The Disease Of More In 'Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning'
#321: "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning," "Fountain of Youth," "Harper," "Tucci In Italy"
Edition 321:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: $400 million can’t buy you the best movie of all time, but it may well by you the MOST movie of all time. It’s an interesting counterpoint to Apple’s new big budget adventure movie. Then a Paul Newman-led noir and my favorite travel show…ever? In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Keanu Reaves is your guardian angel.
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
We know Tom Cruise didn’t die filming the stunts for this eighth (and no one believes it when they say his last) entry in the Mission: Impossible movie, but the magic of this franchise is its ability to convince us that he might at any moment, whether he’s hanging off the side of a jet during takeoff, riding a motorcycle off a cliff, or in this case hanging off to the side of a biplane going full speed doing spins.
In fact, that danger is kind of what makes it special.
These stunts are the primary (dare I say only?) reason why people want to go see these movies—the thing that differentiates them from James Bond or Jason Bourne or any other action adventure series. It’s also well known by now that they’re the building blocks of the productions themselves. Cruise and the filmmakers plan out a handful of impossible stunts, then makeshift the narratives for each movie around that.
If it’s a garbled mess, who really cares? We’re here to see the crazy man do something crazy! Everything else is just getting in the way. If you asked me to recap what happened in the most recent 2023 movie I couldn’t tell you, let alone the six before that. There’s always some confusing MacGuffin, a thumb drive or a canister or a briefcase, that everyone is chasing after threatening the fate of the world, but no one is buying the tension—Ethan Hunt is going to win, even if his plans require arguably more luck and random chance than skill.
For some inexplicable reason, The Final Reckoning decided what it needed to do was try to tie together all of the narrative threads from all seven of those Rube Goldberg machine plots into one story.
That really is the most impossible mission of all—requiring not just a three-hour runtime but perhaps the most exhausting, overstuffed three hour movie of all time. Long sections of the movie are cut together like a montage, cutting in and out of entire scenes in less than 10 seconds or splicing together two or three different scenes using different characters to finish explaining page after page of exposition.
Outside of some garden variety hand-to-hand combat and chase sequences, there aren’t any real big action set pieces for the first 70+ minutes. I mean…?????
At seemingly every turn, the decision was always just to make more movie. More characters—there are at least 20 with significant roles. More globe-hopping, more subplots, more background information, more Tom Cruise sprinting! More more more!!
To be fair, this movie’s production was disrupted not only by 2023’s writers and actors strikes but also the pandemic, the latter led Paramount to split its seventh M:I movie into two parts and the former caused production start/stops and lots of rewriting.
The arc of what is now the seventh and eighth movies is pretty clear as a single film—Ethan Hunt vs. AI—but turning a two-hour story into nearly SIX hours of content (2hr43min for No. 7 and 2hr50min) was as laborious this time as it was for me with Wicked.
That lengthy production and maximalist approach has made this one of the most expensive productions in movie history—$400 million, according to some reports (and that’s before film prints and advertising).
When did we all agree that blockbusters have to be THIS MUCH movie? It’s not just M:I…I had the same complaint about Bond back in 2021. Tentpole studio movies have gotten so weighed down by the enormous weight of franchise lore and the need to continue upping the spectacle that they can hardly move.
These big blockbuster movies must be simpler. They must be shorter. And obviously they must be cheaper.
M:I (and Bond) are at their core fun, mission-of-the-week tales, never meant to be taken too seriously.
But the gravity hanging on every line of dialogue in The Final Reckoning feels like the weight of the world. It’s not just that this movie isn’t funny, or quippy, it’s that nobody seems to be having any fun. When I think about the difference between these last two M:I movies and their far more successful cousin, Top Gun: Maverick, the primary difference is just how fun Maverick was.
All that complaining, and yet still, I came to this movie for the stunts. Buried in all that everything-ness were two that will be better than any other action movie will do this year. The first, an underwater scuba search-and-rescue, is the only moment when the movie slows down to focus on one thing at a time, and is rewarded with a breathtaking, heart-pounding intensity.
In some of these stunts, the movie gets hurt by the gap between what’s difficult for Tom Cruise to do and what’s difficult for Ethan Hunt to do. The proliferation of CGI in movies overall has certainly hurt Cruise a bit because audiences are used to seeing literally anything be possible on screen.
