Please, One More Reckoning Before We Go! Okay, But This is ‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’

May 14, 2025

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The Impossible Man (CREDIT: Paramount Pictures and Skydance)

Starring: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny, Holt McCallany, Janet McTeer, Nick Offerman, Hannah Waddingham, Tramell Tillman, Angela Bassett, Shea Whigham, Greg Tarzan Davis, Charles Parnell, Mark Gatiss, Rolf Saxon, Lucy Tulugarjuk

Director: Christopher McQuarrie

Running Time: 169 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Near-Death Experiences

Release Date: May 23, 2025 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: It’s all come down to this. All those previous impossible missions that Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) pulled off over the decades? We thought they were more or less self-contained. But instead, it turns out that they were all part of a vast global conspiracy to sow widespread confusion and establish a new world order. This is set to be established by an artificial intelligence entity known as, in fact, “The Entity.” It is apparently going to accomplish this by infecting every connected device on the planet and then – as far as I can tell – launching every nuclear weapon and also just generally making everyone distrustful of everyone else. Some guy named Gabriel (Esai Morales) is trying to usher The Entity along to its destiny, while Ethan and his IMF crew attempt to do the opposite with their precision timing and the latest batch of stakes-raising, death-defying stunts.

What Made an Impression?: They’ve Got So Much to Say: The Final Reckoning definitely gives off end-of-the-series vibes, although I’m sure Cruise and the rest of the creative team are open to future installments for as long as he remains ageless. In the meantime, though, this chapter definitely closes the book on something. And it’s a big ol’ slam, clocking in at nearly three hours. Those minutes are filled with a trio of major set pieces, and plenty of talking in between about how those set pieces will be accomplished. And when I say “plenty,” I mean, “oh so very many plenty.” I really don’t think there needed to be this much dialogue for such an action-oriented flick. That’s not to say that the Mission: Impossible flicks ought to be silent (although that might be kind of cool if they were), but I personally would have advised a sleeker design.
Hey, Remember Those Times Way Back When?: When it comes to long-running action series, M:I is kind of the antithesis of Fast & Furious, insofar as the former sheds several of its supporting characters in between installments without any fanfare, whereas the latter seems to just collecting them for perpetuity until it’s bursting at the seams. To be fair, there are still a few IMF mainstays hanging around, although Ethan’s female counterparts have a tendency to disappear no matter how beloved they are by fans. The Final Reckoning takes a somewhat different approach by explicitly drawing upon some of the earlier entries in ways that would have felt impossible just a few years earlier. And that’s kind of thrilling for those of us whose favorite M:I chapters seemed like they’d been completely forgotten.
Timely Gobbledygook: Cautionary tales about artificial intelligence are so hot right now. But frankly The Entity doesn’t have anything to do with any real-life A.I. On the contrary, it’s just a profoundly vague MacGuffin. Or should I call it the villain? Can the MacGuffin be the villain? I think it is in this case. Anyway, it’s all just an excuse for the most baroque modern blockbuster action around, so whatever.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is Recommended If You Like: Parking your butt while the obsessive man does his thing

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Entities

It’s the End of the World as We Know It, and ‘Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One’ Feels Fine

July 5, 2023

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Which one’s Dead and which one’s Reckoning? (CREDIT: Paramount Pictures and Skydance)

Starring: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Esai Morales, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Vanessa Kirby, Henry Czerny, Pom Klementieff, Shea Whigham, Greg Tarzan Davis

Director: Christopher McQuarrie

Running Time: 163 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for A Reckless Relationship with Gravity

Release Date: July 12, 2023 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: This might just be the most impossible mission yet! That may sound like hyperbole for a series that’s famously death-defying, but honestly it lives up to the hype. Ethan Hunt (the freakishly indefatigable Tom Cruise) and his pared-down IMF team must somehow figure out how to dispatch a new enemy that threatens to wipe out humanity as we know it by reverting society to an analog dystopia. Of course, that premise is just a setup for the shameless stunts and sizzling globetrotting. In addition to this all-encompassing terror, Ethan is also being chased down by some law enforcement types who aren’t so sure he should be able to operate without impunity anymore.

