Mission: Impossible Franchise (1996-?)

[Finch]

Quite a few of the professional critics are mixed on the film too. It sounds like at least a third of the movie is dire chatter about the AI threat which was the least enjoyable part about Dead Reckoning, and when part 8 is even longer at 170 mins, I'd hate to say I'm half tempted to wait for a disc or digital rental and fast forward through the exposition and callbacks. I've enjoyed all seven films but Fallout and Dead Reckoning have each been less impressive than Rogue Nation and nothing I've read so far suggests that Final Reckoning reverses that trend.

[Mr Sausage]

Quite a few of the professional critics are mixed on the film too. It sounds like at least a third of the movie is dire chatter about the AI threat which was the least enjoyable part about Dead Reckoning, and when part 8 is even longer at 170 mins, I'd hate to say I'm half tempted to wait for a disc or digital rental and fast forward through the exposition and callbacks.

I'm with you here. I hated Dead Reckoning after loving the previous three, so the idea of sitting through an even longer version with more of what I hated, no thanks. I was hoping the delay meant they were retooling things, not belabouring their surprise box office disappointment. Bizarre decision.

Also, I think what people like about these movies is that they're basically stand alone adventures. Long term continuity is...a weird decision to be making now.

[Finch]

In hindsight, it might have been more fruitful to stick to the rule of changing up the directors with each new film. If Cruise ends up making a ninth after all, he should resist the temptation of a fifth team up with McQuarrie. Would be fun to have DePalma back for an epilogue-type film though DePalma did say after the original film he didn't want to do another. More likely, the series gets continued with a new lead after a three year hiatus but I'll admit that I'm stumped to think of anyone who would feel compelled to try equal Cruise's devil-may-care attitude to dangerous stunts (perhaps Glen Powell who'd probably have Cruise's stamp of approval).

[therewillbeblus]

I thought they were clearly establishing Hayley Atwell as the next “Ethan Hunt.” Whether or not they wind up doing anything with it, who knows

[Never Cursed]

In hindsight, it might have been more fruitful to stick to the rule of changing up the directors with each new film

Ehh, I don't know. Not only is it not gonna happen short of a break between Cruise and McQuarrie (since McQ basically runs Cruise's career now in the same way that Paula Wagner used to run it), he's the only director of this bunch that understood Cruise's screen presence and knew what to do with him (and one needs to return to Spielberg and PTA to find competent directors who understood that before him). I can't imagine any hypothetical replacements being either better filmmakers or working well with such a notoriously controlling star-as-auteur in the same way that I can't imagine any replacements for Cruise himself actually drawing $800 million in tickets - and if both disappear, what's left of the series' already not-that-strong identity? Also, De Palma is never, ever making a movie again, certainly not a big-budget one.

[The Curious Sofa]

I've never been a huge fan of the first M:I film, and like most people, I think the second one is the worst but then I never thought John Woo translated well to Hollywood. I thought the underrated third film put the series on track. The fourth and fifth films are two of the greatest action movies ever made, and the sixth and seventh films are fine follow-ups, though not in the same league. So, while McQuarrie did a great job, I don't think he's the only one who can make a great M:I film.

I'm a big De Palma fan, but I've always thought that his Hollywood blockbusters had to rein in most of what makes him great: his irreverence, his excesses, his postmodernism and his disregard for good taste, all of which he has come under attacked for.

I don't believe there's much to Cruise's screen presence, but then that may be a personal thing, I just find him bland and at best an okeyish actor. He's a great action star, but he's never even been the best character in the M:I movies. Since the fourth film, maybe even the third one, they've done a great job with their female characters, who generally outshine Ethan Hunt. I would have so been on board with Rebecca Ferguson becoming the lead or getting a spin-off

Spoiler

and still haven't forgiven Dead Reckoning for killing her off

I've just finished watching all the James Bond films back-to-back (a project that got a friend and me through winter), and I expect this new one to be similar to Bond's swan song, No Time to Die. That one also suffered from bloat, a silly McGuffin and way too much wrapping up of character stuff, but it was still an OK watch.

