The Mission Impossible Booster ShotTom Cruise runs and runs, but is this cinema?By Armond White
Vain movie stars used to be mocked for believing their own hype. Now, estimable, redoubtable, sincere Tom Cruise not only believes his own press; he manufactures it. In the era of Fake News, his new film Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is handed down like a Covid edict. We must take the jab, obey, and be happy about it. As with Covid, national media load The Final Reckoning upon us with Red Alert, Breaking News finality. This eighth installment of the M:I franchise is supposedly the last, but it's unseemly as a Covid booster shot.
Don't call it a rehash, but The Final Reckoning (which follows 2023's Dead Reckoning, Part One) transmits a serious case of déjà vu. No wonder star and producer Cruise and his director Christopher McQuarrie include flashbacks to all the previous M:I films. This time, as covert agent Ethan Hunt of the Impossible Missions Force, Cruise endeavors to wrest control of the Entity, an artificial intelligence system sought by bad guy Gabriel (Esai Morales), then retrieve its source code from ex-CIA agent William Donloe (Rolf Saxon). Ethan/Tom goes from aerial stunts to underwater stunts with lots of IMF team blather in between.
You have to fool yourself to sit still and enjoy any of it as fresh or inventive. The purpose of hype is to make us accept the predictable as surprising or fascinating, while admiring Cruise's personal derring-do.
Ever since Top Gun: Maverick, Cruise's films have imposed a sense of duty on audiences - a different purpose than other meaningless, direct-to-streaming content with zero purpose.
Conservatives mistook the patriotic tone of Maverick's military subject to mean that Cruise was working as an America First filmmaker, but The Final Reckoning suggests a more craven motive - it's unmistakable when Ethan/Tom boards an aircraft carrier christened George H. W. Bush, hinting at the film's RINO dedication. It may be necessary to rethink the recent hero-worshipping of Cruise, whose action-star exploits (running, running, running as in Minority Report's "Everybody Runs" ad) seem as overwrought as a politician's election campaign. What cabinet position, and in whose administration, is he after?
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