I liked this more than Dead Reckoning, but I am unsure I would ever watch it again. These last two movies have felt like the Jurassic Worlds of this franchise: bloated facsimiles of what came before. If I saw them first, I’d have next to interest in exploring the rest of the series.
There are two or three pretty spectacular sequences here: the submarine, the planes, and the island house. All three had me on the edge of my seat. The submarine in particular enraptured me; it was some of my favourite filmmaking in the past couple years.
I want to be clear on this: these sequences are really quite stupendous. They’re excellent. They’re enthralling. There are not enough superlatives to describe them, in particular the submarine sequence, which is so good I started thinking about how it reminded me of Wall‑E.
The film makes one other pivotal change, and gives its fleshy villain Gabriel more agency, which makes it much easier to see him as a real threat. I wish Gabriel was written this way from the get-go.
This minor improvement to the villain ups the stakes and goes a long way to making the action feel important and tense. It’s an improvement in almost every measure over Dead Reckoning for me.
That being said, the remainder of the film is a mess. It’s self-indulgent and self-important, eager to assimilate the entirety of this franchise into a cohesive entity (pun intended) that has never existed. These films have always been patchworks of whatever style is in vogue at the moment — from spy thrillers to John Woo action to physical stunts and effects. There’s never been some grand vision. Acting that way gaslights the audience, in much the same way as Rise of Skywalker or, to a less ridiculous extent, No Time to Die.
It feels like every franchise wants its Endgame moment — a film they can all claim they’ve been building towards for decades. That only works if the studio has truly been building towards it. In every other case, the gravitas is unearned and inauthentic. And inauthentic gravitas is so uncool, so forced, that no film that attempts this will ever succeed based on merit. It’s creative bankruptcy at a Hollywood scale.
If one were to remove all this preening from these recent M:I movies, keep the action sequences, and add just enough plot about a bad guy whose AI will destroy the world, one would have a banger. A banger that respected your time and left you wanting more.
Unfortunately, I feel like my time has not been respected, and I have little interest in more this.
My current ranking of these movies, in which the top three are more or less immovable objects:
1. Fallout
2. Rogue Nation
3. Ghost Protocol
4. Mission: Impossible
5. Mission: Impossible 3
6. Final Reckoning
7. Mission: Impossible 2
8. Dead Reckoning