The movies are Tom Cruise’s therapy. He’s just so psyched to be a part of them, he wants to share his purpose and life’s work with the world, and hope you like it. The Final Reckoning is tinged with a little extra sumpin sumpin, as the end is in sight for Ethan Hunt as age slowly catches up to him. It will eventually…but not today. We need to trust him…one last time.
We last left Ethan (Tom Cruise) in emotional turmoil. He lost Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) a beloved team member, and is deep in hiding. He’s content to stay there…except he gets a desperate message from President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett). Since the last movie, the Entity (the AI villain) and its messenger Gabriel (Esai Morales) has almost completely taken over the world order; all it needs is the nuclear codes of the few remaining holdout countries (like the US, China, Russia, etc) before it starts its doomsday in 3ish days. And only Ethan, has the one key, literally, to turn to stop the Entity from world domination.
That’s why this latest session is almost 3 hours long: Tom/Ethan’s going through some stuff. So there we sit, on our mini chairs, listening to Tom vent. He goes through his last 30 years of work and the toll it’s taken on him for a couple hours. We painstakingly build this movie, piece by piece, on the shoulders of his past endeavors. We help him fix mistakes across the series, like actually understanding what the Rabbit’s Foot is, and get through apologizing to people like data analyst William Donloe (Rolf Saxon). All those years working in the shadows have made him emotionally scarred, hoping there’s people out there who care for him. So Christopher McQuarrie’s screenplay prescribes positive affirmations, about every 5 minutes, to make sure he’s ok (I wish I had someone look at me like everyone does in this film), from old pals like Luther (Ving Rhames) or Benji (Simon Pegg), and even new ones like Paris (Pom Klementieff, get it, she’s French) or Theo (Greg Tarzan Davis). He also gently assuages Tom’s fears about artificial intelligence, filtering the complex idea through a movie lens for him to understand: the unintentional comedy of this is wonderfully juxtaposed with how seriously the movie takes it, you’ll chuckle a bunch under your breath.
But thankfully McQuarrie also suggests other coping mechanisms for Mr. Cruise: get out of the house and play. Chris starts small: let’s get a little exercise on the land. Some good running is obviously part of the land section, doing so above ground, under ground, in big spaces, or tiny corridors. You get your classic strength building exercises through hand to hand combat and things like that, even a little gunplay if the time allows. That wasn’t enough for Tom, so we next up the dosage to water work. Specifically, the deep sea variety. Keeping those positive affirmations going, the lights go dark and there’s a giant scuba camera around our hero’s face as he plunges the depths of the sea, undergoing more intense physical therapy and even coming face to face with death to assuage some of those fears he must have. Don’t worry, along with that session is Grace (Hayley Atwell) there with a devilish smirk and beauty to warm him back up in case he needs it. Ok, he’s feeling better! But the final dosage is some of the freshest air possible: up in the sky. The final 35 minutes of this session is why we go to movie therapy: Tom gets to fly through the air as now the whole audience is feeding him positive affirmations, exclaiming “Holy sh*t!” and “How did he do that?” over and over again.
One beautiful emotional circle jerk as a final pill, and then we can go home, in peace. Tom’s Mission Impossible movie therapy might be physically taxing, but emotionally its the salve he needs to come to terms with his own Final Reckoning. If this is the last Cruise MI, then at least Cruise can leave the series a better, well adjusted human being. Well, as well adjusted as a movie filtered Tom Cruise can be. You’re welcome Tom, that’ll be $400 million.