By Michael Marano

“Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” is an honest piece of grand entertainment, not as great as “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” but still pretty great.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Screening at movie houses throughout New England.

Tom Cruise hanging in there in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. Photo: Paramount

If you’re of an age that your first exposure to Tom Cruise was, as a young person on the cusp of Reagan’s America, seeing him skidding around to Bob Seger in Risky Business, or maybe in Endless Love, Losin’ It, or The Outsiders, then an ayahuasca/peyote smoothie and a triple feature of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, The Matrix Resurrections, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood oughtta save you a couple of hundred grand in therapy as you deal with your midlife crisis.

Those three movies, starring Gen-X icons Cruise, Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Brad Pitt, perfectly articulate the emotional realities of being an aging Gen-Xer in a world that doesn’t make sense anymore as changes in media, culture, and technology continue to further push Gen-X into invisibility, isolation, and alienation. The motto of the superspies in the Mission: Impossible movies begins, “We live and die in the shadows…” And keep in mind, one of the lead members of our team of heroes is played by Simon Pegg, the guy who was the king of all Gen-X slackers in Spaced and Shaun of the Dead.

In Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (hereafter, MI:8), a direct sequel to Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (hereafter, MI:7), Cruise’s hero spy Ethan Hunt becomes a new iteration of Neo, a Neo-Neo, confronting a Machine God that is keeping humanity enslaved via a digital labyrinth of lies and deception. As with Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth in Once Upon a Time, the world is changing fast around Hunt, partly because of inextricable cultural forces, and partly because of a cult composed of apocalyptically obsessed fanatics.

As was established in MI:7, there’s a sentient, malevolent AI unleashed upon the world that’s manipulating, through digital media, our perceptions of reality. Hunt and his IMF team want to destroy the AI, called “The Entity,” while world governments want to control it and so control the world. So, in MI:7 and MI:8, we have a MacGuffin for an antagonist. Picture all the back-stabbing generated by the Maltese Falcon — if the Black Bird was untouchable, able to change reality (the way it could be in Inception), and as actively homicidal as HAL 9000. MI:7 ended in a cliffhanger, and while you’d be cheating yourself by not watching it before MI:8 (because MI:7 is the best entry in the series), there’s enough of a recap at the start of MI:8 that you can get up to speed in no time.

The great strength and the great weakness of MI:8 is that it really is a Reckoning, for our hero Ethan Hunt and for the whole Mission: Impossible series. Hunt’s a guy who has just turned 60 and is owning his shit. Mission: Impossible is a 30-year-old film franchise that’s doing the same. Loose ends are tied up from MI:7, sure. But tying up loose ends, including but not limited to items left on a shelf in 1996’s Mission: Impossible — and even issues left over from the ’60s Mission: Impossible TV show (!!) — is overkill, and muddies the narrative flow of MI:8.

Hunt’s tying up those loose ends in a world changed, manipulated, and warped by The Entity. Navigating life as you enter middle age is hard. Doing it while the world is being put under Martial Law is exponentially harder, particularly because the chaos is the result of disinformation sown by an insane, nihilistic being that’s infiltrating the military and law enforcement and that is worshipped by a bunch of idiots who think said being is the manifestation of Divine Will upon the Earth.

It’d be trite to say The Entity is a stand-in for Trump and Trumpism and Right Wing populism on a global scale. It’d also be profoundly accurate. The threat of a January 6-ish coup looms over much of the movie. And how messed up is it that two of the world’s most prominent Scientologists — Cruise with MI:7 and MI:8, and Elisabeth Moss with The Handmaid’s Tale TV series — are leading the pop culture charge against mind-controlling demagoguery? Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is a superspy who is able to handle the radicalization and lobotomizing of the whole world in a way that we regular folks can’t. He can stop The Entity. We regular folks have a hard enough time getting our racist uncles to shut the fuck up at Thanksgiving. “The Entity wants us scared and divided,” we’re told. Global Armageddon looms because of clickbait.

And it looms because Hunt might be responsible for The Entity’s existence. By saving the world, he’s created a threat to the world (albeit in Mission: Impossible III, an entry so shitty it almost killed the franchise). Hunt is told, “Everything you’ve done has come to this.” Honesty is needed, but the world is disorienting and rotten with lies, threatened by a cult that is so enamored with fake news it grovels before a thing with no substance. It speaks volumes that the person, besides Hunt, best able to face The Entity, is a super-competent Black woman who’s President.

The problem with MI:8 is that it’s a Reckoning with too much that didn’t need to be finalized, and some other things in the franchise are left unresolved.

The other problem is … the movie is almost too awesome.

All entries in the series have showstopping stunts performed by Cruise, who, bless him, risks his goddamn life to show us a good time at the movies. Consider the climb he executed on the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Or the HALO jump in Mission: Impossible: Fallout. There are four or five showstoppers in MI:8 — so many, they kinda stop the show. As do all the aforementioned Reckonings. And, despite the word “Final” in the title, there’s a disappointing lack of finality to some of the proceedings.

But these are nitpicks. MI:8 is a goddam movie … it has analog grit and weight and stunning locations and sets. It’s not a digital blob of ones and zeroes, like the blobs of ones and zeroes that make the world in the movie, and the world at large, a swamp of stupidity and falsehoods. It’s an honest piece of grand entertainment, not as great as MI:7, but still pretty great.

Back in the 1980s, author, critic, and personal trainer Michael Marano (www.BluePencilMike.com) dated a girl who had a giant poster of Tom Cruise’s Maverick from Top Gun over her bed. It was weird.