What Made an Impression?: What’s All This Now?: The Mission: Impossible series combines elements of espionage, big budgets extravaganza, and practical stunt work, all genres that are notorious for being accompanied by nonsensical plots. And Dead Reckoning Part One might just be the nonsensical one yet! As far as I could tell, the enemy wasn’t exactly human, but it could take human form. Or maybe I misunderstood that. But I don’t think I did! The opening scene provided a very thorough explanation, after all. Anyway, I’m pretty sure that Esai Morales plays the villain in question, but confusion still lingered with me by the end. If you find yourself just as confused as I was, you can still enjoy the movie, though you’ll also probably find yourself mulling it over more than you need to.
New and Old, Which One’s New?: In terms of character carryover, Mission: Impossible is kind of like the hall-of-mirrors version of Fast & Furious, if some of those mirrors were covered by blackout blinds. In addition to Cruise as Hunt, you can rely on Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg to be there as his regular IMF buddies. But on the flip side, you could have a love interest like M:I 3‘s Michelle Monagahn just unceremoniously disappear. There’s also a little bit of room for new favorites like Rebecca Ferguson and Vanessa Kirby to remain after their initial appearances, and for new recruits like Hayley Atwell to seamlessly find their place. And we can even reach way back for originals like Henry Czerny who were there in the beginning but have taken most of the sequels off, and you can be tricked into thinking that they’ve been there all along. Basically, the casting in this franchise is a magic act.
So Much Delivered, So Much More to Come: But let’s finally get down to the bread and butter. The best setpieces all involve a climactic train ride. There’s a cliffside jump to arrive on the train, fights within and outside the train, and a desperate scramble to stay alive and not fall off the train. Before that choo-choo checks in, you might actually wonder what’s taking so long for Dead Reckoning to go for broke as much as usual. But once it does, the massively wound ball of tension lets loose and doesn’t give you any time to catch your breath. And this is just Part One! A nearly three-hour opening chapter, after that. (Or the first half of the seventh chapter, from another point of view.) This is just the latest 2023 blockbuster that forces you to wait another year for the end of the story, but you won’t feel deprived. Dead Reckoning Part One can stand fully on its own, and quite frankly, you’ll need all those extra months to recover.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is Recommended If You Like: Saying “Huh?” and “Woo-hoo!” at the same time

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Trains

This Is a Movie Review: Mission: Impossible – Fallout

August 12, 2018

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CREDIT: Paramount Pictures

Mission: Impossible – Fallout is to Ethan Hunt what Spectre is to James Bond, but not that (transparently) insane and mostly successful. But what I really want to talk about is this idea that Hunt is irreplaceable. The conjecture that there is only person for the most dangerous jobs in the world is certainly compelling, but is it healthy? If we’re talking about how it applies to reality, certainly not. For the sake of the world and for the sake of their personal lives, experts and superheroes should have backups and successors in place. But when we’re talking about the cinematic medium, the calculus is a little different … or is it?

M:I isn’t the only spy and/or insane stunt franchise that has been killing it in the past 20 years, which means we’ve got our backups. And when Tom Cruise finally calls it quits (in a billion years or so), maybe a worthy Ethan Hunt successor will somehow run into our hearts. In the universe where the IMF exists, Hunt really shouldn’t place the entire weight of the world on his shoulders. But since this world is a fictional place, it’s working as it’s supposed to.

I give Mission: Impossible – Fallout 4 Cliffhangs out of 5 Shifting Allegiances.

This Is a Movie Review: ‘Ready Player One’ Wrings Some Beauty and Profundity Out of Empty Calorie Storytelling

March 28, 2018

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CREDIT: Warner Bros.

This review was originally published on News Cult in March 2018.

