By Tom Siebert
I once interviewed actor Peter Graves, co-star of the innovative espionage show Mission: Impossible, which ran from 1966–73 on CBS-TV and as a revival series on ABC-TV from 1988–90.
The gray-haired, good-looking Graves played Jim Phelps, leader of the Impossible Mission Force (IMF) that used explosives, electronic devices, and realistic masks to save the world every week from Communist dictators, corrupt industrialists, and Third World evil geniuses.
Mr. Graves, who died in 2010, had opted out of the original, 1996 Mission: Impossible (MI) movie because the film’s script portrayed his heroic character as a bad guy and even had him killed off (sorry for spoiling the ending to anyone who may have been stranded on a desert island for the past 29 years).
Now comes Mission: Impossible –– The Final Reckoning, an epic, exhilarating conclusion to the famous film franchise, unless of course, this eighth installment makes so much money that in a few years we are gifted with Mission: Impossible 9 –– We Were Just Kidding about the Last One Being the Last One.
Supernova Tom Cruise, Hollywood’s most-renowned stuntman who showed that he can be a brilliant actor in 1988’s towering Rain Man, opens the nearly three-hour spectacle as himself, thanking moviegoers for their faithfulness and promising the best cinematic-experience possible.
However, Mission: Impossible –– The Final Experience is sometimes impossible to follow because of its dizzying flashback scenes from the previous MI films. There is even a callback (unintentional?) to Cruise’s breakthrough movie, 1983’s Risky Business, in which he is wearing only underpants.
But the snappy expository dialogue in “Mission: Impossible 8” explains to us that there is a rogue artificial intelligence (AI) called “The Entity” that threatens to trigger an international nuclear war. In this final MI episode, it’s not just the tape recording that “will self-destruct in five seconds” but all of humankind will be destroyed “in the blink of an eye.”
Cruise again plays Ethan Hunt––the impossibly handsome, daredevil, secret-agent man––who is given the AI source code and tasked with saving the global landscape by going below and above it in death-defying scenes.
And speaking of death, The Entity has a worldwide cult following, sort of like the real-life end-timers who are rooting for the apocalypse. Hunt takes out some of these shady characters in hand-to-hand combat, one with a meat cleaver, the bloody killing taking place mercifully off-screen.
When not breaking into a shipwrecked Russian submarine at the bottom of the Bering Sea or hanging onto a dogfighting biplane in the South African sky, the superhuman Hunt is surrounded by his sensational IMF members, who first meet up and then say goodbye in London’s Trafalgar Square.
There's Geek Squad-like Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames); wisecracking field-agent Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg); and ex-pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell), who has chemistry with Cruise but not sex.
And we at last get a Black female president, played by Angela Bassett, who steals every tense scene that she is in.
Rounding out the incandescent cast are Esai Morales as the debonair villian Gabriel; Pom Klementieff, French assassin-turned-IMF ally Paris; Greg Tarzan Davis as friendly federal agent Theo Degas; Shea Whigham as CIA agent Jim Phelps Jr.; and returning from the first MI film, Rolf Saxon, as a CIA analyst.
Nick Offerman, known for his droll demeanor in NBC-TV’s comedy Parks and Recreation, is a surprising standout as U.S. General Stanley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Offerman is a Joliet native who graduated from Minooka High School and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie and co-produced by him and Cruise, Mission: Impossible –– The Final Reckoning has already made more than half of its $400 million budget, since opening worldwide earlier this month.
Moreover, the eight Mission: Impossible films have grossed more than $4.35 billion, making them the 17th most-successful movie franchise in Hollywood history.
Fun facts: the number of MI sequels has now surpassed 1950’s Francis, about a talking mule, with six follow-ups that starred actor/dancer Donald O’Connor; and 1934’s The Thin Man, which kept husband and wife detectives William Powell and Myrna Loy snooping around for five more of their fabled screwball comedies.
But the number of James Bond films, 25, is probably out of reach for even the most productive producers, a la Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak.
And as for a personal disclosure, action/special effects is not my cup of genre. I prefer 1940s’ film noir like The Big Sleep and The Postman Always Rings Twice; the classic movies of the 1970s such as The Godfather Part II and All the President’s Men; and recent social-justice dramas Till and Spotlight.
However, I did like Mission: Impossible –– The Final Reckoning, which I went to see only because my brother Don asked me to take him. And he loved it.
Finally, I don’t want to give away any imagined scorched-earth ending to this ambitious thriller. So let’s just say that we are still here.
As the closing narration states: “Nothing is written. We are the sum of our own choices.”
So each of us can save a piece of the planet a little bit at a time? Not a bad message for a movie, nor a philosophy of life.
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