Film review: The Final Reckoning is trumpeted as the final Mission: Impossible movie
Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
★★★★☆
(12A) opens in a decidedly gloomy fashion, however: not only is humanity suffering from innumerable wars and widespread famine, it’s also facing the existential threat of a ‘truth-eating parasite AI’, aka ‘the Entity’, that is on the brink of colonising the world’s cyber-structure and unleashing a nuclear holocaust.
The good news is that Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) ‘is the best of men in the worst of times’ – but how can Ethan and his team of Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg) and Grace (Hayley Atwell) defeat an enemy that is armageddon incarnate?
A direct sequel to Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (2023), The Final Reckoning arrives trumpeted as the final Mission: Impossible movie, which means that a sombre, valedictory tone is almost inevitable.
It shouldn’t dominate proceedings, though. While this latest outing offers plenty of what made the franchise an unstoppable juggernaut – narrow escapes, bravura action sequences, death-defying stunts – it leans too awkwardly into its own mythology, and spends a considerable chunk of its nearly three-hour runtime in linking events from the first Mission: Impossible (1996) to current events.
The result is that some of the finest scenarios in the entire franchise – a brilliantly executed sequence in which Ethan explores a sunken, crippled submarine, for example, and an outrageous series of stunts involving a pair of biplanes – are exceptions rather than the rule.
Ethan Hunt and Tom Cruise are perfectly entitled to go out on their own terms, of course, but The Final Reckoning is a movie that sparks and jolts rather than electrifies.
- (theatrical release)
Set in 1950, (12A) stars Benicio Del Toro as Zsa-Zsa Korda, a businessman with ambitious plans to drag the fictional Middle Eastern territory of Phoenicia into the 20th century by building dams, railroads, canals and all manner of vital infrastructure.
Fearing for his legacy after a shadowy cabal tries to kill him off in yet another assassination attempt, Zsa-Zsa appoints his daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a devout novitiate, as his estate’s executor, whereupon, accompanied by his personal tutor Bjorn (Michael Cera), Zsa-Zsa immediately embarks on a globe-trotting round of meetings with potential investors – among them Leland (Tom Hanks) and Reagan (Bryan Cranston), Marseille Bob (Mathieu Almaric), Cousin Hilda (Scarlett Johannsson) and Uncle Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch) – all the while expecting that the next assassination attempt will be the one to finally succeed.
Fans of writer-director Wes Anderson will know what to expect: beautifully composed set designs (ranging from High Renaissance to Art Deco), a virtually irrelevant plot, and a host of whimsical-but-deadpan characters speaking snappy dialogue a little too quickly.
Mia Threapleton is superb as morally compromised daughter Liesl, but overall The Phoenician Scheme is as frustratingly self-indulgent as Anderson’s recent offerings of Asteroid City (2023) and The French Dispatch (2021).
- (theatrical release)
(G) stars Maia Kealoh as Lilo, a lonely young Hawaiian girl living with her older sister Nani (Sydney Agudong).
Ostracised at school and desperate for company, Lilo wishes for a friend on a falling star, unaware that the meteor is actually an alien spacecraft crashing to Earth.
From the wreckage emerges a destructive blue four-armed koala-ish creature – aka Stitch (voiced by Chris Sanders) – who bonds with Lilo over a shared appetite for destruction.
A raucous take on ET, this live-action remake of Disney’s 2002 animation will tick a lot of boxes for a young audience, and not least because Lilo and Stitch devote a considerable amount of effort to wreaking havoc on unsuspecting adults wherever they go.
- (theatrical release)