But the second big action sequence might just be the craziest thing Cruise or Hunt has ever done in this series. Cruise is acting, fighting and hanging off the side of a biplane, and I’m not sure how it would be possible to capture any of it other than him actually doing it?
It’s about 20-minutes of pure adrenalized terror as an audience member, and even though it’s intercut with two other separate climaxes happening in two other locations (remember: more more more!), the intercutting actually comes together into a pretty epic overlapping conclusion.
If we come to these movies for danger, real and realized, then on the whole, this movie is actually a success.
Something New
Fountain of Youth (AppleTV+): This movie provides an interesting counterpoint to M:I, right down to the fact that it’s skipping movie theaters to be released directly on AppleTV+ (the business case for doing so with a $200 million movie continues to escape me).
In practical terms, it fulfills all the criteria I mentioned above: it doesn’t take itself too seriously (in fact, not seriously at all), everyone is having fun, and it’s only 2hr4min long. And what a cast! John Krasinski, Natalie Portman, Domhall Gleeson and Stanley Tucci? That’s better than The Final Reckoning (and there’s not 20 of them)!
For about half the movie, that was enough to have me overlooking just how obviously derivative it is. Krasinski’s treasure hunter protagonist is a naked rip-off of Nathan Drake from Uncharted and Nic Cage from National Treasure, each of which were rip-offs of Indiana Jones, and compared to any of those three this story feels very paint-by-numbers. There’s literally clues on the back of famous paintings he has to steal!
It’s hard to say I would’ve liked this movie better than M:I considering the huge discrepancy in action scene quality, but I was considering it until it rounded into its conclusion (spoiler alert, though it doesn’t matter much). The fountain of youth being hidden under the pyramids is on par with “the arc of the covenant is under the Lourve” (The Da Vinci Code, another Indiana Jones rip-off) on the scale of disqualifyingly dumb.
It baffles me how director Guy Ritchie can vacillate between projects that carry such a strong authorial touch (The Gentlemen, both the movie and the show) and then commercial projects like this that feel like they could’ve been made by anyone. I’m still a huge fan and have proverbial season tickets, but I can’t deny the inconsistency.
Something Old
Harper (1966, YouTubeTV): A couple of years ago I was trying to get into LA-set noir books (my favorite genre of stories) and found a 1940s Ross McDonald novel called “The Moving Target.” Had I known they made a movie adaptation in the 1960s starring Paul Newman, I would’ve jumped on it far sooner.
Newman’s detective is every bit as hard-boiled and alcoholic as the genre calls for, and twice as charming. All the noir tropes are here (femme fatale, convoluted plot etc), not to mention the awesome landscapes of 1960s Los Angeles.
The mystery itself isn’t one of the best, and twists itself into pretzels by the end, but with a young Newman at the center of the frame this is the kind of movie you want to live inside of. Next up for me will be The Drowning Pool, a 1970s movie in which Newman returns to the Lew Harper character for a mystery that I hear is way more engaging.
Something To Stream
Tucci In Italy (Hulu): Those who know me well know of my love for Italian culture, language and food. This passion was initially sparked during the pandemic, watching Stanley Tucci’s travel show on CNN (“Searching for Italy”). The way he beautifully interacts with and highlights the eccentricities and wonders of Italy was as intoxicating to me then as it remains now, with Tucci launching essentially teh identical show at a new home now on Hulu.
As opposed to the CNN version, which focused on Italy from the perspective of a tourist, this new show seems to dive deeper into the local customs and cultures of Italy’s regions (the first episode if Tuscany, for instance). The areas where the show goes are places no tourist would or even could reach.
Still, each of these destinations is so gorgeously photographed and lovingly portrayed that it’s the ultimate digital tourism—and doubles as quite effective food porn. Shoutout to diligent newsletter reader Sarah for finding her Italy in the contradas of Siena on the night before the palio race. You’ll certainly find yours if you check this show out this week.
Trailer Watch: Good Fortune
Aziz Ansari writes, directs and stars as a down-on-his-luck loser who gets help from a guardian angel…in the form of Keanu Reeves. It’s kind of like a reverse Heaven Can Wait, but played with the major slapstick energy one might expect from a cast that includes Seth Rogen, Keke Palmer, Sandra Oh and Sherry Cola.
I remember seeing an extended preview of this movie at last year’s CinemaCon and thinking it was hilarious. And does anyone have a higher approval rating than Keanu??