There was tremendous pressure on Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie, and their whole team to end this series on a high note. The Final Reckoning has the longest running time of the franchise and two of the craziest stunts ever performed. But did they accomplish their mission? Well, sort of.
This direct sequel to Dead Reckoning picks up months later, unfortunately doubling down on that film's worst aspects. Notably, that's making an all-powerful, nihilistic AI called the Entity its big bad. The threat is even more grave this time, as the Entity has infected since all of cyberspace, and is well on its way to infiltrating the nuclear missile facilities of all eight nations that possess them.
The first hour is surprisingly leaden, as the film reveals the Entity's grand vision for destroying humanity. It also tries to explicitly connect all the films in the series. Some of these are great and organic. Some feel incredibly forced. And some make no sense at all. And it repeatedly hits the note that the perilous state of the world is Ethan's fault. It's as if someone sucked all the fun out of the series.
But once we're off and running, with Ethan on one side of the globe and his team on the other, the film delivers exactly what we've come to expect from this franchise. Cruise's death wish goes to another level in this film, with two of the most mind-blowing stunts he's ever had the audacity to perform. Even more than scaling the Burj Khalifa or driving a motorcycle off the cliff, these feel like he was one wrong step from dying.
The film's centerpiece is a nearly wordless sequence that harkens back to the original's Langley vault break-in. Here, Cruise dives to unsafe depths to retrieve the source code for the Entity with the cruciform key he stole from Gabriel (Esai Morales) at the end of Dead Reckoning. Inside a submarine filled with corpses, freezing water, and active torpedoes, it's harrowing and claustrophobic. DP Fraser Taggart delivers some of the greatest IMAX photography of all-time here, taking up the full screen so every shift and snag makes your heart skip a beat.
The film makes one other big error, and it also has to do with the film's villain. In Dead Reckoning, Gabriel worked as an antagonist because he was so mysterious, putting into motion events even he didn't understand. But for some reason his note for this one was to start chewing the scenery. He's literally cackling while trying to kill Ethan nearly every time they meet. It's an odd choice for a movie that is often deadly serious.
Any time the film's focus is on the team and their mission, it soars. But it gets dragged down every time someone says, "The Entity wants you to distrust me," which is surprisingly often. Playing out in the background is a tense political thriller in the vein of 1964's Fail-Safe. As different countries' nuclear arsenals fall to the Entity, the President (Angela Bassett) must decide whether to make a preemptive first strike, since no one has any idea what the Entity might do once it has complete control. It raises the stakes, putting the fate of the world in someone's hands besides just Ethan's.
Overall, this is an often breathtaking film. But it digs itself a big hole that takes a while to get out of. Once you accept the first third will be a bumpy ride, it will make the rest of it that much more exhilarating.
