Flasz On Film

There was a time when arrival of a new Mission: Impossible movie was an event I’d look forward to with excitement. After all, ever since Ghost Protocol, the franchise proceeded with renewed vigor, no longer as an anthology series—though the idea of hiring filmmakers with distinctly different visual toolkits and ideas about how to spin these movies and how to blur the boundaries between movie magic and top-class stuntmanship was interesting in its own right—but rather as an evolving saga with a growing narrative. But ever since the last instalment, my excitement has been permanently replaced with a mixture of exasperation and anxiety.  

I’d like you to imagine that the entire Mission: Impossible series is like a friend you’ve known since you were both in secondary school. And this friend had gone through phases as he was reaching adulthood. In fact you went through these phases together, from too-cool-for-school let’s-skip-classes-and-hang-out-and-get-up-to-some-mischief (Mission: Impossible) to the inevitable arrival of the long-hair intellectual goth who loves anime and Asian cinema (Mission: Impossible 2) and then to that point where your paths diverged because he got a girlfriend and his priorities changed so much that you stopped hanging out together (Mission: Impossible 3). 

But then, a few years passed, and you bumped into each other and reconnected. You’ve discovered that your friend developed a passion for fitness, and you started to go for park runs together and then to the gym to lift some weights. Times were great. (Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol). Eventually, your friend’s passion for fitness turned into a passion for bodybuilding. He started taking his diet seriously, began to cycle between bulking and cutting, organized his daily routine around the gym, meal-prepping and counting calories and began talking about trying to have a go at an amateur bodybuilding contest. You thought it was a great idea and decided to wholeheartedly support him in this adventure. When you saw him on stage, all shredded and tanned and in peak condition, you were proud of his achievement (Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation).  

However, his bodybuilding journey didn’t stop there. Because you both saw he had great potential, you continued to support him because you both felt it would have been really cool to see him at a podium among the best bodybuilders in the world, standing toe to toe with the elite. He started seriously using PEDs, added some serious mass to his frame and committed fully to the journey to the top of the world, which you both thought was within reach. And then he did it. He went to the Mister Olympia contest, posed shoulder-to-shoulder with the greats and took home the top trophy (Mission: Impossible – Fallout).  

You walked up to him to shake his hand and pat him on the now incredibly sized and conditioned back. He smiled and thanked you for always being there for him. But you felt instinctively that something had changed and your friend’s journey from fitness to bodybuilding and then to the top of the world had impacted his mind. He was different. He forgot he had an off-switch and didn’t know how to slow down and redirect his focus and energy, having just won the most prestigious title in bodybuilding.  

Unfortunately, years of discipline, sacrifice and commitment to shaping his body and building an incredible physique have taken their toll in the form of your friend developing an undiagnosed body dysmorphia, a common condition among bodybuilders. It wasn’t that he didn’t know how to stop, but rather he didn’t realize he could because what he saw in the mirror was completely divorced from what he looked like in reality. He was a titan of muscle mass and conditioning and a true champion in this field of athletic endeavor, but his mind kept telling him that he was still not big enough, not shredded enough, not developed enough. That he needed more steroids, more training, more food. More of everything.  

He wouldn’t listen to reason. After all, it’s inherently difficult to convince someone suffering from a mental illness that they need help because their mind tells them that the entire world is wrong and what they perceive is real. He kept bulking and undergoing progressively more aggressive steroid treatments, not because he wanted to push new grounds, but because in his mind he was trying to catch up to the warped self-image he was chasing because of his raging dysmorphia. When you saw him compete at Mister Olympia again, he was almost comically massive. He loomed over other competitors but lacked the definition and proportion. He had put on too much muscle and looked more like a cartoon, an embellished caricature of a bodybuilder (Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning). And the title went elsewhere.  

Sadly, the friend didn’t learn the lesson. He could not have been reasoned with and convinced that he had developed a crippling mental illness that rendered him completely unable to perceive his physique for what it was and he vowed to push his body even harder, put on even more muscle and outshine his rivals by becoming the biggest and most muscular bodybuilder that ever lived.  

And now you sit there in the audience and watch him struggle to the podium for his posing session. He’s out of breath, nearly crumbling under the weight of his muscle mass. Even from afar you can see the irreparable damage the constant steroid use had wrought on his body. You can see that in pursuit of developing ever bigger musculature he had torn his left bicep, which rendered his body unsymmetrical, a definite disadvantage in the eyes of the referees. You almost feel that his days are numbered and that next time you see his face, it might be at his wake.  

That’s what I felt while watching Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the eighth and (for the time being) final instalment in the franchise that saw Tom Cruise embrace his title of the last true action star and a champion of death-defying stunt work. In fact, the title alone was a massive red flag because it seems that the people who produced it must have realized just how badly they had painted themselves into a corner by titling the seventh instalment Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning: Part 1. They probably meant to title this movie Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning: Part 2 but somehow this title wouldn’t carry the oomph and the sense of finality they were after. And you can’t just add another subtitle to it because Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning: Part 2 – The Final Reckoning would have looked completely braindead and laughably ridiculous.