[nicolas]

Went to cinema for the first time in over a year for the final Mission. I dearly love these films and consider the first one, Rogue Nation and Fallout to be masterful but The Final Reckoning is a disappointment. I’m saying this with a heavy heart when seeing Cruise’s accomplishments in the film but they’re not enough to carry the rest over the finish line.

It’s not often that I fully agree with David Ehrlich but this time I do. There are spoilers in his review: https://www.indiewire.com/criticism/mov ... 235122988/

[Aunt Peg]

I was really disappointed with this effort. Whilst I've never been a big fan of this franchise I have seen every one of the films from the De Palma one onwards and stuck with them cumulating with the best of the series in 2023's Dead Reckoning Part One - that was one hell of a ride.

Part Two was so flat. A talk fest filled with big empty speeches and even the one outstanding action sequences wasn't as exciting as any of the scenes in Part One.

Glad I was forewarned by some of the chatter on the interest about this so I kind of knew what to expect but I still can't help feeling really letdown.

[Never Cursed]

More than anything I was surprised by how dark this film was willing to go in both its severe escalation of stakes (someone correct me if necessary, but I think only the second one also threatens to end all life on earth?) and its strange, half-critical attitude towards Tom Cruise's character. Though Ethan Hunt has always been a daredevil and risked his life with questionable odds against him, none of the other movies in this franchise paint him so suicidally as this one and its underlying, unspoken assumption that he is essentially trying to kill himself as penance for all the instances in which he intervened in civilization-altering events. While the critics have overstated the interminability of the film's first hour of exposition and character development, these lengthy scenes of callbacks, retcons to make previous films' plots relate to this one, and haggard authority figures berating Cruise into suicide-by-mission are overlong and rhetorically misplaced in any Mission: Impossible movie. They are even more ill-fitted to this film, which has by far the best premise of the series but does very little with it until a fantastic and atmospheric underwater setpiece (for my money right up there with the opera house from the fifth one as the best thing that the series has ever done) which doubles as a standalone expression of the film's justifiably tense attitude towards technology. With a different first act, ideally something more akin to the previous film's airport introduction where all the different factions and their relevant exposition can be integrated more naturally into an action or heist sequence, this film might have been great. Instead, one has to average out two excellent setpieces and 70-odd minutes of callback-reliant exposition to get "pretty good."

Spoiler

All that said, Esai Morales' exit is the best for any villain in the series. Surprisingly bloody and Final Destination-ish for one of these movies, and it made my entire theater gasp.

[therewillbeblus]

I was prepared for all the exposition and callbacks and melodramatics that were destined to take place here, but I wasn't prepared to find both set pieces so dull. I'd have to see Woo's film again, but this is by far the (at best) second-worst entry in the series. I find myself feeling like domino did about the sixth installment's set pieces: they've been done better elsewhere. I hope more people are amazed like Never Cursed by it, but I was bored during the underwater mission. It's not only superfluous next to Rogue Nation's far better one, but that earlier film made you feel higher stakes -from the more intimate plot arc connections to the mission, to the strength of the rescue itself, completely sideswiped here. That's part of the problem with the narrative - it's so vast and broad and doesn't do a good job at making you feel the stakes, so each segment of the mission is just too unbelievable or clichéd, even for this series. I cared far more about Benji getting fingered by the face-machine in Rogue Nation than I did about "the world" in this case. The airplane set piece fared better, but only once it got truly ridiculous towards the end. Before that, it also feels superfluous next to Fallout's helicopter version. And the ending? For all the slow buildup of "This Is It" the film dishes at us (which is the bulk of the film, even in and out of most 'thrill' moments and showdowns), we get the most casual exit to the credits yet. It all just feels flippant after so much dramatic talking. I hate to say this, but this is the first Mission Impossible film that I wish I had watched at home versus a theatre. It doesn't warrant a theatrical experience, except for maybe three minutes of the plane bit. Everything else is mechanically plotty talking heads fluff, or cutting back forth as every character says one word to complete the next dramatic sentence about the end of the world, and I don't need a big screen to experience about two hours of that in ratio to maybe 40 minutes of bland action. A huge disappointment.

