KWIF: Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning + Sinners

 KWIF = Kent's Week(ish) In Film. 

This Week:
Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025, d. Christopher McQuarrie - in theatre)
Sinners (2025, d. Ryan Coogler - in theatre)

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[Missions: Impossibles 1-6 and 7]

The TV series from the 1960s from which the Mission: Impossible film series takes its name was a team-based ensemble series revolving around a group called the IMF - the Impossible Mission Force. From the opening sequence of Brian DePalma's first entry in this series, in which Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt is the sole survivor of a mission where his entire team was killed, it was laid pretty bare that this Mission: Impossible was all about just one man.

Oh, every film it tries to pretend like its interested in Ethan being part of a team, amassing Luthor (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) and a rotating cast of others as his support base, but the films have never been interested, not one iota, about who these other characters are. They are there for one reason, and one reason only: to heave up the corniest dialogue that reiterates just how singularly awesome and important and noble and unique and courageous and handsome and incredible Ethan Hunt (and thus the man portraying him) is. But it hasn't always been so unbearable as it is in the latest (and last?) bloated entry in Cruise's vainglorious celluloid espionage exploits.

When Christopher McQuarrie joined the franchise with its fifth feature, it picked up the threads from JJ Abrams' third feature and started really investing in Ethan as a character, and what the toll of his role as sole saviour of the world has on him. It gave him an equal in Rebecca Ferguson's superspy Ilsa Faust, and took away from some of that centrifugal force that Cruise generates. Ilsa had her own world she existed in and it just so happened to cross paths with Ethan Hunt. Rebecca Ferguson didn't play Ilsa as a love interest, she had her own shit going on and Ethan was either getting in her way, helping her out, or a nice distraction.

With the sixth Ilsa-heavy M:I entry, Cruise squared off against a scene-stealing moustache and the super-tall, super-jacked, super-man that is Henry Cavill behind it. Cavill is the physical ideal I think Cruise wishes he was. When Cruise played Jack Reacher, a character described as a brick shithouse of a man (which Cruise most definitely is not) I can only imagine he was thinking he was Henry Cavill the whole time. So Cavill's nefarious turn and death in Fallout, well, it's like in Fight Club, when Jack bashes Jared Leto's face in. He just felt like destroying something beautiful. Mission:Impossible - Dead Reckoning (formerly "Part 1") was Cruise's direct response to having any of the attention taken away from him, and despite some spectacular stunts, it was the worst film in the franchise since John Woo's much maligned second entry. Slated to be the first of a two-part swan song to Cruise's run on the action franchise, he made it all about him. No more Ilsa, no scene stealing villains, and everything... EVERYTHING revolves around Ethan Hunt and just how goddamn important he is.

All this preamble is to say Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (no longer Dead Reckoning - Part 2) is the apex of Tom Cruise's self-fellating on screen. It's a 170-minute, $300 million(or more) budget spectacle that commands you to revel in the majesty that is Tom Cruise.  Every goddamn character - even the ones who are trying to take Ethan Hunt down - can only every talk about just how wonderful and noble and just the best-person-ever Ethan is, often directly to his face while Cruise just stands there, looking off screen, doing the best acting of his career by pretending to not be revealing in such effusive admiration. Dead Reckoning at least still deigned to have some personal investment for Ethan (though it involved fridgeing Ilsa, so fuck that noise) while here there is no journey for Ethan to go on, except to prove that he is the one man, and one man alone who can save the world.  At a certain point I had to wonder if all this ego-fluffing was camp. My wife assured me it was not self aware enough to be so.

There is a nominal attempt at building a team around him. Pom Klementieff's assassin, Paris, from Dead Reconing joins the squad, as does Greg Tarzan Davis' CIA Agent Degas. They hook up with Benji, Luthor and Haley Atwell's master pickpocket Grace. Atwell has the unfortunate role of having to pretend her character is totally infatuated with Ethan ...but then ALL characters kind of have to as well, except she has to pretend to be romantically interested in him while Cruise's sexual energy seems to have gotten lost somewhere between putting on his Lev Grossman fat suit for Tropic Thunder and belting out "Wanted Dead or Alive" for Rock of Ages, and he give her nothing in return. Oh, Cruise is totally down for taking his shirt off but he just wants people to be impressed with the physique of his 60-year-old body and what he can do with it, and not all all with any sense of allure. (Ok, I am impressed, you got me there). The team is a team only to ensure that Ethan's mission, and thus his rightful place as Best Person Ever, is affirmed. 