Therefore, they surreptitiously removed “Part 1” from the title of the previous movie, which allowed them to proceed with calling this film Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. Thus, they proceeded with building from the events of the previous movie to stage what they though was a grand finale of the franchise—though we all know that nothing is ever final in Hollywood—and to give Ethan Hunt a send-off he had worked for over the course of the last twenty-nine years. The game of self-oneupmanship was on and the movie simply had to be bigger, bolder and more packed with action and stunts than anything that came before it. Cruise would go on to perform bone-chilling stunts while flying a biplane, deep sea diving, off-road racing and fighting off baddies with his bare hands. And sprinting. His trademark. The stakes would be ever higher too as The Entity—the ominous sentient AI that threatened to take over the world and meddled with Hunt’s mission in the previous movie—would now endanger the survival of the humankind.  

That’s right. It’s no longer about spy stuff. McGuffins are now extinction-laced. The stakes are now so high that the world will end unless Hunt and his rag-tag group of helpers, which included the old guard Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames) as well as new additions in the form of Grace the pickpocket extraordinaire and a new love interest for Ethan (Hayley Atwell) and the nameless assassin-turned-ally played by Pom Klementieff would go on an adventure that includes even more globe-trotting, more locations, more coordinated miracle-working, more stunts, more fights and more adrenaline, all to give Tom Cruise that final salute as he parts ways with the franchise he had adopted so profoundly that it had become a part of his genetic makeup.  

Sadly, it just does not work. Just as my manufactured friend’s pursuit of hypertrophy began to cannibalize his own form, Mission: Impossible too has become a parody of its peak self. And that’s because in order to stage this convoluted chapter in the saga, in which a lot of loose ends would have to be tied and also several callbacks to the early days of the series would have to be made to bring the franchise together in a resplendent finale, the resulting movie would end up too muscular for its own skeletal frame too look aesthetically pleasing and healthy. 

In fact, Red flags are flying even in the opening frames as The Final Reckoning begins with what you’d think is a staple mission briefing in which Ethan Hunt learns about what he had just done himself in the previous movie. We spend ten minutes listening to a spiel about what The Entity is, what the Sevastopol submarine is and how the band of rogue IMF agents let The Entity slip through their fingers and now the world is in disarray and the deadly AI is on course to take control of the world’s nuclear arsenal in preparation to annihilate humanity. Like, was he in a coma? Did he suffer a fall and lost his memory? Of course not, this is for the benefit of the viewer… who had also seen the previous movie anyway.  

But that’s not even the half of it because The Final Reckoning ploughs on and proceeds to stage some truly incredible set pieces in between the many bouts of exposition, franchise callbacks and other plotting, which all work to counteract the buildup of adrenaline in your bloodstream. We come back to the first movie to reintroduce a character who is now key to saving the world. We are asked to recall what the Rabbit’s Foot was and what happened to women who got to close to Ethan Hunt, all in extended sessions when the action is paused and the filmmakers tell us all about it.  

As a result, this final epic chapter in arguably the most interesting long-standing action franchises of all time is a festival of fits and starts where great stuntwork is layered between heavy-handed exposition and ridiculous plot devices, all of which works perfectly to tire the viewer and render them incapable of staying awake. This movie is a burden, a nearly three-hour long slugfest where nothing makes sense, deus ex machina is adopted wholesale as a standard narrative tool and where the outside world does not exist or matter unless any of the main characters are about to interact with it. In this regard, it seems Mission: Impossible has been taking lessons from the John Wick franchise, which had taken this idea to the extreme.  

Hence, when the climax is finally reached and the camera cuts between Tom Cruise hanging onto a wing of a flying plane, the president (Angela Bassett) fighting the urge to end the world herself and the rest of the team trying to disarm a bomb and also capture the AI into a doodad that looks like a lightbulb, all of which must be synced up to a millisecond, I was not exhilarated. I was not joyous. I was tired and exasperated. I was relieved much in the way I’d be relieved after a long-haul flight had come to an end and the fasten-your-seatbelt light was switched off. Relieved because I’d get to stand up and go home.  

And that’s not what anyone should feel after a movie that tried to be epic and bombastic and action-packed. Maybe my feelings would have been different if the filmmakers had committed to some permanent decisions, which is what John Wick: Chapter 4 and No Time to Die ended up doing. Sadly, they didn’t. The reckoning may have been final, but something tells me this isn’t the last Mission: Impossible. And Cruise might still be back—assuming he can find an insurer willing to gamble on him surviving another stunt. Then again, The Final Reckoning might truly be the end—not because the story demands it, but because the economics do. A film this swollen with spectacle needs to gross a billion just to break even.  

And this mission might in fact turn out to be impossible because in contrast to Avengers: Endgame which had a rabidly zealous fanbase willing to come back for multiple long hauls of comic book action, The Final Reckoning might dissuade the audience from doing so. After all, these death-defying stunts tend to lose their luster on multiple watches, and I don’t think people will venture out to give themselves bedsores to indulge in listening to entire pages-worth of exposition. It’s not conducive to good entertainment, just as it’s sad and a little depressing to watch a longtime friend destroy his body and shave years off his life chasing a body image that no longer exists.