[Finch]

The red flag came up for me as soon as they announced the story to be split across two films. It didn't feel like they'd properly mapped this out in advance, just the broadest strokes. Maybe they got cocky after the (too) effusive praise for Fallout. I'm kind of hoping though that Cruise and McQuarrie let it lie and have others take over, behind and in front of the camera. If Paramount decide to continue with someone else, I hope they really do a clean sweep and not have new films be tied into Cruise's old crew or the sort of enervating world building Lionsgate seems to be trying with Ballerina and Donnie Yen's character's spin-off (though Yen's film should at least have exciting action if the writers aren't permitted to go in completely new directions).

I'm going to get DePalma's first film whenever B&N or the shits at Amazon have a sale for it, and between that and Rogue Nation, I'm covered for this series.

PS.: Second week BO takings should be interesting. Perhaps they'll be lucky and it holds better than expected.

[therewillbeblus]

See, that ideally shouldn't haven been a red flag considering they've been building upon previous narratives for a little while, even if the films still felt self-contained. Dead Reckoning left on a note of completion - even if the Entity was still out there, it still felt like a contained episode with a mission accomplished and the right kind of cliffhangers promising fun next installment. This one brings back so much unnecessary stuff and makes weird connections that don't even have the guts to play out as if they should matter (the Shea Whigham reveal was eye-roll-inducing, and its 'payoff' flaccid). And the movie was just so disorganized. Like, there's all this time for exposition, but zero time to get the audience engaged in the missions (stuff like the intervention with Pom Klementieff's character early on could've benefited from some integration, but instead it's just "hey, masks" again)

[Monterey Jack]

Three hours, and they didn't have enough time to explain the B&W flashback to the woman from Ethan's past Gabriel killed in front of him? It seemed a bizarre omission to make that seem like it would have a bearing on this movie's plot, then never bring it up again. Did that fall victim to reshoots and restructuring, or what? It would have made Ethan's pursuit of Gabriel more of a personal revenge on top of his dedication to stopping The Entity, which would have given the overly plotty (and plodding) first hour more of a dramatic pulse.

I liked this as it was unspooling, and ending with the thrilling biplane climax sent the movie off on a high (even if it was a total retread of the climax of Fallout), and yet, compared to Dead Reckoning, it was one of the weakest M:I movies since the flailing, horribly shot III. This one needed more humor (DR honestly had some of the biggest laughs of the series, all without sacrificing plot tension) and should have inserted a major action/stunt scene into three bloated first hour.

[pistolwink]

I agree that this one was a mess. It felt unfinished, in a few ways -- the narrative was notably inelegant ("disorganized" is a good word to use; it had tons of redundant exposition, for example), the editing often felt like a rough cut, and in general the film seemed to trust its audience less than any previous film in the franchise save maybe for #3. Maybe that's because the underperformance of the previous installment made McQuarrie and Cruise nervous that people wouldn't have a grounding for this one. But also, the desire to make this one some kind of "meaningful" culmination, complete with hamfisted efforts to link the various films together and lots of (intentionally? unintentionally?) kitschy philosophizing (not least from the Pom Klementieff character, who shows up mostly to speak brief psuedoprofundities in French), left a sour taste in my mouth. We have enough of that sort of thing in the Marvel films, the Bond franchise, etc.

Still, I was never bored. The set pieces were very impressive, if maybe even too short! Unfortunately the big submarine sequence was hampered for me by two women (or maybe I should say adult babies) in the row in front of me constantly being on their smart phones--not just texting but even having conversations on them. I asked them to cut it out and, predictably, they started sassing me instead. I have no idea why such folks pay $12 or more to sit in a theater and barely watch a movie.

I'd like to re-watch Fallout soon, since that seems to be close to a consensus favorite and also the one that occasioned all the hoopla about Cruise and McQuarrie saving blockbuster filmmaking—a false promise in retrospect, I guess. And yeah, I bet the praise for that one made them swing for the fences on the last two—and mostly whiff IMO.

[therewillbeblus]

Fallout has really fell in my esteem. I still like it, but it does feel redundant after watching both 4 and 5 again recently. I got about an hour in, was having some fun, and realized I just didn't need to finish it. But I also think III is easily second best, and a wonderfully dark, unique entry in the series, and so many people seem to hate that one simply based on how it looks!

