I’m about to spoil the ending of Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning for you, but that’s fine. You don’t go to an M:I movie for things like “a coherent plot” or “fully realized characters.” You go for the stunts, for Tom Cruise breaking into a dead sprint, and for shit to blow up real good. Going by those metrics, The Final Reckoning delivers. I got my money’s worth, and then some.
But there was one extra draw to The Final Reckoning, which was that it was presumably the final movie Cruise would do for the franchise. After all, “The Final Reckoning” is right there in the title. Also, Cruise is 62 years old and surely hellbent on finally getting himself a Best Actor statuette before he goes to Scientology heaven. So it made perfect sense for him to bow out of this series while his limbs were still intact.
And it made even MORE sense for his character, Ethan Hunt, to die.
Because what better way would there have been to cap off Ethan Hunt’s story than with him dying? It would have been a fitting tribute to the M:I franchise, and to the insane amount of work that Cruise put into it. As Vince Mancini wrote in his review of this installment, “Possibly no movie in history has been so good at being a movie as Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning.” And you know what makes a movie, like, EXTRA movie-y? Knocking off the main character at the end. After all those decades of running around and wearing masks and jumping out of moon landers, the right way to end Ethan Hunt’s story was with the one mission that he WOULDN’T survive. He’d still save the world, of course. But then he’d fall off one of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur and Simon Pegg would fall to his knees and scream, "NOOOOOO!" while theater ushers pepper sprayed the audience to induce tears. Very sad. Very dramatic.
This was such an obvious creative choice, in fact, that I was dead certain that Cruise would die at the end of this installment. I didn’t look for spoilers. I didn’t check any lengthy Vanity Fair profiles of the actor for cryptic hints at his character’s fate. I was operating on pure movie instinct. Shit, they just offed James Bond in Daniel Craig’s last go round. If they can kill off James Bond in a shitty movie, then they can surely kill off Ethan Hunt in a better one. In fact, doing the job would have been easier by orders of magnitude, because Ethan Hunt is barely a character at all. The only reason that you or I care about any M:I character is because the score playing underneath demands, practically at gunpoint, that we do.
So I purchased my ticket over the weekend expecting blood. I sat down. I watched Cruise explain the plot (it’s nonsense) for minutes at a time. I watched multiple flashbacks to the other M:I movies to help clarify that plot (they didn’t). I watched Cruise run. I watched his HGH regimen go topless in multiple scenes. I watched him solemnly tell all of the other characters around him that they HAD to let him do a bunch of crazy-ass shit or else the Earth would explode. And I then watched him do that crazy shit. I was sufficiently enchanted all the way through, especially in the bananas final hour. The only thing left was to see how they would wrap it all up.
And guess what? They didn’t. They didn’t wrap up SHIT. They ended this M:I flick just like every other M:I flick, with Cruise nodding respectfully to his secret spy friends before walking off to parts unknown. Not only did Ethan Hunt survive this supposed "final reckoning," he even gets a resurrection scene, where Hayley Atwell frees him from an icy tomb while he's wearing a bejeweled cruciform key around his neck.
Are you fucking shitting me, Cruise? Eight movies and you don’t have the stones to off yourself? You let Ving Rhames take the fall for you? This is bullshit, son. I didn’t go to your movie in hopes there’d be a teaser for a ninth one after the credits. I came to watch you die.
Cruise's limitless star power and ego helped make Mission: Impossible the best action franchise on the planet, and so it's a bitter irony that those same things prevented him from sticking the landing. This guy spent has the last decade modeling himself into the One Man Who Can Save The Cinema, risking his life multiple times while on set just to prove how dedicated he is to the art form. But in the end, he didn't have the moviemaking instinct to let us see him get his head blown clean off. That’s what you would have done if you’d had that dawg in you, Cruise.
Instead, you took the coward’s way out. Not very Ethan Hunt of you. I’m disappointed, and so are my all of my fellow countrymen. Maybe when Timothée Chalamet takes over this franchise, he’ll make the call that you, Mr. Movies, never could.
