Year of Release: 2025
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Starring: Tom Cruise, Haley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny, Angela Bassett, Greg Tarzan Davis, Rolf Saxon, Holt McCallany, Janet McTeer, Nick Offerman, Hannah Waddingham, Tramell Tillman, Shea Whigham, Charles Parnell, Mark Gatiss, Lucy Tulugarjuk, Stephen Oyoung
Score out of ten (whole numbers only): 5
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Synopsis and Review
Following the entertaining and well crafted "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One", Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise went back to work to complete the events sent in motion by that episode, something that took a considerable amount of time, due to strikes and logistical issues. The film picks up after the prior installment, and finds Ethan Hunt holding the key, the that is critical to defeat the entity (the key unlocks access to a box located in a sunken submarine where the original source code for the entity lies). Hunt is now being hunted, particularly by the American government who is one of the few remaining governments still with control of their nuclear arsenal, as the entity has stolen that control from nearly all other nations who have a nuclear inventory. Hunt manages to persuade the American president to give him time and resources to retrieve the box from the sunken submarine. That task is a complex one, which demands his team find a particular spot in the Arctic to sequester him, in the hopes of reanimating him after such an in-depth dive. However, Gabriel who has since fallen from grace with the entity, has plans of his own, and wants to control the entity, and has successfully stolen a device created by Luther that sways some of the entity's computing prowess. The team has to calculate and be ingenious enough to play with all these variables, in order to avoid a global nuclear meltdown.
The first sentiment I personally got from this episode of "Mission: Impossible", was just how bloated and self congratulatory the film seemed to be. As if the creative team had decided to pat themselves in the back for all the work they've been doing throughout the latest films in the series, and at the same time wink at the audience with a smirk that says: "here's some more acrobatics the likes you've never seen before". They've tried too hard, and pushed excessively, and lost track of what made the prior and more successful films of the series always so fantastic: the ability to be narratively economical, to pay attention to characters, to put a big budget spin on what is essentially a b-movie (or slick tv-show) concept. The impossible mission is still there, the considerable risks for everyone involved are also fairly well illustrated, but this time around it all gets buried under the Ethan Hunt mythology creation show, which sadly sucks out the air from most of the supporting characters (and almost of the whole story itself), who are all left with not much to do, except be part of the Ethan Hunt back up orchestra. This focus on making the stunts larger, flashier, and bigger, also pushes the villainous agent in question to the sides, who also have to play third fiddle to whatever Ethan Hunt is doing onscreen. The creative team looked at all the "knobs" they had available to them on the "creative mixing table", and instead of finessing the narrative, characters, and finding a balance for all the ingredients they had available, cranked up the action set pieces, which as it turns out in this film, go on for an enormous amount of time, including the stunts in the submarine, and the stunts with the airplanes. Is the film ultimately worth watching? Yes, it's watchable, all the actors are solidly cast, and Tom Cruise does try his hardest, but it's an unbalanced feature, and one of the weakest films in the series (the worst one being of course John Woo's "Mission: Impossible 2"). It could have benefited from more editing, adequate character development, and an ambition to do better storytelling (as opposed to be driven by fear of missing out, which is what the film gives off, a faint scent of despair, of irrelevance). The production team is a mixed bag: while the visual effects and stunt work is top notch, the cinematography from Fraser Taggart is underwhelming (cinematographers don't even light scenes anymore, everything just has this "shot on iphone" look), the same going for the score by Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey (I wish they had brought back Danny Elfman for this episode). Hopefully the talented Christopher McQuarrie learns his lesson from this experience, and focuses more on his next projects with Tom Cruise.
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