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Review by matt lynch ★★★★ Liked

ittedly these movies do not have to work very hard for me to love them, and yet they work so, so fucking hard.

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Mission Impossible AI: Manipulates global events to control the world
Our AI: Tralalero Tralala

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gonna petition to put Tramell Tillman in every movie ever from here on out

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you can’t hate this one!! that’s what the entity wants, it wants us to turn against eachother

Review by davidehrlich ★★½

Whether or not “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” actually ends up being Tom Cruise’s last time racing to save the world as a renegade member of the IMF, there is no mistaking the fact that Christopher McQuarrie’s heartbreakingly flat and disted epic was intended as a last hurrah for America’s best action series.

That has almost nothing to do with how the movie ends, and just about everything to do with how it comports itself for the 160 minutes before that. Case in point: The festivities kick off with a bonafide supercut of Ethan Hunt’s greatest hits from the saga’s previous seven installments, neatly divided into subcategories like “love interest” and “villain.” And it would be a massive understatement…

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An extremely, shockingly dull and expository first hour that had me sitting there going “are they fucking BLOWING it??” leads to maybe the finest extended set-piece they’ve ever done and from there I was locked in. I like how weird and unwieldy these last two are, lots of threads that if you pull on enough you’re like “what?!” and I definitely got a lot of that here but you can really start to see the seams. Cruise heads are gonna have a lot of fun dissecting a major plot element of this lol. 

Some tremendous people talking in room scenes. Few people the camera loves more than Katy O’Brian. Cruise is the hottest he’s been since II. 

I liked this well enough, wish I loved it. Probably good to end it here because you feel the well drying up with every sip.

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Thank you, Tom Cruise, for never giving up on the theatrical experience.

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unfortunately, the people who didn’t like this have already been brainwashed by the entity.

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Farewell, Ethan Hunt. Not a single 007 agent can ever top you.

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I’m exhausted

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Tom asked us to trust him one last time and you better. The first half demands your patience before it catapults you into the best sequences this franchise has to offer. I don’t think there’s a more tense and jaw-dropping moment than Ethan going into the submarine. Half an hour of silence, which is louder than any form of dialogue one can conjure — I was stress-eating my popcorn while leaning forward the whole time because I couldn’t believe this SOB had done it (again). That goes without mentioning the awe-inspiring plane sequence. It’s so unbelievable and a testament to this franchise’s (Tom’s) willingness to take the hardest and longest path to entertain us. In a time when we have…

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This movie is operating on a whole different level, man…

…than the rest of the franchise, unfortunately. Hell, than itself. Because there is that same face-melting witchcraft at times—two set-pieces, specifically, that rank amongst the most impossible of Mission: Impossible. The heart is there, too; I was moved to tears maybe half a dozen times. 

But it’s also profoundly silly, simultaneously abnormally somber, and more reliant on characters no one cares about than this review is on hyphens. 

I was never that hot on Dead Reckoning and its goofy-ass puppet villain with a retconned backstory, but I couldn’t deny how fun it could be and how much I loved Pom Klementieff. I’m sad to report that Final isn’t going to win…