There are no character arcs in this film. There is a small redemptive arc for one character calling back from the first Mission: Impossible but that's about as close to a character arc as we get. Ethan's sole motivation in this rather absurd endeavour, is to save the world because only he can.

Picking up from Dead Reckoning, The Final Reckoning finds "the Entity", an artificial intelligence let loose upon the world, taking over, one by one, each nuclear power's arsenal, getting set to destroy everything, while nations still strive to find some way to control the Entity for their own benefit. Ethan and team have figured out how to stop the entity, but the mission...it's practically impossible! 

I can accept the multitude of far-fetched coincidences and microscopic margins of error that Ethan and team need to successfully achieve in order to save the day. That has always been a part of the series. It's a lot harder to accept the James Bond-meets-MCU-level threat and globetrotting adventure that doesn't at all seem like the style of the series. There's is such heightened levels of absurdity in this that it makes Indiana Jones' surviving a nuclear blast by hiding in a refrigerator look realistic by comparison.

Despite Cruise's borderline insane commitment to practical physical spectacles in death-taunting-level action sequences, these last two films have stretched so far past reality that they're really not that enjoyable. The absence of any character development or journey means you're all too aware of "Tom Cruise" on screen, and "Ethan Hunt" is just the innocuous shadow he casts.

That all said, the middle act of this film, starting with a sequence on a submarine captained by Severance's Tramell Tillman and with Love Lies Bleeding's Katy O'Brian on board (let's spin off a film about that crew please), just sings like a proper impossible mission. This segment of the film sets up the stakes, reiterates the dangers, adds more complications and we watch as Ethan and crew execute the impossible. It involves a gorgeously filmed underwater sequence and even as it keeps adding layer upon layer of danger to admittedly absurd levels, it never stops looking great.  It helps that Ethan is underwater and unable to communicate with anyone so it is just pure spectacle, with no one reinforcing just how incredible or awesome or necessary he is. Of course, it ends with one, perhaps two dangers too many, and its conclusion, well, if it were a Stretch Armstrong doll it would be spilling its inner sand everywhere.

This did not need to be a three hour movie. Scaling back the flashbacks to past instalments, shaving back the layers upon layers of peril (sorry to say but President Angela Bassett -- as much as I wish that were a real thing instead of Tangerine Palpatine -- is utterly unnecessary here), and cutting a dozen or two of the speeches about how fucking incredible Ethan is could pare this back a good 40 minutes. 

I didn't hate The Final Reckoning but these big bloated multi-part finales to film franchises are getting out of hand and they generally don't earn the right to be so damn self-important. These final two entries of the Mission: Impossible series feel more on par with ludicrous-ness (Ludacris-ness?) of the Fast and Furious franchise (a series itself that's failed to maintain its own standards). Nothing will be worse in this series than Mission:Impossible II, but these Reckonings have kind of sunk to a new level of mediocrity.

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There is a comic book series called Phonogram written by Kieron Gillen and illustrated by Jamie McKelvie that posits that music is magic, that the sounds we hear from bands, the creative energy that infuse them, unlocks the ethereal aspects of existence. In the comic, there are people who see the literal magic at play and can navigate it where as the rest of us just experience the surface impact of the magic, but the metaphor at play is a strong one. Music can unlock every type of feeling and elicit sensations that cannot be adequately described with even the most florid language. Music can transcend reality and take the listener into another plane of existence, at least for a moment.