[nicolas]

Fallout has really fell in my esteem. I still like it, but it does feel redundant after watching both 4 and 5 again recently. I got about an hour in, was having some fun, and realized I just didn't need to finish it. But I also think III is easily second best, and a wonderfully dark, unique entry in the series, and so many people seem to hate that one simply based on how it looks!

Ha, it’s the other way round for me. Only with my fifth viewing I’ve grown to fully love Fallout and appreciate how astonishing the entirety of it is. It’s now at no. 2 in my ranking after Rogue Nation. I also never appreciated III as much as I did this month in preparation for DR. Compared to how ugly and flat the 7th film in particular turned out, III has wonderful colors and depth in its images. Yes, the framing is often tight (which J.J. Abrams even admitted in his commentary) but it’s still a slick-looking action film with a fine blend of analogue and digital at a time when lighting was actually that and not just controlling flat LED screens on an iPad.

[Brian C]

The airplane sequence didn't really do much for me - physically impressive as far as these things go, but maybe 90% of it amounts to little more than Tom Cruise hanging on for dear life, and that's just not very cinematic no matter how difficult of a stunt it might be.

By contrast, the submarine sequence worked a lot better and in fact rivals the best sequence I've seen in this series. Might just be me, but I thought it tapped into a kind of bad stress dream energy for me. I rarely have bad dreams where I'm in dire physical danger, but I have a lot of bad dreams where the circumstances are stressful - things won't ever go the way they should, stuff like that. Being in my late 40s and too jaded to find suspense in whether a Tom Cruise action hero will live or die, I nonetheless appreciated seeing Hunt work completely alone and cut off from his team, mostly wordless, having to deal with problems that seemed more or less plausible and not just an endless series of contrivances. Of course, the plausibility went completely out the window with the resolution to that sequence! But still, I thought it was effectively spooky, with the set design adding a ton to it.

Narratively, I thought the movie was barely trying. But what else is new in this series? The scripts have always been mere clotheslines to hang action sequences from, and if this one seemed even choppier than most, well ... it's not like I could come up with 8 good M:I scripts, either. I also can't help but wonder why they couldn't keep Rebecca Ferguson around for one more movie - the dropoff in screen presence from her to Hayley Atwell is enormous, to the point where it kinda cheapens the ending to have Atwell show up at all (not to mention that other guy who joined the team for this movie, and who the script pays so little attention to he might not have even been referred to by name). Although as TWBB alluded to, they didn't really even try to write an ending anyway, so I guess it doesn't matter much.

I guess my bottom line is that if this is indeed the last one, I won't miss the series much. On the whole, I think the series really suffered by switching to McQuarrie full-time - none of his films have much real style at all and they've never seemed invested in much other than building up Ethan Hunt as a messianistic savior figure. And this installment lays on that angle eye-rollingly hard. Might have been nice to have more filmmakers bring different voices to this franchise as it went on, but instead all we got was Tom Cruise calling all the shots in order to show himself as humanity's selfless, self-sacrificing guardian angel. On the way home, I was thinking about Cloud Atlas and wondering if some future civilization will dig up this movie and make it their sacred text for an Ethan Hunt religion, like with Sonmi in that film. "For those we never meet..."

[tenia]

