise will “stick the landing,” or whether this jot in the franchise will finally breach the $1 billion B.O. bubble — as if we all will benefit, like National Amusements stockholders. That sort of extra-cinematic P.R. horse race crap — the attempt to get us to feel as though we’re “in on” the event, whether or not sitting through the movie itself is a patience-torturing slog — is a large part of why franchise blockbusters are always a dubious cultural phenomena: They’re built on sand, they gather hype-momentum derived from the madness of crowds, and they rely so much on earlier films they can be unreadable to the uninitiated. (And we all have better things to do than to study old Tom Cruise films; I skipped a few MIs in the middle, and have never suspected I’d missed much.) This new one, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, in fact, leans so heavily on the entire seven-film backlog behind it, spooning in remember-this decades-old film clips as though we should all have this stuff front-of-brain, that it’s essentially four-fifths of a new film.
Cruise isn’t terribly interesting to watch, however doggedly he’s paired with actresses he could’ve fathered (an age-old Hollywood tradition).
The Mission: Impossible franchise has always had a particular yen for seeming a lot more brainy and narratively complex than it actually is. If you pay even a little attention, it’s quickly clear that the pseudo-stories are really 75% speed-talking gobbledygook, like the physics equations on movie scientists’ whiteboards. You sit down to any of them with the zeal of taking an AP calculus test, with the subsequent feeling of not knowing why you bothered. There’s certainly little attempt at character or dramaturgy. The scripts (in the last four entries, written or co-written by director Christopher McQuarrie) are considered the real stunt-work, famously difficult to execute but for all the wrong reasons — just convoluted Tinkertoy erections requiring tens of thousands of man-hours and millions of paycheck dollars, yet barely scripts at all, closer to Pentagon concept-of-operations scenarios written by an over-caffeinated AI. If you charted these screenplays, which I’m sure is a thing, you’d see an indelible pattern: exposition and more exposition — so much explaining you want to sew their lips shut — occasionally interrupted by a pointless chase or fistfight, often atop moving vehicles.
(Oh OK, FYI, re: what happens in this eighth in the series: Tom’s Ethan Hunt continues his efforts to prevent the amok AI they all insist on calling The Entity from taking over the world’s nuclear arsenals and triggering Doomsday, by swimming in the Arctic Ocean and climbing on the outside of biplanes, etc. Small nuclear weapons keep showing up, as if you can order them on Etsy, and there’s a lot of business about terabytes and cruciform keys. Hayley Atwell, as a pickpocket who looks like a model, has a great movie face. Simon Pegg, not so much.)
This weird, mythic-post-Cold War, junior-James Bond paradigm, a childishly preposterous Rube Goldberg fantasy of faux-espionage so many decades out of style, probably simply boils down to Tom and his distractingly boyish hair. But he’s not even an actor anymore, merely an iconic parameter in the robo-text, a steely-eyed body that might as well be an AI avatar, hustled through its paces like a drone on a test run. Industrially, of course, he’s a corporate entity unto himself, a pillar of the common modern daydream; his retirement is all but unimaginable. None of which makes him terribly interesting to watch, however doggedly he’s paired with actresses he could’ve fathered (an age-old Hollywood tradition), or how hard his stunt team works. (I’d have to be a Trump voter to buy the publicity snow job about the CGI-free risks taken by Cruise — a 60-odd-year-old man who singlehandedly supports a billion-dollar movie franchise with a liability insurance tab that’s probably outrageous already but would, if the tall tales were true, overshadow most small countries’ GDPs.)
All the same, to be nitpicky about it, the new film takes aim at your innocent viewer’s credulity and pelts it with dung: virtually every scene and cut leaves you with a question mark. Characters are shunted from locale to locale in a cut; cheap editing shortcuts are filthy on the ground. Far from being expertly engineered, the movie feels happenstantial, like the writers’ room made it up day to day and could barely keep up with the shoot. Often, Tom is running but we’re not exactly sure why. Action films are supposed to be all about visual precision, modulation, and surprise, but McQuarrie’s films are as dull as exercise routines.
When you start noticing that every actress under 40 must wear a tank top, you realize there’s no way to watch these movies and not feel stupid. So, you resist, and perhaps read the franchise, which was initiated in the mid-’90s, around the same time as Yahoo!, Netscape, and Microsoft Explorer, as a parable of our own dizzying grapple with the virtual tech that outpaces us everyday. Tom’s vein-popping battles echo our experiences, every time we sweat out double authentication on multiple devices just to see our bank balance, or, more to the point, confront the hellish machinations we must perform every time we’re told our personal information has been silently, invisibly stolen. But maybe it’s just a certain type of movie … a cinematic megafauna that tramples the foliage so other movie varieties starve and die, and whose ecosphere spoilage, and monstrous spoor deposits, are slowly turning the rainforest into a wasteland. ❖
Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.
