With a title like Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, you would think there would be some finality to a cinematic franchise that has been haunti-, er, I mean, lighting up movie screens for the better part of three decades.  And in case you are not aware of this fact, this installment will remind you of it once, twice, or thirty-seven times.  But who is counting?  I certainly was not doing so.  My goal was trying to ignore other distractions in the film, such as its constant references to its predecessors, which I barely remember.  The one immediately preceding this one, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One (2023), came out a mere two years ago.  You would think this sequel would be “Part Two” with a similar subtitle, but I guess that would be asking for too much logic.  Besides, who is this Catholic to complain?  Religiously, I stick to Catholicism because it is familiar and there is infinite room to grow within it.  The difference lies in the words.  There is no end to God, and apparently not for Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning despite its appellation.

The only thing Ethan is reckoning at the start of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is a tape from President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) trying to convince him to turn himself into the United States government, along with the “Cruciform Key.”  Plot-wise, part of the reason for this message is to catch up the audience with recent events so that what you are about to see makes some semblance of sense.  There is an artificial intelligence (AI) known as “The Entity” that has infected the entire world.  It is threatening to take over the world’s nuclear arsenal and annihilate mankind.  In the events of the previous film, Ethan had managed to steal the Cruciform Key from Gabriel (Esai Morales), who, like Ethan, once worked for the Impossible Mission Force (IMF).  The Cruciform Key is the only thing that can stop The Entity.  Instead of complying with the president’s wishes, Ethan gathers some familiar faces, and some new ones, and heads to London in order to capture Gabriel and learn how to use The Cruciform Key to put an end to The Entity.  Instead, Gabriel has turned the tables on Ethan, capturing Ethan along with his female colleague, Grace (Hayley Atwell).  Ethan does what he usually does and gets away, but so does Gabriel, making his way to where Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), the technology expert on the team, is undergoing medical treatment.  Luther has developed a “poison pill,” a computer program that can disrupt The Entity.  Gabriel wants to use it to control The Entity, and leaves a bomb and a message for Ethan.  Luther sacrifices himself to render the explosive relatively harmless, but not before delivering the message: Ethan must recover The Entity’s source code and bring it to Gabriel.  Ethan has also been given another imperative by The Entity: bring the source code to a special server farm in South Africa that will be protected from any nuclear fallout.  There appears to be only two choices.  Either help The Entity enslave all of humanity by giving it access to all our stored information, or resist it and have it blow up the planet.  There is a third option, which is destroying the AI.  However, with its level of infiltration around the globe, this will send the world back to the Stone Age.  You might also say there is Gabriel’s way, but that still involves enslavement.  Ethan appears set on retreating from modern comforts, and allows himself to get captured after surviving Luther’s blast.  From there, he is brought to the president and the rest of the cabinet, who have little reason to trust him since he rarely listens to them.  The president, being the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), is aware of Ethan’s penchant for going rogue, but also knows he gets results.  Hence, she gives him the resources he needs in order to complete his . . . um, mission.  Sorry.  In this case, it involves having an aircraft carrier task force take him to rendezvous with a nuclear submarine in the North Pacific.  Meanwhile, the rest of his team, led by longtime comrade Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), head in the same direction.  Once they provide the coordinates of the sunken Russian sub where the source is housed, Ethan dives on it to retrieve the information.  As one would expect, it is full of action and shooting and all the rest.  It is Grace who plucks Ethan from the icy waters, and they all head to South African to rendezvous with Gabriel.  As they head into the subterranean server farm, the president’s cabinet urge her to launch a preemptive strike in order to, in the minds of some, to minimize the casualties before the missiles are launched in earnest.  She stops at the last moment, even though it means The Entity gets full control of all nuclear weaponry.  What only Ethan and Gabriel know is that The Entity cannot launch an attack without access to those mainframes.  Insanely, that is precisely Ethan’s plan, putting Grace and her pickpocket skills in charge of trapping The Entity in a specially designed thumb drive with the precise timing only her dexterity can achieve.  Gabriel attempts to flee when he sees other IMF agents show up, thinking he has all the time he needs with the Poison Pill around his neck.  There is a protracted plane chase between him and Ethan, with Ethan eventually getting the MacGuffin, connecting the source code, and then Grace pulling the plug at the precise moment.  Everyone is more or less grateful to Ethan, and the good guys say their goodbyes in London before the end credits roll.

It takes nearly three hours of watching Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning in order to get to those end credits.  That is three hours of giving Tom Cruise excuses to perform stunts.  It is also three hours of people recapitulating whatever crazy plan is contrived in the moment, and adding their obvious takes on the insanity of the matter.  Finally, it is three hours of reminding you through sometimes subtle references of moments from previous films.  In other words, the movie is self-indulgent.  People do not seem to mind this because they like action flicks, but I need some semblance of a plot.  I suppose there is a basic one, that being that the good guys must prevent the end of the world, but it is the particulars in which I get lost.  An example of this is Ethan as a character.  One of the constant refrains about him is that, like in previous films (or so we are told), his decisions hold the lives of billions of people in the balance.  Yet, as far as I can tell, it is The Entity that has the real power, which is why he and his companions are trying to stop it.  Either way, it is a god-like ability that is an uncomfortable view for a practicing Catholic such as myself.  It gets even more confusing when Grace suggests that Ethan, instead of Gabriel, be the one to try and control the AI.  Her idea proves to be a red herring, making it look like she might not be on his side, even though her loyalty is proved in the end.  These are just a few examples of parts of the story that do not make sense if you stop to think about them while catching your breath between death defying stunts.

Death, though, is a prominent topic in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, which I suppose is apropos given the title.  For Luther, it truly is the final reckoning.  For the others, I figured pretty much the main ones would survive until the last few minutes, which dissolved some of the tension in the action scenes.  If there is one interesting aspect to this, though, from a Catholic perspective, it is the willingness to sacrifice.  Ethan does not expect others to lay down their lives for him, but he expects himself to do it for them.  An oft used Scripture for these moments in action flicks is John 15:13, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”  Ultimately, this is not what happens, but there is that possibility.  While this can be said of other characters in other movies, this one elevates this concept by discussing what seems to be an important motto for Ethan’s team: to be willing to give your life for those they will never meet.  It is one thing to potentially die for family or friend.  It is another to do so for complete strangers.  That is Christ-like, though, again, with what I discussed in the last paragraph, that is not a comparison with which I am comfortable.  What can be said is that it is nobility of the highest order.  Even if I felt the length of the film at times, I can at least appreciate the attitude.

I suppose I should have latched onto that notion early on in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.  To have the mindset of sacrificing oneself for the untold multitude takes being the best of persons at the worst of times, another description given for Ethan.  I submit that it takes that disposition to make it through the film, but at least it has a lot of stunts?