Member-only story
Review: ‘Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning’ — Masterful Action Meets Narrative Bloat
The (maybe?) grand finale to the greatest blockbuster franchise of this generation neatly summarises the best and worst that its series has to offer
Early reviews of Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning almost led me to skip the film entirely. Maybe I was safely nestled into a small internet echo chamber, but every time I opened a review I would see what felt like warnings not to see the film, reviews which discussed how the first hour in particular plays out as an exhausting exposition extravaganza. Sure, the later set-pieces were impressive, but by then the audience would likely be reduced to frustrated mush having been spoken at for an entire hour in a ridiculously lengthy reiteration of the rest of the series, complete with ret-cons galore. It was this specific problem with the handling of exposition and the introduction of mostly uninteresting new characters that, for me, made Dead Reckoning: Part One (which I supposed we should just call Dead Reckoning now) such a punishing watch — every fun set-piece or engaging idea was soon smothered in expository dialogue that dragged the story to a screeching halt and felt so directly written to the audience that it felt as though Tom Cruise would…
