I don’t know if there’s a better way to describe Christopher McQuarrie’s tenure as Mission: Impossible franchise-runner than “Flanderization.” If you’re not familiar with the term, it comes from the occasionally too-clever fan wiki TV Tropes and originated from an observation made about The Simpsons’ Ned Flanders and how, over the show’s decades-long run, he slowly morphed from a do-gooder neighbor foil to Homer’s boorishness into a caricature of American evangelicals. Such is the nature of Flanderization: Once a series goes on long enough, its essential traits become so exaggerated that it only vaguely resembles what it was at its inception. This is the arc that the Mission: Impossible movies have gone on ever since McQuarrie paired with Tom Cruise – who appears in sequence in the opening credits as the producer and above-title star – back in 2015 for Rogue Nation, which remains the best of their work together simply because it still has some Brad Bird in its DNA. Since then, they’ve jettisoned all of the non-action elements that accompany white-knuckle thrills in the concept of “entertainment” – things like character, humor, structure, and so on – because they’d get in the way of McQuarrie and Cruise’s momentum.
There’s always a reluctance to compare the latter-day Mission: Impossible movies and the heyday of Brian De Palma and John Woo, perhaps because they’re just “too different” or whatever. For my purposes, the good news is that Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning invites comparisons as that this may be the final film in the franchise (the film is as coy about that as Cruise is), so there’s a lot of bow-tying for McQuarrie to do before Cruise ascends to heaven on a flaming chariot. All of it is silly, given that no one cares about the lore of these movies beyond getting excited when Luther (Ving Rhames) shows up to bro out with Ethan Hunt (Cruise), and the levels of pedantic retconning reach truly shameless heights. First, there’s the matter of what’s animating Shea Whigham’s CIA antagonist (could it be a family affair?); then there’s the revelation that whatever the hell Philip Seymour Hoffman was after in the third installment is dramatically relevant to what’s going on and was never really a JJ Abrams macguffin (and to be fair, this is the funniest rejection of the “Mystery Box” TED Talk possible). Worst of all, McQuarrie thinks we have to know – that we’re just dying to find out – what happened to the guy at the computer terminal that Cruise hacked in the first one after he came back with his coffee. I’m not kidding when I say that a solid chunk of the second and third acts are devoted to this. This, as Ned Flanders once described Lisa Simpson, is the answer to a question that no one asked, perhaps to distract from how dull the storyline is this time.
As it’s a direct sequel – long ago, this movie was once known as Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two before someone at Paramount finally realized they’d made some lovely word salad out of a marquee feature’s title – Final Reckoning is burdened with resolving its predecessor’s plot, which is often a jarring transition for a more episodic franchise. Even the most serialized elements of the Bond franchise in the Craig years couldn’t stop Eon from introducing new antagonists along the way, but, much like everything else when one compares the IMF to 007’s MI6, Hunt gets the short end of the stick. We’re still stuck with the rogue AI known as the Entity, which has now wormed its way into the nuclear powers’ arsenals and is ready to bring about Judgement Day (somewhere, John Connor is getting tingles), and Gabriel (Esai Morales), the former henchman for the artificial intelligence, who fell out of its favor when he failed at his mission in the last installment. The team has been whittled down to its core, with Benji (Simon Pegg) being the only other person besides Hunt and Luther to debut in the series outside of the Reckonings, and there’s not much time for Hayley Atwell and Pom Klementiff to do trust-falls or bonding exercises. There’s a sunken submarine to find and a rogue AI to kill. From frame one, it’s all gas and no brakes because if the Mission: Impossible bus slows down for a minute, someone in the audience might think about what’s happening and then ka-boom.
