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philthepill.online · @philthepill.online@bridge.neodb.net

Rated Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning 6/10

Ethan Hunt is a confounding character to me. Plucked from a trilogy which kept his individuality at the forefront, he instead became an avatar of heroics working on behalf of institutions that have proven themselves to be dens of snakes and vipers. That cognitive dissonance reached a successful peak for me with Fallout, which sincerely made the case why Ethan was Very Important despite what people like me might think about individual agents taking on the mandate of heaven. And then came this duology, which now has the Ethan Hunt character singularly focused on playing out his tropes, like some sort of cyborg golem. He must put his own life at risk. He must put the whole world at risk. If his closest lady friend is killed, he must immediately imprint on the closest beautiful woman in his orbit and project onto her all his motivation for saving "the world." Dead Reckoning had me sneering at what they were doing with this aging husk of a man, wrapped within a science fiction story that reduced the more complex villainy of Solomon Lane to a big, broad cartoon villain in the form of The Entity and its henchman Gabriel. But Final Wreck, as we may appropriately shorthand, at least has the benefit of having already crossed the rubicon with the last entry. We are in full-on late-Tom-Clancy, paranoid conspiracy nuclear war thriller, having long ago left behind the more contained spy thrillers akin to John Le Carre. As a result, I felt like the setpieces paired with a musical score that is lifting from multiple eras of MI was creating a sort of choreographed performance. There was tension and sentimentality and some rumination on mortality. The stakes became so high that they were abstract, leading me to the only question that matters: Will Ethan Hunt complete the mortally dangerous task in front of him? Final Wreck became a circus act; high-wire trapeze and jumping through flaming hoops. In committing to a more honest acknowledgment of what this franchise became, it was marginally more successful than the seventh movie. I walked away feeling like it was worth the price of admission. That said, it still treated me like an absolute child idiot with that amount of narration and ham-handed exposition for franchise lore. Three stars.

#movie

Published 2026-03-19 00:00 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere