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Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (PG-13)
26/06/25 20:46 Filed in: 2025
Starring: Tom Cruise
May 2025
Warning! This is NOT a movie review. This is a critique of the film. Intended to initiate a dialogue, the following analysis explores various aspects of the film and may contain spoilers. For concerns over objectionable content, please first refer to one of the many parental movie guide websites. Ratings are based on a four star system. Happy reading!
“The world is changing, the truth is vanishing, war is coming.”
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning picks up almost immediately after the events of the previous film, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (2023). When we last saw Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team, they were faced with the daunting task of outwitting an advanced AI (lamely named “the Entity”). Now, to prevent a nuclear holocaust, Ethan must use a cruciform key, an object he acquired in the previous movie, to unlock a computer drive containing the source code that can destroy the Entity.
Acting as the Entity’s liaison is Gabriel (Esai Morales), an assassin who tries his best (but fails miserably) to be a top-tier villain. Gabriel always seems to be several steps ahead of Ethan and his team, which is no surprise since he’s receiving instructions from the Entity. So the question becomes, will Ethan’s plan to do the exact opposite of what the Entity expects actually work? And, to add a ticking time bomb element to the plot, Ethan’s team must figure out how to stop the AI before it hacks into every nation’s nuclear arsenal and obliterates the planet.
Sound like an impossible task?
Don’t sweat it.
Even though it takes Ethan and his team nearly three hours to complete their mission (it only took 2 hours for them to save the world in the first film), doomsday is averted and life goes on as if nothing happened; which is ironic, since after watching this film, your life will go on as if nothing happened too.
That isn’t to disparage the movie’s two protracted, well-crafted action sequences—one takes place in the depths of the ocean and the other occurs high in the sky—but the balance of the film is a retread of earlier Missions. Indeed, a couple of the movie’s montages recycle clips from previous films; one dispenses brief images to refresh the audience’s memory and another is used to produce feelings of nostalgia.
In an attempt at bringing the series full circle, the story hearkens back to a few key characters and objects from the earlier movies. For starters, CIA analyst William Donloe (Rolf Saxon)—viewers will remember him as the poor fellow who took several trips to the bathroom while Ethan made his pulse-pounding descent into the computer room on wires in the first film—has a significant role in this movie. Also, U.S. Intelligence agent, Jim Phelps Jr. (Shea Whigham), is the son of Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), the villain Ethan bested in Mission: Impossible (1996). Another allusion to the OG movie is the NOC list; the item multiple parties vied to possess.
Mission: Impossible III (2006) gets some love with a mention of villain Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman), montage clips of Ethan’s wife Julia (Michelle Monaghan) and a reference to that film’s destructive MacGuffin…the Rabbit’s Foot.
There are also many similarities between Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning since the films are a continuous, 2-part adventure. Many actors have reprised their roles in The Final Reckoning including: Morales as villain Gabriel, Hayley Atwell as uber-thief Grace, Pom Klementieff as the aptly named French assassin Paris, Angela Bassett as President Erika Sloane, Henry Czerny as CIA director Eugene Kittridge, along with many others.
Also returning for this film is director Christopher McQuarrie. McQuarrie excels at realizing the movie’s action sequences, but struggles to sustain viewer interest during slower, talky scenes. To break up the monotony, the director employs various storytelling strategies, including montages and flash forwards (a technique used in heist films like Ocean’s Eleven or action films like Avengers: Endgame to depict what the characters will do when they carry out the intricate capers being discussed during the long-winded planning session). Unfortunately, these gimmicky attempts at punching up the action, along with the overly dramatic music by composers Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey, make the scenes play out like those on a typical TV procedural. McQuarrie’s most annoying directorial choice is his fixation on the “poison pill”—he cuts to closeups of the flash drive countless times, especially during the biplane scene.
Writers McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen have churned out a story that never quite takes off. There are some decent story elements here—both new and rehashed—but there’s an apparent abandonment of character development since the writers assume the audience already knows the IMF team by now. The series’ tropes are so well-established they’ve become hackneyed; and yet, the writers do little to divest themselves of these expected elements (i.e., the ole latex mask gag) or predictable patterns (i.e., defeating the enemy with milliseconds to spare). And the dialog they’ve written, especially the voiceover narrations for Ving Rhames’ Luther Stickell, is rife with stilted speech and fortune cookie platitudes. Examples: “Our lives are the sum of our choices,” and, “Those we never meet.” President Sloane says Ethan is “the best of men in the worst of times.” Okay, that one’s kind of cool.
As the star of the show, the success of the Mission movies lands squarely on the shoulders of Cruise, who always rises to the occasion, regardless of what the writers and directors throw at him. The 62-year-old actor is in amazing shape (as evidenced in the treadmill scene) and still does his own stunts. Though some throw shade on Cruise’s skill as an actor, no one can question his dedication to the craft. And if they do, I dare them to dangle from an upside-down plane with only a seatbelt to hold onto like he does in this movie.
The main theme of The Final Reckoning is the same as in the previous film: fear of AI and its destructive potential. To avoid being tracked by the Entity, global intelligence agencies unplug and go dark. Ethan receives his mission briefing on an old VHS tape. Gabriel flies a vintage biplane, which can’t be controlled by the Entity. This reversion to analog over digital is reminiscent of the Battlestar Galactica reboot (2004), when survivors of the Cylon onslaught use older, non-hackable Colonial Vipers to repel enemy forces.
These movies aren’t typically known for their dramatic character interchanges, but there are two meaningful scenes where Ethan makes amends with those he’s hurt in the past. When Ethan apologizes for ruining Donloe’s career, the CIA analyst, who was reassigned to an arctic outpost after Ethan hacked into the database on his watch, forgives Ethan without hesitation. Not only did the demotion rescue Donloe from a career spent in mindless tedium, it changed the trajectory of his life when he met his wife. Donloe returns the knife Ethan accidentally dropped onto his workstation decades earlier, effectively burying the hatchet between them.
The other individual Ethan hurt, though indirectly, was Jim Phelps Jr. Phelps could be angry that Ethan’s actions lead to the death of his father, but his motivation isn’t revenge. When Ethan extends his hand to propose a truce, Phelps transfers the gun from one hand to the other and shakes Ethan’s hand in a gesture of forgiveness. A touching moment.
The globe-trotting story was shot in Norway, South Africa and London. As with the other Mission films, the production elements in The Final Reckoning are superb, especially during the major set piece action scenes.
In the final analysis, The Final Reckoning is a rote doomsday scenario that could’ve been transplanted from any other spy/thriller/action movie. It goes overboard with fan service and is a “Best Hits” pastiche of the earlier Mission movies. It’s a predictable, safe series capper that doesn’t deliver the kind of bang such a storied franchise deserved. Sadly, not even the exciting final 30 minutes can make up for the movie’s slow start and standard, cookie-cutter plot.
Still, The Final Reckoning is one of the cleanest action movies I’ve seen in recent years. And, I’d go back to the theater just to see the heart-stopping biplane confrontation…one of the most ingeniously storyboarded and executed action sequences I’ve ever had the pleasure of beholding.
Bruce Geller’s Mission: Impossible first aired on TV in 1966, and the first movie was released in 1996. Now, after 29 years and 8 films, Cruise’s movie mission has finally come to an end. But will the mission continue with other actors?
As we’ve learned from watching these movies, anything is possible.
Rating: 2½ out of 4
Spider-Man: No Way Home (PG-13)
24/03/22 22:59 Filed in: 2021
Starring: Tom Holland
December 2021
Warning! This is NOT a movie review. This is a critique of the film. Intended to initiate a dialogue, the following analysis explores various aspects of the film and may contain spoilers. For concerns over objectionable content, please first refer to one of the many parental movie guide websites. Ratings are based on a four star system. Happy reading!
Spider-Man: No Way Home has opened up a whole new narrative dimension for the MCU—the multiverse.
The multiverse concept certainly isn’t new; the earliest physics-related usage of the word can be traced back to a 1963 sci-fi story. Of course, the notion of alternate or intersecting realities has been extensively plumbed in sci-fi and fantasy books/TV shows/movies such as Star Trek (the “Mirror Universe” and TNG’s “Parallels”) and Sliders…among many other examples.
Sadly, screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers barely scratch the surface of the infinite plot possibilities inherent in the multiverse concept. Indeed, such a wide open story device should’ve been expanded to far greater creative frontiers (reference Piers Anthony’s “Mode” series) than what’s presented in this pedestrian yarn: a teenage angst opener gives way to a bleeding heart middle which sets up the mash-up melee ending.
In an ironic twist, the story is dependent on Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) but conveniently sidelines him for most of the film (for fear that he’ll upstage the kid running around in red tights, no doubt). Strange’s spell, destabilized by Spider-Man/Peter Parker’s (Tom Holland) multiple modifications to his incantations, opens a rift in space/time that allows the multiverse to come spilling into our plane of reality. Moral: alter the witch’s brew at your own risk. Corollary: beware the consequences of playing God.
What begins as a clever assemblage of heroes and villains from every previous Spider-Man movie (and what a treat it is to see Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina, Jamie Foxx, et al. together on one set!) morphs into a rehabilitation experiment gone wrong (of course). The resulting protracted battle, which is all over the place and isn’t nearly as exhilarating as it should’ve been, features too many confrontations with too many characters and ends up being a sticky, tangled mass…much like a spider web.
While it’s fun to see all three Spider-Men (Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Holland) sharing screen time, the dialog is often hokey, jokey and repetitive (why do McKenna and Sommers keep harping on the fact that Maguire’s Spidey can naturally produce webs while Garfield and Holland’s wall-crawlers must manufacture theirs?). In many of these arachno-trio sequences, the opportunity for the heroes to learn from each other is eschewed in favor of frivolity and fan service. So much character development could’ve been mined in these scenes. What a whiff!
The one aspect of the movie that stimulated my gray matter was talk show host J. Jonah Jameson’s (J.K. Simmons) blustery commentary that bookends the film. At the beginning, with Spider-Man’s identity recently revealed, Jameson regards Parker as public enemy #1. At the end, after the timeline has been (mostly) restored, Jameson calls Spider-Man a coward for hiding behind a mask.
Not only does such choleric rhetoric illustrate the plight of a hero in the eyes of a fickle public, it accidentally stumbles upon a telling socio-political message: the media, it would seem, is complicit in inciting bigotry and hostility in any universe.
This movie caps off a trilogy where each installment has gotten exponentially worse. Many aspects of the movie are gimmicky, which is fitting since the entire plot is built on a gimmick (the multiverse). No Way Home squanders a promising premise and underserves a tremendously talented cast.
The word “Home” appears in the titles of all three Holland Spider-Man movies. If the next film in the series isn’t any better than this one, they should name it Just Stay Home.
Rating: 2 out of 4
Tenet (PG-13)
31/12/20 20:09 Filed in: 2020
Starring: John David Washington
September 2020
Warning! This is NOT a movie review. This is a critique of the film. Intended to initiate a dialogue, the following analysis explores various aspects of the film and may contain spoilers. Views are my own and elaborate on comments that were originally tweeted in real time from the back row of a movie theater @BackRoweReviews. For concerns over objectionable content, please first refer to one of the many parental movie guide websites. Ratings are based on a four star system. Happy reading!
“To the degree that it’s not plot, any experimental structure will call attention to itself and often seem visibly artificial. So it has to be managed carefully or the story, the human content, will become secondary to the style. The story may even disappear altogether, lost in the clever externals of its presentation. One of the most damning things that can be said about a story is that it’s an amazing technical achievement.”
Those words come from Ansen Dibell’s Plot. Ironically, that writing resource was published in 1988, five years before CGI took a giant T-Rex leap forward in Jurassic Park (1993). How many CG era films does that “style over substance” indictment describe? A staggering number, I think (I’m looking at you Star Wars prequels).
The first thing that popped into my mind while reading Dibell’s quote was director Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017). Nolan’s depiction of the eponymous WWII debacle was a visual marvel, yet featured some of the scantiest character development in cinema history. You can read what an epic fail Dunkirk’s story was in my review.
So here we have Tenet, Nolan’s follow-up to Dunkirk. Nolan’s fascination with time (Memento and Interstellar) and the nature of reality (Inception) collide in Tenet. Sadly, Tenet resembles Dunkirk more than those earlier Nolan successes.
Tenet is a rare exception where the trailer is better than the movie. The preview establishes a time-bending reality where generically-named Protagonist (John David Washington) and Neil (Robert Pattinson) experience effect before cause. This causal reversal creates some startling visuals, particularly when we see a crashed car flip over and drive backward through freeway traffic.
However, for all its “amazing technical achievements,” Tenet is clearly missing what the Tin Man yearned for in The Wizard of Oz (1939)…a heart. Lack of heart also was the narrative Achilles’ heel of Dunkirk, which starred Kenneth Branagh (who plays villain Andrei Sator here).
Since Tenet’s sole writing credit belongs to Nolan, the movie’s dearth of genuine human moments has exposed his storytelling inadequacies; in the past, Nolan’s stories were buttressed by the superlative efforts of David S. Goyer and his brother, Jonathan. Nolan fails to reveal significant personal details about any of his characters. Without a connection to the characters, we aren’t really concerned for their safety—the same was true of the cardboard cutouts that populated Dunkirk.
Despite its intriguing premise, Tenet is a wholly uninvolving and unmoving tale due to its shallow characterizations and uninspired performances. Sad to say, but this decorated, scintillating cast is grossly underserved by Nolan’s script. Pattinson is flat, Branagh is unconvincing (especially his beard), Washington is unreasonably overconfident, and Michael Caine and Martin Donovan are mere blips on the radar (which, like tenet, is a palindrome).
Then there’s the question of where the movie’s MacGuffins come from—namely, objects that cause time to flow backwards. Are the artifacts alien in origin? The reference of “somewhere in the future” is egregiously vague (more lazy screenwriting). Also, Sator’s scheme to destroy the world is right out of a 70s James Bond movie. Nothing original here.
Though brilliantly realized, the action sequences actually undermine the film. For example, when we see a fight scene staged backwards earlier in the story, do we really need to see the same sequence played forwards later in the movie? We get the point already.
Worse still, two earlier sequences are revisited later in the movie—the freeway car chase and the melee at the airport. Returning to the same locations and sets feels like a retread and is an egregious waste of screen time, proof positive of the story’s tenuous construction. These hollow and anticlimactic action scenes may induce the sensation of déjà vu, restlessness from boredom, or both.
To the movie’s credit, it makes the audience work to figure out what’s going on—it’s the opposite of mindless entertainment. Also, the movie boasts a few exceptionally well-crafted action set pieces. These pulse-pounding sequences will leave many viewers completely satisfied, regardless of the flaccid story.
However, despite its ambitious high concept premise, Tenet is too long, too confusing and, surprisingly, too monotonous. In the end, the film is an interesting puzzle for the mind, but it isn’t an enjoyable entertainment.
The sequel, teneT, will be this movie played backwards.
Rating: 3 out of 4
Rambo: Last Blood (R)
04/10/19 22:16 Filed in: 2019
Starring: Sylvester Stallone
September 2019
Warning! This is NOT a movie review. This is a critique of the film. Intended to initiate a dialogue, the following analysis explores various aspects of the film and may contain spoilers. Views are my own and elaborate on comments that were originally tweeted in real time from the back row of a movie theater @BackRoweReviews. For concerns over objectionable content, please first refer to one of the many parental movie guide websites. Ratings are based on a four star system. Happy reading!
