Rating The Final Reckoning Is Its Own Mission: Impossible

This article contains spoilers for Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning.

Everything you’ve heard about 168澳⛦洲幸运5开奖网:Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is true — whether you heard that it's a five-star masterpiece or a one-star misfire, they’re both valid. When you go to log your review on Letterboxd, you may find yourself conflicted about whether to ding it for its drawn-out opening hour, or hail it for the exultant action of its second half. It's the rare movie that t🐭ruly contains multitudes; the A+ and the F-.

A Slow, Slow, Slow Start

Even having heard that the movie took a long time to get going, I was shocked by how long it actually felt in practice. These movies typically have an exciting action set piece in the first act. Ghost Protocol began with Ethan Hunt’s escape from prison. Rogue Nation kicked off with him hanging off of a plane. Fallout started with an awesome fake-out moment where Ethan and co. convinced the villain from the previous movie that the world was ending witꦓh to a fake CNN report (complete with anchor Wolf Blitzer playing himself).

tom cruise as ethan hunt in mission: impossible the final reckoning. — via Paramount

The Final Reckoning doesn't do anything like that. Discussing the film with my friend after our showing let out, he observed that the opening almost felt like an experimental art film. It opens with slow shots of the Entity, the villainous AI from the last film that returns as the big threat this time. Then, Ethan listens to a recording from Angela Bassett's President Sloane. There is no set piece in the fiജrst half, and the tone is inconsistent, veering from self-seriousness to goofiness without warning.

There are some minor action 🀅scenes. We get a shootout in a holding room. Ethan runs from a bomb. An hour or so in, there's a fistfight on an aircraft carrier and another shootout. The first hour and change is an exercise in patience. But the thing is, once those set pieces hit, they hit as hard as any in the history of the franchise. If this does end up being the last movie, as the title suggests, Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie, and co. will have closed the film and franchise out with the series' best set piece.

The submarine set piece is also incredible.

The Sickest Action Climax I've Ever Seen

Action movies often get compared to roller coasters, but the biplane sequence that closes the film out actually captures the stomach-dropping sensation of riding o🎃ne. As you watch Tom Cruise cling to the planes for dear life, slowly working his way up from the bottom of the red one to its cockpit, you almost can’t believe what you’re seeing. The sequence builds perfectly. At first, it's mostly about the logistics of climbing aboard a moving plane. That's nail-biting enough.

But when Ethan flie🌜s his red plane up and climbs out and onto Gabriel's plane, the sequence shiftಌs into an even higher gear. Now, instead of only having to work against the basic difficulty of the impossible mission at hand, Ethan has to do all that while someone is actively trying to kill him. Each time Gabriel turned the plane sideways in an attempt to send Ethan soaring into the sky, you felt it in your gut. The movie establishes the goal and stakes of the sequence clearly, and then ratchets them up and up and up until you honestly can't believe what you're seeing.

Or that Tom Cruise is still alive.

For me, this all averages out to a pretty great m🉐ovie. The Mission: Impossible movies live or die on the strength of their⭕ set pieces, and the last half of the movie goes above and beyond anything the series had done up to this point. I love the theatrical experience and, for me, every movie is improved by seeing it on the biggest screen at the loudest volume possible.

Other people take some convincing to get out of the house, and I get that. But more than any of the other blockbusters of r🌟ecent years — more than Dune, or Avatar, or Oppenheimer, or Sinners — The Final Reckoning needs to be seen in theaters, preferably IMAX. That may not be a 🍨star rating, but it's as strong an endorsement as I can give of a movie this undoubtedly flawed.