Mission Impossible — The final reckoning

May 30 – June 5

7 pm
1:30 pm Sunday June 1 Matinée

Action / Thriller

Rated PG – 2h 41m

In Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise cheats death with gusto once more in a finale packed with action & melodrama. The Mission: Impossible franchise hits a big milestone this year… nearly three decades ago, the first film starring Tom Cruise opened in 1996. The Final Reckoning has a lot on its plate, working hard to say a fitting farewell to Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his beloved franchise. It’s also designed to tie up loose ends for a bunch of side characters, while teasing future sequels without Cruise in the lead role. Of course, Cruise and company wants this ‘finale’ to be bigger and bolder than anything we’ve seen before.

Director Christopher McQuarrie packs the movie with full-throttle action from start to finish, and naturally, Cruise does lots and lots of running because he clearly loves doing it. The two main action set pieces are jaw-dropping–Cruise isn’t satisfied with delivering death-defying stunts above ground, this time he goes deep underwater. As if exploring a ghostly Russian sub resting on the ocean floor wasn’t risky enough, it starts rolling with Ethan inside, loaded with missiles! The intensity is off the charts, even surpassing the nail-biting underwater vault scene from Rogue Nation. It’ll definitely make the list of the top 10 incredible action scenes from the MI franchise.

By now we’ve seen more than enough movies turn on the prospect of the planet being destroyed, and that doesn’t automatically mean there’s anything at stake in them. (Just think of such empty vessels of end-of-the-world action as Armageddon or X-Men: Apocalypse.) But in The Final Reckoning, Cruise and his M:I partner and director, Christopher McQuarrie, ratchet up the doomsday fervor with enough conviction — and obsession — to carry you along on hairpin turns of suspense. The film glances back, in several quick-cut montages, to all seven of the series’ previous films, taking Ethan’s defining trait — his propensity to go rogue, which of course is what he does when he can’t accomplish his mission any other way — and folding that into the film’s symphonic sense of peril.

Expect The Final Reckoning to be one of the must-see movies of the summer, and at the end of it Ethan Hunt is very much alive. Yet an element of the film’s power is that it’s genuinely saying goodbye to these characters, to that reconfigured 1960s chicanery, to Ethan’s more-Bond-than-Bond mojo. Besides, what’s Tom Cruise going to do for an encore? In The Final Reckoning, he’s more than just the top gun of danger junkies. He has turned the spectacle of doing his own stunts into a popcorn art form.