Reel Tastes & Travels – a light dose of entertainment to wake you up

Ethan Hunt is back, and the stakes are bigger than ever… nothing less than saving the whole of humanity from extinction. This is meant to be the last film in the franchise (even if the ending leaves the door open a tiny crack for future adventures), and the entire movie telegraphs a sense of finality. The pressure is greater – his adversary is nothing less than a malevolent AI, ‘The Entity’, with grandiose plans to cleanse and remake the world ala Noah and the Flood (but with nuclear weapons). How could they possibly top that – any future movie is bound to feel a tad anticlimactic after that. The fan service / nostalgia is heavier – with several flashback montages of Ethan’s past adventures peppering the first half of the movie and multiple guest appearances tying back to earlier films. And Ethan himself seems wearier, bowing but not yet breaking under the weight of all that has happened and continues to happen to him.

This is not your usual MI film – there is no jazzy stunt sequence to introduce Hunt on screen, the iconic face masks only make a brief appearance at the start, and Hunt and his team spend the majority of the movie apart, often out of contact due to the need to go low-tech to avoid the Entity’s gaze. All of that notwithstanding, the movie is an enjoyable watch. At a run time of 170 minutes, the editing could have been tighter, but the movie never feels likes it’s dragging. And what the first half lacks in splashy action sequences (although it has its share of smaller ones), the second half more than makes up for. 

The movie picks up where the last one left off. The Entity has taken over most of the world, governments are in crisis, unsure who to trust, or even what information to trust and the world is inching towards all out nuclear war, either instigated by The Entity who is working on wresting control of nuclear warheads globally, or as a preemptive strike to protect themselves. 

We see this increasing tension play out through the eyes of the US head of state, stuck in a classic Prisoners Dilemma – does she take the US arsenal offline to protect it from the Entity at the cost of leaving the US defenceless, or does she take the first strike while she still has control. It’s a good choice to spend some of the movie’s runtime on the deliberations and moral agonizing of her inner circle over this decision. It makes the dilemma and impending doom feel more real and not just an abstract threat. Even more so since the villain this time has no physical presence and in fact, is largely sidelined in this movie (unlike the first one) beyond its role as catalyst for the plot. 

In the same vein, since there can’t be a hero-villain showdown without an actual physical villain, the film brings back Morales as a secondary antagonist, who is trying to use Hunt to gain control of the Entity for his own undoubtedly nefarious purposes. 

The first half sets up these various dynamics while the second half propels Hunt and his team into one impossible situation after another. And of course, things go wrong at every possible instance to ratchet up the difficulty level of our hero’s quest to 13! But this is the IMF after all – an odd character or two may die, occasionally a fairly key member of the team, but eventually they will triumph.  And on the way we get to enjoy Hunt singlehandedly retrieving the movie’s Macguffin from a long sunken submarine, an intense fight scene between two teams who should be on the same side but sadly aren’t (as an aside, the fact that this seems all too plausible serves as a sad commentary on the lack of trust and increasing divisiveness of today’s world), and a thrilling death-defying battle in the skies. 

Huge shout-out to the background music in these scenes which truly helps build up the intensity of the moment. The sequence where Hunt deep sea dives and makes his way through the sunken submarine had me almost feeling claustrophobic on his behalf and I could practically feel my anxiety spiking as I followed his progress. 

The movie is good enough to switch off your brain for a few hours and sit back and relax. But if you start thinking on the plot for more than a few minutes, it starts to fall apart (unfortunately an all-too-common trait of movies these days). I’m willing to sit on my sense of disbelief a bit when watching an MI film – so yes, the hero is seemingly tireless and bounces back immediately from every trauma inflicted on him, and yes, the team pulls off every impossible task they face. But let the story at least be consistent and make sense in-universe. For instance, why would killing the Entity destroy the entire cyber universe…and if so, why does the world seemingly reset without a hitch at the end of the movie? And when faced with nuclear annihilation as the only alternative, why are the government leaders so aghast at the idea of rebuilding cyber networks that they try and shut down Hunt immediately? It smacks of adding drama for the sake of drama and honestly was not needed. I also wish they had found a way to use the Entity more actively. Morales is a perfectly serviceable villain but after getting a taste in Part 1 of the mayhem and misdirection that the Entity can cause, it would have been fun to see it messing with the team some more, rather than lurking passively in the background (evil intent only indicated through some lights on a map) for most of the movie. It feels like the franchise wrote itself into a corner with an antagonist that is so near all-knowing and all-seeing that they couldn’t follow it up with a fitting end. The conclusion falls a bit flat and I was left with a mild feeling of dissatisfaction at the resolution – never the best way to leave a movie.

Verdict: Solid watch but nowhere near the heights of some of its predecessors