It’s not quite “Mission: Unwatchable.”
Still, “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” (PG-13, 169 minutes, in theaters) is a big comedown from its entertaining predecessor, “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One.”
The eighth, and possibly final, entry in the series involves a rogue artificial intelligence, called “The Entity,” that threatens to take over the world’s nuclear arsenal and cause the annihilation of humanity. It’s up to Impossible Missions Force agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team to stop it.
If they don’t, IMF agent and former thief Grace (Hayley Atwell) notes, “It’s the end of the world as we know it” (to which I wanted to shout at the screen, “I feel fine!”).
Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt in “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.” (Paramount Pictures/Skydance).
So off go Hunt and his team – Grace, techie Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), French assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff) and U.S. Intelligence agent Theo Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) – on an impossible mission that takes them from the Bering Sea to a bunker in South Africa. Hunt’s best pal, computer whiz Luther Stickwell (Ving Rhames), also plays a key part in saving London from destruction at the hands of primary human villain Gabriel (Esai Morales).
Director Christopher McQuarrie, working with a screenplay he wrote with Erik Jendresen, goes all-out in this grandiose possible finale. The film slips in multiple quick-cut flashbacks, often serving as highlight reels recounting Hunt’s many heroics, as a way to tie all eight “Mission” movies together.
As for Hunt and his heroics, the film should be subtitled “The Deification of Ethan Hunt.” McQuarrie reminds us, again and again (and again and again), that Cruise’s Hunt is quite a guy. U.S. President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) leaves a special message for him in which she heaps on the praise for his saving the planet multiple times – while never following orders! If not for him, she says, “Earth might not be here … at all!”
Others agree, with lines like; “You were always the best of men in the worst of times” and “You’re the only one I trust to save it” – it being the world. Hunt even gets all T.E. Lawrence on us, with “Nothing is written” as one of his apparent mottos. And what would a movie with a Cruise hero be without the obligatory scene or three of him sprinting like a faster-than-a-speeding-bullet track star to or from danger? (I loathe these scenes; can’t he just hail a cab?)
When the film isn’t kissing Hunt’s butt, it’s often locked in long, mind-numbing scenes of comically convoluted exposition. Sure, there also are the expected action/adventure sequences – Hunt narrowly escaping death while retrieving something called the “Rabbit’s Foot” from the wreck of a sunken Russian submarine, Hunt hanging from a biplane as the evil pilot tries to shake him off – but these attempts to recall James Bond or Indiana Jones come across as dull and dragged out (in the case of the sub sequence) or just ridiculous and dragged out (the plane bit).
Rhames has a moving scene, and Morales has fun chewing up the scenery, but Atwell, whose pick-pocket character played such an appealing role in the previous film, and Pegg, one of the funniest actors in movies, are criminally underused here.
Gotta keep that camera on our running, jumping savior, Ethan Hunt. ** (out of four)
Only one way out
“I hate to tell you this, but we’re all going to die.”
That’s what I tell my film students whenever I’m about to screen Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal,” the famous art-house film about a knight who plays chess with the Grim Reaper.
Not to be confused with a Bergman film, “Final Destination Bloodlines” (R, 110 minutes, in theaters) delivers hilariously ultraviolent horror with an invisible Death tracking down and killing (mostly) young people in comical, Rube Goldberg style.
A date in a high-rise restaurant doesn’t go so well for Iris (Brec Bassinger) in “Final Destination Bloodlines.” (Warner Bros. Pictures)
As gruesome and brutal and mean-spirited as it all is, “Bloodlines” isn’t torture porn. The appeal isn’t watching someone in pain, it’s the suspense of knowing something very bad is going to happen but not knowing exactly how, and the humor in watching ridiculously unlucky victims fall prey to absurdly awful chains of events.
In other words, you don’t have to be a sadist to enjoy the film, but you do have to be twisted.
(Guilty as charged.)
This is the sixth “Final Destination” movie, the first coming in 2000 and the fifth in 2011. The basics are the same: People who have cheated death by surviving a catastrophe realize they are on a checklist for a particularly awful exit from life.
Directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, “Bloodlines” starts at the 1968 opening of a swanky high-rise restaurant where Paul Campbell (Max Lloyd-Jones) plans to ask girlfriend Iris (Brec Bassinger) to marry him. Should be very romantic.
But Iris envisions something entirely different, having a premonition that things are going to turn bonkers very quickly.
They do.
Some of the turns for the terrible are telegraphed in amusing ways, like when people frantically pile into an elevator that has a sign that says there’s a maximum weight of eight adults, or when it’s mentioned that the restaurant tower was constructed five months ahead of schedule, or when Paul says, “I’m the luckiest guy in the world.”
The story moves to the modern day, when the descendants of one of the restaurant survivors find themselves in peril. One by one … well, you can guess.
Though the fate of most, if not all, of them is sealed, we still squirm as they try to avoid the inevitable. Along the way, the funny bits continue.
The message, intended or not, seems to be this: We’re all going to die. We might as well go down laughing. ***
** Click here for Tim Miller’s previous movie columns for Cape Cod Wave **
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Tim Miller
Tim Miller is co-president of the Boston Society of Film Critics and a Tomatometer-approved critic.He teaches film and journalism at Cape Cod Community College in West Barnstable. You can contact Tim at [email protected] or follow him onTwitter @TimMillerCritic. Or you can ignore him completely.