There is a sequence in Sinners that is transcendent in this same fashion, a prolonged moment that marries music and moving pictures as well as human movement to create a powerful experience that conveys that idea of music being magic and lets the audience join the ride. In this moment in the film, music opens a metaphorical gateway between the past and the future, director Ryan Coogler's fluid, sweeping camera navigates the scene as barriers between reality break down. Ludwig Goransson and his talented ensemble of musicians, as well as the film's co-star Miles Canton providing deeply soulful blues vocals, bridge these worlds with a harmonious cacophony of sound. The scene captured is of the beautiful cast dancing, only to be joined by ancestors and descendants in the joyous movement.  I'm underselling its power. I let out an audible, uncontrollable "wooooooow" as the sequence evolved. The magic was real, and transformative. 

Often, when a film has a big idea moment like this, the entire story is built around it, it leads up to it, and then rides the high for the remainder of its runtime (or futilely tries to top it, risking undermining the whole endeavour), but not Sinners. This moment is an unexpected moment when it happens (oh...sorry, spoiler warning, I guess?) but it's really the pivot point of the movie. The sequences leading into this moment build up the characters and the scenario. Coogler deftly invests us in Michael B. Jordan's twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, as well as their blues-playing cousin Sammy, and the women they all love, and the town they all live in, the peopley they're all connected to, and the nefarious forces they face be it the Klan or the white devils with pointy teeth and glowing eyes.

I wrote about how Mike Flanagan's Midnight Mass was a masterclass in character and setting introduction and set-up.  Sinners has much the same brilliance. Smoke and Stack departed their Clarksdale, Mississippi home to engage in World War I, and after they returned, they stole away to Chicago to work for Capone. They have returned to Clarksdale armed with knowledge and experience and no fear. The legend of the Moore twins lives large in Clarksdale, some of it rumour, most of it not.  

The twins are opening up a juke joint, and fast. They want to get operating immediately. The don't so much as see the need as impose the need upon the town. There are warnings they receive, but there's a fearlessness and ambition in their endeavour, and they're going to put their all into it.  Smoke reunites with his lover Annie (the radiant Wunmi Mosaku) while Stack tries unsuccessfully to hide from Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), the daughter of the white woman who took the twins in when they were kids who Smoke had a fling with before leaving town.  They recruit their younger cousin to play, despite the protestations of Sammy's preacher father who wants his son's talents for the church, not for the sinner crowd. The twins also wrangle in alcoholic blues pianist Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) to play, and local grocers Grace and Bo Chow (Li Jun Ji and Thomas "Yao" Pang, respectively) among other help.

Meanwhile they don't know the threat that is coming. An Irish immigrant, Remmick, is chased through the desert by Choctaw hunters, well aware he is a demon in human form. Remmick gets refuge in the home of a Klansman and his wife, and in short time he is not alone, but a fledgling horde.

Remmick senses the power of Sammy's music, and wants that power for his own. So he descends upon that lively event of Smoke and Stack's grand opening, and it's not long before vampiric chaos ensues.

Coogler ties together the joys of music, the strength of community, the power of solidarity and the terror of systemic racism and injustice, and can't resist as the fleeting satisfaction of revenge, and underlines it all with a deliciously entertaining action-horror genre picture. Sinners is one of the most entertaining movies of the 21st century.  It's hard not to acknowledge From Dusk 'Til Dawn but Coogler has little to none of Tarantino or Rodriguez's interest or deference to Grindhouse pictures, and so when the bloodbath begins, it's all still so very rooted in character rather than spectacle. The choices Coogler's script makes in this last act are never not surprising, up to, and including the coda to the film.

Everyone is great in this picture, everyone. But when Michael B. Jordan is on screen (sometimes on screen twice) everything just orbits around him, caught in his gravitational pull. He is magnetic, capitvating and so good looking. Smoke and Stack are so smooth, collected, menacing yet sympathetic, and stylish as hell. It's impossible not to wish for stories about the Moore twins in Chicago, or their World War I experience... if not movies, then comics or novels from Coogler.

But Sinners is a singularly awesome film that wants to exist on its own, just one story start to finish, with no franchise ambitions. It stands apart as not just a movie, but an experience.