Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning Is a Huge Mess. But It’s a Fun Mess.

Perhaps the greatest sin Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning commits is buying into its own self-importance. For years, the Mission: Impossible movies stood as a welcome bulwark against the world-building extravagance of Hollywood’s franchise craze. Every installment was a new task, a new heist, a new series of crazy stunts, and minimal crossovers from one picture to the next — an additional team member here, a secondary villain there. This not only let the films stand on their own, it allowed them the grace to be ridiculous. We didn’t take their plots too seriously, which paradoxically involved us even more in what was happening; we could focus on the action onscreen without grand ideas or ornate mythology to distract us. And the action onscreen was usually exhilarating.

The strains of grandiose portent had already crept into the previous installment, Dead Reckoning (which for a brief while had an unfortunate Part One subtitle, as if to confirm this particular duology’s This Time, It’s Serious vibe). But that movie also had great fun setting its insane set pieces in motion. Christopher McQuarrie, who has directed these last four entries and deserves a lot of credit for crystallizing the elements that now distinguish this series, is an expert engineer of anticipation and misdirection. He knows how to toy with us, and he knows how to build an intricate set piece.

So, it’s dispiriting to find so much of this new film suffering from Solemnity Overload, as Final Reckoning’s first hour drowns us in dumb, endless litanies about the many achievements and transgressions of Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), conveyed through montages of the previous installments and ladlefuls of grim voice-over. (“Every personal sacrifice you made has brought this world another sunrise.” “You are always the best of men, in the worst of times,” etc.) It’s enough to make us worry the whole movie will turn out to be a bottle episode, a glorified series of clip packages held together by different voices eulogizing Hunt’s sense of destiny, which of course is also Cruise’s own sense of destiny. (If they snuck some clips from Top Gun, Days of Thunder, or Edge of Tomorrow into those montages, would we even notice?)

These films get rewritten and reimagined so often during production that one assumes their plots are constantly being retrofitted to justify assorted sequences — and this particular one has been shooting for so long that maybe the only way to make it all make any sense (or at least to make us think it’s making any sense) was to douse it in expository portent. In previous films, lines like “Sir, Ethan Hunt is the living manifestation of destiny” and “He’s a mind-reading, shape-shifting incarnation of chaos” got some good laughs, especially since they came from slightly silly avatars of officialdom; this time, it’s the movie itself that seems to be saying this stuff over and over again. Maybe it’s because constant reminders of a hero’s sense of sacrifice serve as ominous foreshadowing, Franchise Hollywood’s go-to mechanism for convincing us that maybe, just maybe, this time our hero won’t make it. And the longer these series go on, the more overwhelming such intimations of superstar mortality tend to become.

Or maybe it’s because our heroes are now fighting an existential foe that could have dropped in from today’s most alarming headlines: The Entity, the all-powerful artificial intelligence that was threatening to take over the world in Dead Reckoning and has all but taken over in The Final Reckoning, is repeatedly described as an “anti-god” and a “truth-eating digital parasite” and “the Lord of Lies.” That techno-biblical blather is reflected in the movie’s glimpses of its troubled Zeitgeist. At one point, Hunt emerges onto London’s Trafalgar Square and grimaces at the sight of a massive protest. The Entity is making us hate each other, dividing humanity and pitting nations against one another. Our hero’s bitterness at the state of the world varies in this film from the vaguely messianic to the satisfyingly cathartic. (“You! Spend! Too! Much! Time! On! The! Internet!” Hunt yells as he repeatedly kicks one anonymous goon in the face, something Cruise has probably wanted to do to all of us since 2005.) That’s generally the extent of the acting the star — a man with otherwise considerable talent and charisma — is asked to do here. When he stares straight into the camera and asks to be trusted one last time, it doesn’t feel like Ethan Hunt asking for one final reprieve from his colleagues, it feels like Tom Cruise pleading for the audience’s patience, as if to say, “The fun stuff is coming, I swear.”

And it does! The good news is that Final Reckoning does eventually recover from the calamity of its first hour to give us an entertaining, if still messy, Mission: Impossible movie. It achieves this by tuning out the broody chatter of its first act and giving us a lengthy, ingenious (and refreshingly silent) sequence inside a sunken submarine, a wreck whose unstable spot on the sea floor ensures that our hero will wind up bouncing and rolling around a room inconveniently filled with floating torpedoes. These movies are driven by Cruise doing his Buster Keaton best to look simultaneously graceful and ridiculous in extreme physical circumstances; this whole sequence, with its endless series of stately underwater mishaps, ranks among the series’ greatest.

There is more. The obligatory, advance-marketed stunt is sensational, as always. In this case, it involves Cruise hanging off the wings of a prop plane, a description that doesn’t quite do the sequence justice. This wondrous feat of real-life derring-do, intercut with multiple other standoffs, transfixes us because a lot of it involves things going spectacularly wrong — again, very much in the Mission: Impossible tradition. (Maybe too much so: Let’s ignore for the time being that this excellent four-way climax is basically a riff on the finale of the far superior Mission: Impossible — Fallout.) Cruise perfected this idea that Ethan Hunt was at his best when he was both dancerly and floundering in the first film, and he’s admirably stuck to it ever since. Which is yet another reason why all that earlier stone-faced Sturm und Drang never quite feels right; these movies shine when they’re being goofy.

So, which is it? Is Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning a disaster or a triumph? I genuinely enjoyed watching this picture, although I worried constantly during the first hour that we were in for a total shipwreck. (At least, until we got to the actual shipwreck.) That worry doesn’t entirely dissipate during the second half. The whole enterprise reeks of Marvel-itis with its endless callbacks. Not just the repeated cutaways to the earlier movies but also the reintroduction of long-forgotten side characters and the revelations of secret identities, as well as stupid little Easter eggs (as if Mission: Impossible fans are somehow supposed to have memorized the original’s release date, like it was Star Wars Day or whatever). Then there are all the stitch marks in the story, the dropped plotlines, the undelivered-upon narrative promises, not to mention one genuinely important development that’s never quite properly explained. (There’s a difference between not taking yourself seriously and taking yourself extremely seriously but not delivering on it.) Sometimes it feels like they’re still not done editing this thing. Sometimes it feels like they’re still not done shooting it.

In the end, the most suspenseful conflict in The Final Reckoning might be the one that appears to have happened behind the scenes, between the clear human dedication to art and craft that shines through its most suspenseful moments, and the sloppy opportunism of trying to retrofit a mythology onto these films (perhaps with an eye toward An Exciting Continuation and Monetization of This Premium Content Across All Platforms™). Artificial intelligence’s real threat is to human thought, originality, creativity, and ambition; given how much of Final Reckoning consists of lazy synopses of the previous films as well as regurgitations of earlier action sequences, it feels at times like the Entity itself could have written this movie. But maybe that’s the ultimate victory: By the end, Cruise and McQuarrie manage to wrestle back their magnum opus from the grubby little cyberpaws of the Lord of Lies. At least, that’s how I’m choosing to imagine it.