Don Reviews "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning"

Hollywood does try to be correct as possible, but there can be mistakes made like the car and a wristwatch seen in Braveheart, the coffee cup in Game of Thrones, or the car driving in the wrong direction on the Golden Gate Bridge in The Graduate.  This is so fascinating that a well-known movie information site has a section for each entry dedicated to it.  With this week’s review, there is the potential for a VERY long list in this category.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning brings back the only director to handle more than one film in this franchise in Christopher McQuarrie (The Way of the Gun) and brings back Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Esai Morales, and Pom Klementieff. It’s the eighth film in the franchise and takes place after Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning. After the discovery of the artificial intelligence program called “The Entity,” it has moved to infect and control most of the world computer systems.  As the number of countries fall victim to it (with America being the last on its list), the possibility of World War III becomes more and more of a reality.  Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his crew try to stop the system from taking over while at the same time trying to thwart the evil Gabriel (Morales) from trying to try and control it for himself.

Be aware that this film is two hours and fifty minutes long!

Visually, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning takes place in many locations around the globe and shows each and every locale well.  The cast continues to do well, which can be compared to the previous films in this series.  It DOES try to ramp up the drama and emotion, but tends to do so more than it really should to the point where it just got old for me.

Did I mention that this film is almost three hours long!  And that is WAY too long!

Over a hour could have easily been cut and still gotten the same result.  IT fills that time with some great action, but it just becomes mindless and just kind of “there”.  OK, I get it: Tom Cruise does a lot of his stunts, and I will give credit there, but this has been well-established, so they could have backed down a bit there.  The script is good overall, but again, it just ran on and on. Because of that (not sure if you know, but it runs one hundred seventy minutes), I could NOT wait for it to end, thinking in my mind, “Enough already!”.  With that in mind, I will never watch Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning again and will set it towards my very “un-coveted Maze Runner Promise” that will make my year end list of worst films of the year, because it is 10,200 seconds long without trailers and the other things you will get when (or if) you go see it!