Aaron's Thoughts
The franchise has always been at its best when it fully leans into the absurd action sequences and at its worst when it resorts to dialogue dumping to move the story forward.
Final reckoning does much more of the latter than the former. It is carrying the burden of not only moving the story forward, but also trying to unnecessarily tie up every loose end in the franchise. One of my favorite parts about Mission Impossible is how sparsely connected most movies are outside of certain recurring characters or villains. This franchise has never been the MCU where you have to do homework to understand what was happening or enjoy the movies. Yet, Final Reckoning tries so hard to tie a neat bow around everything that it abandons that idea & in doing so weighs down the entire film.
There are two action set pieces that I would put up there as two of the best in the franchise, but aside from those twenty minute sequences the movie didn’t work for me. The amount of time spent on characters explaining the convoluted plot or rehashing old plot is enough to make your head explode. It almost felt like almost 2 hours were spent on dialogue.
Did they have to do less because Tom is just simply older & can’t do as many big stunts as he once did? Or were they just that confident in this mess of a script & hoped the dialogue would make up for it? I’m not sure, but either way it’s a tough note to end on.
Dead Reckoning and Final Reckoning are going to have interesting legacies because they have great sequences in them but aren’t great movies. Been nothing but diminishing returns since Fallout. Guess it’s easier said than done to go out on top! Great run by all involved, but I really hope this is actually the last one with this regime.
