Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

I saw the latest (and last) Mission Impossible today. I think the guy snoring three rows behind me for most of the length of the movie probably got more out of it.

There were a few cool fights, although they were generally in quick cuts close up rather than long takes from far away, which always makes fight scenes better. The first major one played out entirely offscreen with Hayley Atwell’s reactions the only clue – an odd choice. Much of the first 30 minutes of the movie was sneering white dudes proclaiming stuff in Dr. Evil-style speeches, so it kind of needed a shot in the arm.

When we got to the stunts, which wasn’t really until about a full normal movie length into the nearly 3-hour running time, the movie got better. I don’t think there’s anything about deep-sea diving or submarines that actually works the way they depict, and Ethan is dead many times over here, but it was still exciting. There’s a biplane thing that was pretty great too. Those were my favorite parts.

What I hated, hated, hated, was the plot and the bad guys. The last movie set up The Entity, a rogue sentient AI that (as happens only in movies) infiltrates everything, including top-secret military systems, existing nowhere but controlling everything. This turns any movie into a superhero movie, where the bad guy is as powerful as it needs to be for the plot, and you have no sense of limits or constraints. The humans dealing with this were completely stupid, too, with some wanting to control it through technobabble to gain unlimited power(TM), and others wanting to worship it (for real? did a significant number of people worship COVID?), and still others wanting to destroy it, but constantly intoning that doing so would “utterly destroy cyberspace,” something that was given no practical definition, but which everyone acted like would be the worst thing ever, and definitely worse than a limited nuclear exchange. Like, I guess my smart fridge might stop giving out water, and my photos would be deleted? I don’t think anybody serious has called the Internet cyberspace since the 1980s.

This movie also reveled in the awful Bond-movie thing where the bad guys can travel everywhere and show up at any time with 20+ minions and know exactly what’s going on down to what the good guys ordered for lunch. Not only that, the villains develop stupid-ass plans that hinge on capturing other people and offering them Faustian bargains, i.e. moral decisions they couldn’t really predict. They are utterly brilliant until they become dead stupid. The “trick” they supposedly fooled the Russians with (Russians who knew the general area where the sub went down, no less) is probably the most ridiculous movie thing ever.

I know you’re supposed to suspend your disbelief for these things, but you have to meet me halfway, and this was all preposterous. The good guys kept making stupid decisions that went counter to their interests, and the bad guys know everything and have infinite resources, but instead of just, you know, killing people and taking their stuff, they decide to put the good guy in a moral quandary and threaten his friends and gleefully start up nuclear weapons they might not get away from, but only with long timers and simple defusal mechanisms.

Side note: If I’m ever President or Secretary of Defense, I will not have a Times Square-size Robinson projection map wall display of the world where the nuclear powers slowly blink red as they succumb. I will also not install (or need) a high-school-gym scoreboard to count down to Armageddon, complete with stylized red plastic light-up elements for whatever DefCon we’re at.