Rambo: Last Blood is the fifth film in the series and is the continuation of the John Rambo saga, which last graced theaters eleven years ago with the generically titled Rambo. From the title, it’s clear that this film is intended to be the final in the franchise. However, as we’ve seen many times before, if a studio is prepared to back a sequel, writers have clever ways of bringing back action heroes. Last Blood cannily plays off the title of the first film, First Blood (1982), and denotes the completion of a cycle.
The movie opens on Rambo’s (Sylvester Stallone) ranch in Arizona, where he trains horses, sharpens weapons, and changes light bulbs in the subterranean tunnels he’s burrowed beneath his property. Though we aren’t really told how they came to know Rambo, college-aged Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal) and her grandmother live in the farmhouse. Rambo has become like a father to Gabrielle, who was abandoned when she was young.
The plot finds some traction when one of Gabrielle’s friends locates her long-lost father in Mexico. Unfortunately, the reunion with her father ends on a sour note. To clear her head, Gabrielle accompanies her friend to a nightclub. Soon after, she’s drugged and is taken by a group of sex traffickers. When Gabrielle doesn’t return home the next day, Rambo goes in search of Gabrielle’s abductors. Cue the bloodletting.
As can be gleaned from that nutshell overview, the story, by Stallone and Dan Gordon, is fairly predictable and uncomplicated. The movie is also slowly paced…nothing of import happens during the first half hour. The dialog, by Stallone and Matthew Cirulnick, is trite (“Feel my rage, feel my hate!”), but is actually a good fit for the laconic hero.
The direction by Adrian Grunberg is solid during the action scenes, but unimaginative for the bulk of the film. In his defense, Last Blood looks like a low budget production—the same half dozen sets/locations are repeatedly revisited throughout the movie, i.e. Rambo’s farm/tunnels, the nightclub in Mexico, the stoop of Gabrielle’s father’s house, Gabrielle’s friend’s house, etc.
Last Blood is a bit deceptive with respect to its action: the first half of the movie is pretty low-key, but the second half is an all-out splatter-fest. During the climatic showdown, Rambo sets a series of booby traps around and below his house: mercenaries fall into spike-pits, trigger wall-mines and trip wires that bring down logs with metal spikes in them, etc. The entire tunnel assault plays out like a more lethal, less light-hearted variation on the well-executed standoff in Home Alone.
For a mostly mindless revenge film, Last Blood has several salient messages (whether intended or not). One of the movie’s ongoing themes deals with the heart. Gabrielle has a hole in her heart from being orphaned. After suffering a loss, Gabrielle’s grandmother says she feels like her heart’s been cut out. The grief in Rambo’s heart drives him to literally rip out his enemy’s heart.
To its credit, the film raises awareness of the horrors of sex trafficking. Young women are shown being beaten, abused and treated like animals. In a scene reminiscent of Bryan Mills’ (Liam Neeson) rescue of his daughter in Taken (2008), Rambo enters a brothel, frees the other girls and extricates Gabrielle.
Though it has pieces of a relevant story (subplots involving sex trafficking, PTSD and abandonment), Last Blood never really coalesces into a complete film. The story is also extremely uneven; a slow start gives way to an uber-bloody climax. At just over an hour and a half, Last Blood doesn’t overstay its welcome, so that’s a plus.
Though Stallone is a bit stiff at times, he’s ended the franchise on his own terms and even gets to ride off into the sunset. However, this isn’t the send-off this beloved action hero deserved. Now that we’re done with Last Blood it’s time for some new blood (which will come next year in a remake with young actor Tiger Shroff).
The best part of the movie is a series of clips from the earlier Rambo films that play during the end credits.
Rating: 2 out of 4