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Saturday Evening Movie Thread [moviegique]: Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

We saw a lot of good and interesting movies this past fortnight-and-a-half. Bring Her Back, a melancholy horror from the makers of Talk To The Hand, er, Talk To Me; the romantic Lost In Starlight; the 25th anniversary of Dogma (about which I have much to say); the 30th anniversary of Eat Drink Man Womanl Wes Anderson's Wesandersony The Phoenician Scheme; the French Kung-Fu Giant Penis Farce Zenithal; and the picaresque coming-of-age apocalyptic survival horror 28 Years Later.

I can recommend all of them to people who like those sorts of things.

But I shan't review them today. Today I want to talk about changes in the movie biz, vis a vis how relates to your nearly 29-year-old correspondent. If we go back 45 years ago (there will be no math), we might find your humble moviegique didn't just see the top 20 movies, he saw 90% of all the movies that were released.

I didn't see them all in the theater, admittedly. I wasn't so adamantly anti-watching-movies-on-TV back then, and it wouldn't have been an option to see them in the theater once they'd past their second run.

In 2010, I still saw most of the top 20. By 2020, I'd seen two of the top 20. And there's a near 0% chance I will see the ones I "missed".

In other words, whatever mojo Hollywood had over me, it lost it five years ago. Yaboi Zack is on a year-plus long rant against "birthday party clowns" (as he calls them): People who gained fame and fortune by bashing popular culture and now can't do anything else. They can't admit when something is good.

Of course, simply redirecting my entertainment dollars to stuff I like allows me to avoid having to grouse constantly. But I do think it's important to call out when things are good. Not because Hollywood is getting better (his thesis). It's not, at least in any way that matters: Any industry stays centralized and powerful because of the virtuous cycle of talent attracting money creating power which attracts more talent and more money and more power. My thesis is that Hollywood's degraded to the vicious version of the cycle: They lost talent, they lost money, they lost power, and this is accelerating.

Hollywood is Carthage. It's Detroit. It's Joe Biden.

That doesn't mean it has no lucid moments, of course.

This brings me to Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning.

Tom Cruise with long hair and bangs gives me Neal Breen vibes.

Cruise Control (I Just Made That Up!)

The decline of Hollywood is interesting. After Dogma, I pointed out to the Boy that while it has an eighth grade theology and a fair amount of clunkers and it presaged and probably created the uber-nerd model of dialogue and humorous references, it was still better than most movies today for two reasons: First, it never loses sight of its goal, which is to be entertainment. Second, it's chock full of characters that are real and different. (And this is kind of funny, because everyone in a Kevin Smith movie talks like Kevin Smith and more or less has his point of view, and in Dogma, most of them aren't even supposed to be mortal humans.)

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning—the movie series that has to use a hyphen for its sequels, because it's got a colon in its base name—never loses sight of its goal (entertainment), and additionally uses its history and creativity (!) to fill itself with new and past characters that are more than just plot devices or representation tokens.

All while being pretty damn "representative".

When you order Angela Bassett on Temu.

President Angela Basset gives Ethan (Cruise, duh) this (final?) mission. Apparently he acquired the MacGuffin in the previous film (which I didn't see) that will allow him to stop the evil, omnipotent AI that plans to wipe out humanity because (duh) it figures that's the best way to end global strife or something. But since it ostensibly also could grant control over the evil, omnipotent AI, every government and rogue agency in the world wants it, too.

The AI isn't much of a presence in this film—it's basically manipulating humans, including Ethan—which is kind of a shame on the one hand, but actually one of the many good choices the movie makes. Why? Because there's already a ton of plot here. Don't want the plot gettin' in the way of the story, as Joe Bob Briggs would say. (I think it's the reverse, but that's a semantic argument.) The AI is basically represented by Esai Morales' Gabriel, who fulfills the very important concept that The Villain Has To Be Someone You Can Punch In The Nose.

Before the AI can carry out its plan, it needs to do two things: Take control of all the world's nuclear arsenal, which it's about 80% of the way there when this movie starts, and hole up in a super-secret-protected bunker which has a sophisticated computer setup and all the world's digitized knowledge. (Furry porn will survive the apocalypse! Yay?)

So the deal is that Ethan has to escape U.S. capture (or convince the President) to let him go rogue one last time, find a way to get to the AI's source code, which is on the bottom of the ocean in highly contested waters—all the powers of the earth are on edge and aggressively patrolling their spheres—and be there in the split second when the AI has control of everything but before it can transfer itself to the bunker.

