Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning has no dull moments!
My Rating of Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning – 4.5 out of 5
Plot Synopsis
I walked into the theater this Sunday with loads of anticipation and excitement! I was about to watch the eighth instalment of Tom Cruise’s iconic series, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. The finale, like it’s the fashion nowadays, was released in the form of two full-length movies. Dead Reckoning in 2023 was the first, and this is the second. It is a great testament to the director and producers’ vision and talent that every sequel has been a nail-biter, equal to or better than the first installment, which was released way back in 1996.
This was no exception! Though it is difficult to compare in terms of quality with the earlier films, this is an exhilarating roller-coaster ride from London to South Africa, and it never lets up. It begins where Dead Reckoning ended – a race to capture and control the AI program called the Entity. It sank the Russian super-sub, Sevastopol, and then went out of hand, and many powerful people are now after it, to seize its control and therefore global dominion. At the end of the movie, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) recovers the key that controls the Entity.
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In this edition, the Entity has gone rogue and is seeking to control the eight nuclear arsenals of the world and unleash nuclear attacks that will wipe out all humanity, with the aid of its human proxy, Gabriel ( Esai Morales). Ethan has to find the source code of the Entity to disable it, but the code has sunk in an unknown location in the Bering Sea with the Russian sub Sevastopol. Ethan’s team member, Luther (Ving Rhames), has developed a malware called ‘PoisonPill’ which can draw the Entity into a hard drive, and when paired with the Podkova module (which houses the source code of the Entity) will finally kill/capture the Entity.
The location of the Sevastopol’s sinking is not known, but Ethan surmises that undersea sonar stations of that time would have captured the blast, and if they can identify which one, the blast coordinates would tell them the location of the sunken sub. The St. Matthew island is the most likely station to have recorded the undersea explosion so that’s where the IMF heads. But the challenge doesn’t end there; someone has to dive more than 500 meters underwater to get to the sub, find the module, and come back up.
Many nail-biting minutes and multiple gunfights later, just when all eight nuclear arsenals have gone under the Entity’s control, and nuclear annihilation is mere seconds away, Ethan’s tenacity and perseverance pay off. How and what happens next will have to be experienced at a movie hall near you. Yes, this is not streaming on any device near you, only at a theater! Despite a massive 170-minute runtime, not one of them is dull or monotonous, and you will never feel the passage of time. The makers of the movie have done a spectacular job of keeping the script taut and pacy and the audience is kept engaged at all times!
Conclusion
Though the storyline and some of the action sequences stretch one’s imagination to breaking point, the underlying hypothesis of a nuclear holocaust waiting to happen in an increasingly digitized world is a stark reality. Like always, Tom Cruise amazes! Doing his own jaw-dropping stunts and carrying the movie largely on his own capable shoulders is one monumental task, and he carries it through with great aplomb. A must-watch for entertainment buffs, head to the theater near you and enjoy this screen spectacle as soon as you can!
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