"Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning" is on Amazon Prime, so I finally watched it.
They never should've killed Ilsa Faust. Ruined the last film, and this one is even worse for it. Not a single mention of her, not even in the tons of flashbacks they use to pad out the film because they don't trust the audience to remember the previous films suddenly.
Probably the most ridiculous thing in a film full of ridiculous stunts and set piece spy-hijinks is the President suddenly being the black CIA chick from "Fallout", who was the worst part of that film. It is utterly beyond any suspension of disbelief that a black female, former deputy CIA director, who through sheer incompetence both unknowingly employed an assassin who was actually the nuclear terrorist she tasked him with killing and got the former CIA director killed when she idiotically tried to arrest him and his counter-terrorist team in the biggest shitshow fuckup of the entire MI series, could ever become President.
Frankly, it's nonsensical that she wasn't immediately sent to a black site to be interrogated for any info on Lark/Walker, then executed for her monumental fuckups. This film outright says they sent that tech guy from the first film to babysit a hydrophone station in Alaska for 30 years, as punishment for... well, nothing actually, since he wasn't remotely responsible for someone breaking into his office. There's no way Bassett's character wouldn't be at least retired in disgrace after "Fallout".
Other than that, Cruise finally looks old, his face is puffy and his hair look like a rug for about half the film. Then he suddenly looks a few years younger again toward the end. I guess they did the stuntwork early, and the boring first act was filmed last. The first act was also surprisingly bland; I checked the time and was shocked 50 minutes had elapsed, yet it felt like the story hadn't even started yet. They didn't even do the opening credits until 23 minutes in, right after a lame off-screen fight that I think was meant to be funny.
And while the biplane stunts at the end were better than I expected, the ending is really just a retread of the ending of "Fallout", with Cruise and the villain fleeing a nuclear explosion in separate aircraft chasing each other, all so Cruise can get a doodad to stick into another device to create a signal so the other team can cut a wire or whatever at the right time. There's no real difference beyond the villain dying in the stupidest, most pointless way possible. And the real villain is an AI, so visually its defeat is just being turned into a glowing flash drive, which isn't particularly thrilling; it doesn't really compensate for the lame villain death a minute earlier.
