Knee-jerk review: "Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning"

1. We were getting worried because the first half-hour or so is exceedingly tedious with long info-dump exposition and table-setting. Eventually, though, it kicks into gear and becomes a proper summer action thriller.
2. We regret to inform you that Tom Cruise is genuinely starting to show his age.  He's in his early 60s now.
3. We love Hayley Atwell, but the pointless death of Rebecca Ferguson's spy character in the last movie remains a huge unforced error.  Did she insult the filmmakers somehow?
4. More and more, it's hard to dazzle us with an action sequence.  Hasn't everything been done already?  Turns out the answer is "no."  This movie has two knockout set pieces - the submarine dive and the biplane fight, neither of which has any dialogue.  Simply incredible.
5. A vast improvement over the disappointing and confusing Dead Reckoning, Part 1, but still not in league with the very best of the series (Ghost Protocol 2011, Rogue Nation 2015, Fallout, 2018).  Those three are action near-masterpieces.
6. In the real world, Cruise's character would have died four times over in this movie.  He makes a ridiculous "hail mary" decision, rolling the dice, and then just hopes for the best.  No one is that lucky.
7. The world needs more smart submarine thrillers.  Can we please have a sequel set entirely on the Ohio?
8. We almost laughed out loud when someone mentioned that a purely theoretical super-advanced piece of next-generation computer hardware was finally built by... Ving Rhames' character Luther.
9. Ditto the moment where Simon Pegg's character Benji explains in detail to computer novice Hayley Atwell's character Grace how to hack into a hyper-secure government facility.  How can Benji possibly know anything about that system?  These movies are crazy and often succeed in creating their own reality where anything can be hacked by Luther and Benji.  This was not one of those moments.
10. Nice Fail Safe call back.  If you know, you know.
11. Angela Bassett can be an acquired taste.  She's gives off that same steely, angry edge in every role.  But that's exactly what is required here.
12. After the disappointing (relatively; it still earned $570 million) last movie, you can see that the filmmakers tossed out all of that mumbo-jumbo philosophical AI nonsense and went back to basics: in The Final Reckoning, Cruise and his misfit team have to find and mate together two pieces of hardware to save the world.  Simple is better.
13. Clever and completely organic return of a character from the very first movie all the way back in 1996.
14. There's no way Paramount lets this golden goose die.  Cruise can totally return as a sage mentor figure and let some other young star do the action work.
15. Go see it.

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