Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025)

Director: Christopher McQuarrie

Cast: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg*

Have I Seen it Before: Never, and maybe never again?

Did I Like It: Here’s a confession, if I haven’t already made it in previous reviews for the Mission: Impossible films. Most people are never more delighted during these films than when Ethan Hunt (Cruise) dangles off of increasingly precarious things. That’s the brand. That’s why the vast majority posters for this movie show a biplane flying upside down with Cruise holding on by one hand. That will gets butt into seats**.

I, on the other hand, am never more delighted in this series when they make references to the original Mission: Impossible (1996). I have a weird affection for that uneven first entry with the byzantine plot, even when I’m willing to admit that Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) is likely the most satisfying entry, pound for pound. From Alec Baldwin’s muttering about the CIA Black Vault in Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015) through the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby) being the heiress to Max (Vanessa Redgrave), all the way to the return of Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) in Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (2023), McQuarrie either has the same soft spot for the first film as I do, or had an interest in making the story of Ethan Hunt one where what came before has an impact on what is still to come. A valid ambition in my eyes, either way.

The references to the original film abound here as well. I found the revelations that Jasper Briggs (Shea Whigham) is actually the son of Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) to be a little anemic, especially when it confirms finally and beyond all doubt that these films don’t share a continuity with the original television series.

But then there’s William Donloe (Rolf Saxon). The hapless mark in the aforementioned Black Vault, he was just a guy who knew how to manage a database. A man after my own heart, who go mistreated.

And he’s the secret heroe of the series, and steals every moment he’s in this film.

I am delighted, in that much at least, and that’s more than enough to recommend a movie.

Is this really the end for Ethan Hunt and company? Aside from dispensing with Luther Stickell in the first act, the film doesn’t seem like it wants to commit to a valedictory for the dangling man. This is as close as we’re going to get, and I hope it is the end. If for no other reason than I find it increasingly hard to believe that Scientology can give a man the tools he needs to do his own stunts into his 70s. This would be a good place to stop.

But if they want to do a spinoff series with Donloe, I’ll be the first one there on opening weekend.

*It took me all of my patience not to list Rolf Saxon in the main cast. More on that later. Also learned that he narrated the American broadcasts of Teletubbies. So there’s that.

**Enough butts in seats to cover a $400 million budget? One wonders, but maybe that’s a discussion for a different time.

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

Director: Christopher McQuarrie

Cast: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg

Have I Seen it Before: Nope, but if the one religious figure who takes a clear stand on the vagaries of motion blurring wants me to do something, I do it. Especially when it means coming out to the theater for his nearly 300 million dollar* epic. If he starts making other demands of me, we’re just going to have to take those on a case by case basis.

Did I Like It: I like it when the following things happen to me:

- Spy movies make me feel like I could engage in espionage and intrigue, even though there is a plethora of airtight evidence that I would be absolutely crushed by any job with even slightly higher pressure than the one I currently have.

- I am witness to Tom Cruise proceeding with a series of increasingly preposterous stunts, which will inevitably culminate in what I can only assume is his somewhat hilarious demise.

- I get to sit in a darkened, air conditioned room and eat M & Ms. (Really, this would qualify when I get to sit in a brightly lit room with M & Ms, but they work even better in the dark)

- Mission: Impossible sequels make reference to the first—and for my money, the best—Mission: Impossible (1996).

On those qualifications, the movie is an unparalleled success, especially the last one, where with the inclusion of Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) this feels like—more than any other film in the series—a direct sequel to the original. Sure, the plot may feel a little saggy in the middle and a little convoluted, but the impulse to label that as a complain about the movie should really be redefined as a return to form.

* Studios, if you keep doing that… Forget it. It’s not worth getting into it right now, but one imagines I’m going to have a lot more to same by the time Barbie and Oppenheimer roll into town.

Paul (2011)

Director: Greg Mottola

Cast: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Seth Rogen, Jason Bateman

Have I Seen It Before?: Certainly.

Did I like it?: It feels fundamentally unfair, but when Pegg and Frost headline a film, one can’t help but long for Edgar Wright to be at the helm of the film. They should be allowed to work on their own projects, right?

Also, I can’t help but feel that as Simon Pegg becomes more and more successful with mainstream audiences that his nerd credibility has also become diminished.