The actors on realizing they're doing a shot from Svalbard, where the residents fly to Iceland to get warm.

 

What's It All About, Ethan?

None of this makes a lick of sense, and that's okay.

Seriously, you could find good ways to rationalize all these things and it would still be nonsense and you just spent 15 minutes of your action movie babbling things nobody understands anyway.

The point is, we're selling this plotline with a bunch of competing deadline clocks. How long can Ethan hold his breath? Can Benji (Simon Pegg) stay conscious long enough to walk the distaff half of the crew through writing a .BAT file? Is the latent attraction Grace (Hayley Atwell) has for Ethan required to get her killed?

There's so much action in this movie, several sequences are just left out. An early scene, played for laughs, has Ethan thrashing baddies while Grace watches, horrified. We only see her expressions, and when Ethan reappears on screen, he's comically disarrayed with blood all over him. They had just discussed the need to use violence as a last resort and when she looks at Cruise questioningly he just says "They threatened you!"

Which is true, but nonetheless amusing. There's a later scene where three of the characters have to run from an exploding bomb to a shelter and...yeah, not there. This surprised me at first, but it makes sense. Nobody's going to come out of this complaining: "Hey, how did those relatively minor characters make it?"

Pom Klementieff (Guardian of the Galaxy's Mantis) speaks only French in this film.

The references to past entries are judicious. I know there are fanatics of this series, but I've seen 1, 2, 4, 5 and now 8. I may have some of those numbers wrong, even. And what's more, I'd be temped to say my favorite (even now) is John Woo's #2 entry, which is widely regarded as the worst. An interviewer tried to bait Cruise into trashing Woo, and of course he handled it like a pro, talking about how much he enjoyed working with the Hong Kong action master, whom I think he was responsible for bringing aboard.

Point is, it's fine. I'm sure it's chock full of Easter Eggs for the real fanatic. I did not feel like I'd missed out on much having missed some of the movies and only ever watching any of them precisely once.

So, the baseline for an M:I movie is to have stunts that still manage to wow the audience in an age of CGI. This movie delivers that in spades. It knows what it's doing. The hacks of the action biz think the key is to constantly amp everything up. Ultimately, however, this just numbs the viewer. M:I 8 ends with a fight on a biplane—positively James Bond ca. 1970.

In fact, in a very early scene, Grace and Ethan are captured, and we all know how this has to go: Ethan doesn't care what you do to him, but he's very sensitive to the harm done to others. (Hacks say it's hard to write for Superman, not realizing that all action heroes are Superman.) While this movie does a good job of making it seem like Ethan might die, it also imperils a lot of other interesting characters we also don't want to see die!

The essence of action is caring. Weird but true!

Blocking? In an action flick?! Seriously, the camerawork is terrific: Not frantically moving around like they're afraid you'll be bored, and willing to use the visual language.

Above and Beyond

Beyond the baseline action, we have Cruise, who has turned Action Man into Acting Man, both here and in Top Gun: Maverick. We have Ving Rhames back—the only one besides Cruise to be in all the movies, I think. And when Ethan, who has killed many, many men, has to reflect on whether he's been a force for good or evil over three decades, the occasional insertion of shots from previous movies resonates without feeling like a crutch.

A minor character from the first re-appears here and is both a major plot point and a fully developed character which reinforces the point: Action Man is a force for good. There are casualties, but that's more the roll of the dice. There's a callback to the Jon Voight Jim Phelps from the first movie, too, but it doesn't go the way you might expect.

This is really a kind of road picture, and when Ethan meets someone, neither he nor you knows whether that person is going to support the mission or betray it. And perhaps even more interestingly, you don't know why. Everyone has their own backstory, and we're not privvy to it. There's something hugely artistically validating about this overarching idea of all of us being individuals making our own choices for own reasons.

Wow. Storytelling. How does it work?

This may point to the problem with Hollywood generally: Where it began with working class adventurers and evolved into artists sincerely trying to understand and depict the human condition, now it views itself as the focus and all of us supporting players in its own "heroic" journey. I am confident Mr. Cruise understands the audience is the point, the raison d'être, of art.

I found myself impressed. It's a good movie. It earns its two hour, fifty minute runtime, which is about the nicest thing I could say of any 170 minute film.

"I can't keep jumping out of planes! I'm gonna be 63 in two weeks!"

P.S. For a geriatric action hero, Cruise is way more convincing than Liam Neeson and Harrison Ford were at his age.