Not possible – The Closing Reckoning could possibly be ‘the feel-bad movie of the summer season’

The other of an escapist blockbuster, the eighth and apparently last outing for Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is the doomiest and gloomiest but within the action-adventure franchise.

With a lot pressure and battle all over the world, it may be a aid when a Hollywood blockbuster distracts audiences with some escapism, some optimism, and a few rollicking, good-natured enjoyable. Mission: Not possible – The Closing Reckoning isn’t that sort of blockbuster. The eighth instalment in Tom Cruise’s globe-trotting action-adventure franchise, The Closing Reckoning is a depressing, apocalyptic tract which is fixated on the topics of how shut we’re to nuclear armageddon, and the way shortly civilisation can collapse. Sure, you get to see Cruise having a battle in his underpants, and doing one other of his hanging-off-a-plane routines, besides, it could possibly be the feel-bad movie of the summer season.

“Fact is vanishing, struggle is coming,” somebody intones in the beginning of the movie, after which we’re subjected to photographs of missiles launching and cities being obliterated. Instead of snappy banter, there’s cod philosophy about future and selection, and rather than Lalo Schifrin’s adrenaline-pumping traditional theme, there are orchestral minor chords on the soundtrack. What’s disappointing about all this doom and gloom is that the franchise has made the sort of whiplashing U-turn you may see in its car-chase sequences. The final Mission: Not possible movie, Useless Reckoning, was a humorous, frothy Euro-caper sprinkled with mischief, glamour and romance – or as near romance as you are ever going to get in a Cruise manufacturing – and the follow-up has the identical writer-director, Christopher McQuarrie. But The Closing Reckoning, set virtually totally in tunnels and caverns, and within the depths of the ocean, is the dullest and darkest movie within the sequence, each actually and figuratively.

It devotes an inordinate quantity of its almost-three-hour working time to scenes of individuals sitting in shadowy rooms, explaining the story to one another in gravelly whispers. Many times, we’ve got to sit down by these ponderous, portentous mutterings: the title may as nicely have been Exposition: Interminable. Normally, these scenes are punctuated with flashbacks to what’s occurred earlier than, flash-forwards to what may occur sooner or later, and flash-sideways (if that is a time period) to totally different individuals, in numerous shadowy rooms, explaining the identical story in the identical gravelly whispers. However as an alternative of livening up the exposition, this frantic modifying hints that McQuarrie and his group could not get the plot underway, and they also stored reducing the footage into smaller and smaller snippets within the hope that we would not discover.

The miserable temper may need been forgivable if The Closing Reckoning had been a genuinely clever and complicated drama. However it’s, sadly, as silly as Hollywood blockbusters get. The premise, which follows on from Useless Reckoning, is that a man-made intelligence referred to as the Entity has taken over the web, and can quickly launch a world nuclear strike which can exterminate the human race. I am unsure why it needs to do that, or how the great guys know its plans, however by no means thoughts. The purpose is that Cruise’s character, Ethan Hunt, can eradicate this existential risk by way of some surprisingly easy means. All he has to do is click on two small devices collectively, and the Entity will probably be a Non-Entity.

One among these devices is a field containing the Entity’s supply code, which is at present in a wrecked submarine – therefore a deep sea-diving set piece which will get full marks for spookiness, and no marks for pleasure. (How lengthy do you need to watch somebody swimming silently by murky water with no villains chasing him?) The opposite gadget that Ethan wants to finish the Entity is a “poison capsule” – a thumb drive, mainly – which has been invented by his pal Luther (Ving Rhames). On this planet of Mission: Not possible, then, this poison capsule is nearly crucial object in historical past. It might actually save mankind. So why does Ethan depart it within the pocket of his unguarded, incapacitated pal, thus permitting it to be stolen simply by the dangerous man, Gabriel (Esai Morales)?

The irony is that the movie retains praising its major character to the skies. After we’re not listening to speeches about how heroic he’s (delivered in gravelly whispers, naturally), we’re watching montages of clips from the opposite movies within the sequence, as if somebody had been about handy him a lifetime achievement award. However nobody even mentions how catastrophically silly he was for not placing Luther’s poison capsule someplace safer.

There are numerous plot issues like this to get previous earlier than the movie ultimately reaches the one motion sequence that viewers may need to rewatch, ie, the one on the poster, with Cruise clinging to a biplane in mid-air. As we’re typically instructed, Cruise does his personal stunts – and he does them brilliantly – so for those who love seeing his face being blasted out of form by high-altitude, high-velocity winds, you then’ll get pleasure from his newest feat of aerobatics. Nevertheless it’s not probably the most unique set piece: primarily, it is the helicopter sequence in Mission: Not possible – Fallout blended with the cargo airplane sequence in Mission: Not possible – Rogue Nation. And also you do need to ask: biplanes? Actually? The selection of such an antiquated automobile means that the film-makers had ticked off each different mode of transport in the middle of the franchise’s three-decade run, and so biplanes had been just about all they’d left.

If there’s one other sequel, then the gang will probably be compelled to pedal round a park on penny-farthings, so perhaps it is for the very best that The Closing Reckoning is being marketed as Mission: Not possible’s grand finale. It is only a disgrace that the sequence’ farewell needed to be so solemn – and so foolish.