But to judge the film on its actual merits, and not some artificial sense of its context among other films…

To its credit, the special effects are pretty subtly great. Nearly ten years after the release, Paul (voiced by Rogen) remains a fairly believable CGI creature. That’s no small feat. Greg Mottola is fine as director, and the whole film works as an innocuous comedy. And yet, the whole film never quite launches past the orbit of other American films of the last fifteen years or so (call it the Apatow era, if that helps). It also trucks in dread “reference rumor,” that same style of writing that fueled “The Big Bang Theory” through 912 seasons. Here it is supposed to be enough that much of the film takes place at Sand Diego ComicCon, but the context of why we appreciate the things celebrated there isn’t quite there. Somebody like Edgar Wright would have made one of the best close encounter movies of all time, and it would be thoroughly amusing as something of an afterthought.

I guess I did manage to find a way to bring the specter of Edgar Wright back into this review. I guess I’m still irate that he was chased off of Ant-Man (2015) is all.

But, again, that doesn’t really talk about this film, does it? The script came from Simon Pegg (and Frost), who wrote those superlative Cornetto films, you’d think something would leak in, but it again, remains just a comedy. Had Pegg and Frost not been in the film at all, I probably wouldn’t be thinking along these lines at all.

Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation (2015)

Director: Christopher McQuarrie

Cast: Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson

Have I Seen it Before: Oddly enough, I think this is one film in the series that I somehow missed in the theater, thus I’m remembering it the least upon this screening.

Did I Like It: Yeah…

On that note, I’ve come to some conclusions about the Mission: Impossible series as a whole. Like the television series that begat it, the movies suffer ever so slightly when watched in succession. The format is relatively unchanging, especially after the series fell under the auspices of J.J. Abrams and his company, Bad Robot effective with Mission: Impossible III (2006). There is little variation in these films. Sure, the ubiquitous “your mission, should you choose to accept it” scene in this film harkens back to its televised analog roots, before pulling the rug out from under us and enveloping super spy Ethan Hunt (Cruise) into a web of villainy before the first reel is over. That’s refreshing and does its level headed best to renew interest in this new story.

From there, however, that twist doesn’t hold up. It gives way to yet another survey of internal difficulties in the CIA that Hunt will nullify with his brazenness. What’s more, the proceedings have continued to grow a little pat in other ways. There are masks. Tom Cruise dangles from improbable heights. Ving Rhames shows up. There’s a throwaway reference to the first film that floats in the air for an instant before evaporating just as quickly as it arrived. Incidentally, those scant references are usually my favorite part of one of these movies, Cruise conscientiously defying the forces of gravity be damned.

All of that isn’t even meant as a criticism of this film or the series as a whole, really. This film, too, is a pleasant way to spend two hours. It may be better to do so every couple of years and then not think too much about it afterwards.

At the time of this writing, McQuarrie is hard at work on the seventh and eighth film in the series, his third and fourth. This series once was a showcase for great (or in some cases, potentially great) directors to play around in a tried and true genre. Now that McQuarrie is here to stay, let’s hope he gets bored and decides to throw us a few more curveballs in the process.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011)

Director: Brad Bird

Cast: Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Paula Patton

Have I Seen it Before: As my reviews for the other movies in this series have already mentioned, I’m a sucker for Tom Cruise dangling improbably from things. As he ages, he hasn’t slowed down. It may be the single greatest argument for Scientology (or, at least, the elite levels of Scientology) that is out there. One can not argue with results. But, to answer the question, I’ll probably be there opening weekend until Cruise is well into his 70s, or if he becomes completely Clear, whichever happens first.

At it’s most basic, good storytelling is a study in obstacle. Get somebody stuck up in a tree, and show how they get down, and that’s about as tight of a story as one can tell. With that in mind, there may be no better graduate level course in this theory than the Dubai sequence of this film. A typical Mission story would have the IMF under the leadership of Ethan Hunt (Cruise) fooling the assassins and the arms dealers. 

Passing through the prism of Brad Bird’s brain, complications pile onto complications to the point where Hunt is climbing the tallest building ever conceived of by man one handed, while a sand storm looms in the distance, and everything else in the scheme is going completely wrong as well.

Here, we have a filmmaker so thoroughly in command of his craft allowed to work magic in a major motion picture franchise. Brad Bird is a better, more pure filmmaker than J.J. Abrams, and possible even De Palma. Whereas Bird’s worst film,

While the rest of the film might be standard action fare, every shot in that hotel is so thrilling, that the memory of a TV show that was once about occasional freelance spies running operations that were essentially heists disappears. Mission: Impossible has now delivered on the ambition that the series has reached for since the original film. We have an American James Bond, and that American 007’s films are on average far better on average than the output of the thing they were trying to mimic. Maybe that quality will ebb, but if it takes twenty or thirty films, that’s going to be plenty of fun in the meantime.