Starring: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Lena Waithe, Mark Rylance, T.J. Miller, Simon Pegg

Director: Steven Spielberg

Running Time: 140 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Explosions (Both VR and Real Life), Threats of Gun Violence, Partial Referential Nudity, and PG-13’s One Free F-Bomb

Release Date: March 29, 2018

The premise of Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel Ready Player One is basically nerd wish fulfillment writ large: in a dystopian future, a gamer completes a series of puzzles based on pop culture touchstones in a massive virtual reality simulation for the prize of a billionaire’s inheritance. As it plays out, though, (in both the book and Steven Spielberg’s adaptation) it is more of a Robin Hood fantasy, with the winnings serving as the golden ticket to end income inequality. The improbability and the wish fulfillment are all well and good, but they do mean that everything wraps up a little too perfectly, so satisfaction must be found in the details and the execution. Spielberg has remained a proficient craftsman his entire career, so even though Ready Player One’s separation between right and wrong might be a little too stark, it still pulls off some genuine wonder.

The film keeps the same basic outline at the novel, save for switching out some of the homages, both because Spielberg wanted to limit references to his own past work and presumably because of rights issues. Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) spends most of his time as his avatar Parzival in the VR world known as the OASIS, partly because his real life is situated in a ugly heap of metal, literally, as his home, like many in 2045, exists within one of many trailers stacked on top of each other. He hangs out with his crew of fellow gamers, whom he only knows virtually, which frankly isn’t all that different than how it is for some folks already in 2018. Wade of course falls in love with Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), a bit of a legend in the OASIS, who feels like she is specifically engineered to be the perfect girl for him, which is a bit of a pain, but at least Sheridan and Cooke keep it charming.

This crew’s quest finds them at odds with Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), the brazenly stereotypical asshole CEO of a global conglomerate who employs an army of corporate drones to win the inheritance because he wants to turn the second biggest company in the world into the biggest company in the world, and he’s not averse to killing to get his way. He is plenty scary, but RPO could have benefited greatly from actually exploring what makes him tick.

It is appreciated that Wade is not a chosen one archetype so typical of the genre. The reason he succeeds is because he puts in the relentless work to understand the parameters and intricacies of the journey. That we get to see his process makes his racing a DeLorean around King Kong actually thrilling instead of just a prompt for ticking boxes off the reference checklist.

It is well worth noting that while the references draw from decades of pop culture, they are primarily based around the touchstones of the 1980s. That decade was partly defined by Spielberg, and it consisted of Cline’s formative years, but they are very much not the formative years of RPO’s main characters, nor much of the target audience. But within the narrative, they are the formative years for James Halliday (Mark Rylance), the OASIS co-creator who designed the game and bequeathed his fortune. Thus, the hours of study that Wade and his crew put in resonate in the way of culture being a way in to understand one’s fellow human beings.

With wizardly blond locks and profound diffidence, Rylance plays Halliday a lot like Garth Algar, but if Dana Carvey had envisioned the Aurora metalhead as the greatest tragic figure of all time. Ready Player One works best as an exploration into this one man’s psyche. His social awkwardness goes beyond any simple diagnosis, and Rylance does not shy away from the discomfort. Creating an all-encompassing VR world may be a bit of an overcorrection to his loneliness, but it is heartwarming that Halliday finds a way to make a genuine connection with the world, though it is more than a tad bittersweet how he accomplishes it.

Bottom line: with so much of Ready Player One rendered as virtual reality, it is frequently an off-putting eyesore. But it has moments of beauty, like Parzival and Art3mis’ free-floating dance; as well as strokes of demented remix genius, as when zombies overrun a rendering of Kubrick’s The Shining. Weirdly enough, the references actually end up having more soul and thoughtfulness than the characters (with the exception of Halliday).

Ready Player One is Recommended If You Like: Heavy referentiality whether justified or shameless, Mark Rylance getting deep into character work, The dance scene from WALL·E

Grade: 3 out of 5 Omnidirectional Treadmills