Wow, in some ways, this 8th is kind of a trainwreck for a $400m blockbuster, and I'd love to know how what got released on the big screen ended up looking so much like a very rough cut.
It looks like this 4th (!) MI collab between Cruise, McQuarrie and Hamilton is the one just before they lost the recipe, as it compiles a sum of flaws that are, once added up, are hard to overlook. If anything, it ends up looking like a poor attempt at reproducing what was well done in (most of) the previous entries, from the narration in general to the edit within some of the scenes. The opening fight is laughably bad both in terms of readability but also in how it manages to forget for way too long that the bad guy is just there in the same room.
This is actually something this movie keeps doing : supposedly important characters are shown to be there only to get lost without the movie thinking about it for a minute. Every time there's a big showdown between everyone, half of the cast suddenly gets AWOL until the movie remembers they're still alive.
Something the movie finds the time instead : repeating everything, all the time. I can't think of another franchise who produces an entry that suddenly seems not to trust its audience at such a level. You get flashbacks from the past 7 movies BUT also flashbacks from stuff that happened IN THIS VERY MOVIE 2 mere minutes ago. It's insane and of course it brings the movie to a bloated 170 minutes. And that's probably the biggest flaw here : everything is just pointlessly bloated, all the time, every time, to the point one just doesn't care anymore. It works for ONE sequence : the submarine sequence, whose tension is extremely well provided despite being quite a long sequence with no suspense whatsoever as to what is going to happen to Hunt, but it does work. Everything else is just looking like the result of a brainstorming on how to add things just for the sake of adding things : make them speak French, add countless repeating flashbacks and inserts (I stopped counting the number of inserts of Gabriel's poison-pill necklace), add characters whose purpose 90% of the time is rephrasing what has just been explained (poor Pom Klementieff...), add characters returning from the past, add retcons, ... It just piles up until the movie breaks, like when somebody writes a super-hero who's just too powerful and you wonder where he was all this time. MI8 keeps trying to do things like this and I kept wondering why : is it because it didn't really so far and thought it'd be original ? It's not. It's actually the most predictable development a franchise can do nowadays. Even James Bond did it in No Time To Die.

Spoiler

In the same way, killing Luther just seems like a way to make the viewers think "oh that's it, ANYONE can die now... but nobody does. Even Donloe doesn't. Even Donloe's wife doesn't. Kittridge and Phelps Jr disappear for the last half hour but they too come back in the epilogue. It just misses a dog to keep alive and the family picture will be whole.

Yet, the movie still knows how to do things properly, if only by flashes : for all the flashbacks making the movie stop to godawful halts, it suddenly remembers how to lay its plan to the viewers through 5 different characters moving in 3 different places, saving time during this while still going forward. It also still knows how to get a proper action scene, like (obviously) the submarine scene but also kinda the cabin one too. But it's fascinating how it manages to miss in some ways the final aerial scene, which is very good in some ways... until the movie makes yet another bad movie-making decision and forgets to give it enough time.

Spoiler

And oh my god was Gabriel a very bad villain altogether, but both what he does in the final - which is pretty much laughing maniacally half of the time - and how he gets dispatched - a joke-ending, at this point, which reminding me of Syndrome's ending in The Incredibles 1 - just further makes it so.

The issue with all this is that for a franchise whose main objective for the past 15 year was to keep doing bigger and louder things for the salke of it, it got past a breaking point narratively too. In some ways, Hunt aka Tom Cruise was indeed the main action protagonist, and it makes senses for him to be The Chosen One to save the world. Sometimes, it reminded me of Last Action Hero : there are billions of scenarios according to the Entity (or so the movie keeps telling us), but the movie remains an action movie, and its protagonist a hero of that, and there actually only is so many things the character will do, and we expect him to do it. But while Fallout managed to nuance and explain in just an exchange with Baldwin, Dead and now Final Reckoning turns this into a be-all end-all situation... for a be-all end-all character. Hunt/Cruise turns for actioner hero into a messianic one, whose destiny is to save us all for the perils around because everybody else just can't or won't. It is written (or are we masters of our own fate ? the movie keeps saying both, without ever choosing), and we can all trust him with everything (but oh, look at him being responsible and modest and refusing such a power... or does he ?).

Still, I still think it's a competently done movie, or at least, there's one that just needs a fan-edit removing all these damned repeats and inserts that would probably drop the movie to 150 minutes at least, but it however won't change the movie having gone over-board in terms of stakes.

5.5/10

[Finch]

I rewatched Rogue Nation on the 4K and the film still holds up. I do think McQuarrie's editing of the fights and setpieces is a touch too blunt and wish he could have let the action breathe just a tad more. I also like how he shrinks the scope of the action more and more as the film progresses: the biggest stunt is almost like a throw away right at the start and the film ends with a knife fight and foot chases in London. It's less obvious than in other films that Cruise and McQuarrie start with the stunts first and then write the rest of the film around them.