Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning on Canal Plus: the conclusion of a breathless saga (review)

Despite some astonishing pieces of bravery, the franchise carried by Tom Cruise reaches its limits in this eighth episode, too long and bloated.

Presented at the last Cannes Film Festival, Mission Impossible 8 arrives this Monday, January 1 on Canal Plus (and streaming on MyCanal). Despite some Dantesque sequences, the last part of the saga carried by Tom Cruise left a bitter taste in the editorial staff of First. Our review:

Those who closely follow the adventures of trick-or-treating super-spy Ethan Hunt know that enormous stakes hung over him. The Final Reckoningalso known as code Mission: Impossible 8. Second part of a diptych started in 2023 with Dead Reckoning, conclusion of the story of Hunt’s fight against an evil AI called the Entity, a best-of episode connecting the previous seven together and reopening narrative avenues left unused by Brian De Palma or JJ Abrams, a supposedly final opus building suspense around the death (or retirement) of its daredevil protagonist…

It’s a lot for a single film, and the announced duration of 2h50 made us fear a jam-packed juggernaut, heavy with all these promises. In fact, we quickly realize this once the projection has started, The Final Reckoning is a film not only enormous, but downright elephantine, announcing its narrative and emotional stakes throughout an endless string of exposition scenes, where director and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie’s taste for parallel editing and verbose explanations with double or triple background shines through. These seem all the more convoluted as they are interspersed with incessant inserts of images taken from previous films, supposed to excite the fan club while reminding the fundamentals of the mythology of the saga to heads-in-the-air who would have, for example, skipped what was happening in Mission: Impossible 3 (hard to blame them).

But above all, these untimely mini-flashbacks give the impression of watching the gigantic trailer for a film that never begins… Everything seems both too long and rushed, fragmented, as if McQuarrie had struggled in the editing room with scattered pieces of a blockbuster-Frankenstein. For almost three quarters of an hour, Mission: Impossible 8 refuses to take off, weighed down by gravity – a shame for a saga usually so comfortable with high aerobatics.

This word, gravity, must be understood in all senses of the term: The Final Reckoning immediately resonates a very dark, funereal note, an atmosphere of the end of the world, of nuclear peril and of threatened democracy, in a very explicit echo of current events. Why not, after all, but the problem is that this spirit of seriousness lightens the usual comic swerves of the saga, when for example Ethan Hunt puts on a tuxedo and tries to find his Cary Grant cartoon reflexes. The atmosphere is so heavy that attempts at casual spy comedy a la Charade fall flat, despite a few well-attempted jokes – a comment from Grace (Haylee Atwell) on Ethan’s new haircut, which will be appreciated by fans who know at least from the episode signed John Woo the importance of Tom Cruise’s hairdresser in the aesthetic issues of a new Mission: Impossible.

This end-of-the-world atmosphere, put in parallel with the suspense over the possible end of the saga, leads McQuarrie to rave about the potential offered by the Entity, the McGuffin of the previous film: if we could read in Hunt’s fight against the AI ​​of Dead Reckoning a meta commentary on the struggle of an “analog” movie star (Tom Cruise, emblem of an old-fashioned star system) against the threat of an artificially manufactured cinema of the future, The Final Reckoning pushes the envelope further by presenting Hunt/Cruise as a chosen one, the only person capable of confronting this “anti-God” that is the Entity, which is raising the threat of a “Apocalypse sect” in the four corners of the globe. This script with eschatological accents – also nourished by borrowings from the cinema of the Cold War and the sixties apocalypse, the Limit Point by Sidney Lumet in the lead – was perhaps born, who knows?, from the satisfaction of Cruise and McQuarrie at having “saved cinema” (as they said in 2022) thanks to the box office of Top Gun: Maverick. After the cinema, the world? We’re hardly exaggerating, as the film is shot through with a slightly crazy feeling of omnipotence, which contradicts the DNA of a saga of which lightness had until now always been one of the keys.

Know what constitutes – or not – the DNA of Mission: Impossible is in any case one of the major issues of the film. By bringing back a secondary character from the first part, CIA analyst William Donloe (played by Rolf Saxon), McQuarrie is less pleasing to nostalgic spectators than he is trapping himself in sentimentalist lurches that are a little silly and frankly off-topic, light years away from the borderline misanthropic dryness of De Palma. There is much more “palmesque” in the extraordinary underwater sequence at the center of the film, which sees Hunt exploring the rubble of the Séabstopol, the submarine which sank in the opening of Dead Reckoning.

The scene is an aquatic variation on the legendary CIA vault heist scene from the first film, full of tension, suspense, sophisticated geometric issues, daring play on silence (contrary to the noisy cannons of the blockbuster), echoes of silent cinema and exhilarating exaltation of the enormous Hollywood machinery. Suddenly very inspired, McQuarrie seems at the heart of his aesthetic project. Going further than its usual vintage references (we also appreciate the very Destination: Zebra, polar station scenes in the Arctic), he works here on a form of almost abstract action, almost hovering and dreamy – at several moments in the film, we see Hunt asleep, unconscious, trying to return to the surface, or prisoner in the alternative reality of the Entity. As if McQ sought to undermine from the inside, through a dive into the unconscious and a sort of dreamlike logic, the overwhelming monumentality of his own film.

The other huge anthology action scene – the biplane chase teased by the promo – deepens certain formal research of Dead Reckoning (we think of the fight against Pom Klementieff in a Venetian alley, or of the one on the roof of the Orient-Express in the darkness of a tunnel) by aiming for a sort of limit point of the Cruisian cascade, where the spatial markers are little by little completely dissolved, where the spectator’s gaze can no longer understand the spatial logic except by anchoring itself to the presence of the kamikaze star in the center of the frame – something like Buster Keaton impressionist. On their own, these two big sequences deserve to be seen The Final Reckoning on a (very large) cinema screen. And getting you to buy a movie ticket is the mission that Cruise and McQuarrie have set themselves since day one. It is therefore once again accomplished, even if, this time, the victory has a slightly bitter taste.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoningby Christopher McQuarrie, with Tom Cruise, Haylee Atwell, Simon Pegg…