There’s a hyperactivity to McQuarrie’s storytelling that pairs strangely with Cruise’s posturing that Ethan Hunt must, above all else, be a long-suffering flagellant, torturing himself for the sins of all mankind in a series of ever-escalating obstacles. This leads to what I’ve come to think of as “ante fatigue,” in which the stakes get raised so high in a given action sequence that it becomes comical. Take, for instance, the scene in which Hunt has to dive down to the Russian submarine. He’s already had to beg the President in person for the chance to do this so that he can commandeer an aircraft carrier so that he can then commandeer a submarine (which he has to jump to from Ospreys to avoid Russian fighter jets, nearly starting World War III in the Bering Streit). He has experimental diving gear, which will only do so much to offset the pressure, and no real way of depressurizing once he finishes his task. He gets into the sub, which is perched on a ledge above the ocean floor, and is able to restore the power with an external battery. The problem is that the sub is half-flooded, and the movements from the machinery have caused the sub to roll on the cliffside. If that’s not enough, he has to traverse the torpedo bay, full of still-armed projectiles thrown from their racks by the sub’s movement with only a meager amount of water, keeping them suspended enough not to hit the floor with enough force to explode. That sounds bad enough, but trust me, McQuarrie finds an additional fifteen ways to raise the stakes – a truly impossible mission that Hunt only survives, once again, because of dumb luck.
This is what I consider Flanderization. In the De Palma and Woo days, Hunt wasn’t just lucky; he was competent. It doesn’t just strain credulity for him to be bailed out by fate at every single turn, this choice actively harms his character, which only became consistently well-defined when McQuarrie and Cruise forgot that his emo posturing in Ghost Protocol was a ruse meant to fool his enemies into thinking that his wife was dead and continued that portrayal into Rogue Nation. More importantly, it robs the story of the audience-sustaining little victories that come along the way, in which scenes are resolved by his skill as a secret agent rather than a last-second Hail Mary or an intervention from an off-screen character. There’s never a grand plan or some sleight-of-hand turn in which Hunt reveals that he’s in control: He’s a purely reactive character, paired with his best antagonist in the form of a computer program that knows exactly what he’s going to do, in which he has to rely on the unpredictability of others to keep his one-in-a-million shot at victory alive.
McQuarrie tries to tie Hunt’s previous adventures into the Entity’s origin story, but it’s too little done far too late, as it’s not really a motivating animus when it’s only revealed to the viewer at what would be the four-hour mark if you combined the two parts into a Whole Boring Affair. He’s not interested in vengeance, nor is he interested in saving the lives of those around him, nor is it a “final reckoning” before retirement. It’s simply a task that’s there. Compared to what he did in Top Gun: Maverick, this is a massive step back for Cruise, in which he’s stoic to the point of constipation and that million-dollar smile concealed behind an undeserved grimace.
The worst part of all of this is that the Stunt – you know, the one defining feature of the McQuarrie era, in which Cruise and the director engaged in a kind of brinkmanship to prove to Brad Bird that the star could do more than climb tall buildings – is trampled over by the director’s insistence on cross-cutting between the two most uninteresting sources of tension. One part of the team is trying to stoically defuse a bomb, while the other is engaged in some IT work while trying to keep Simon Pegg from drowning in his own blood. This is all well and good, but when you have to cut away from the Stunt, in which Tom Fucking Cruise dangles from the fucking upper wing of a fucking biplane, far above the green-covered crags of a Congolese mountain range filmed with eye-popping color in full-frame IMAX, you’re making an active decision to prioritize plot over spectacle.
I have bad news for you, guys: You chose to do the exact opposite four movies ago, and this is as much of a betrayal of the latter-day M:I ethos as it would be for Ethan Hunt to suddenly become good at his job (if you’re going to do Nolan-style cross-cutting, at least ensure that all three parts are as interesting as each other). At least in the last one, you paused when he did the stunt, having flanderized the entire series down to a headline-generating stunt surrounded by a bunch of padding. Otherwise, the capstone to your nearly three-hour sequel to a three-hour seventh installment of a franchise that should have ended, perhaps, after the sixth, will just feel like a waste of time.