Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning

AIs Wide Shut

Mission Impossible
The Final Reckoning
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
USA 2025
Paramount
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: Spoilers for the last movie.

Okay... so right up front I will say that, since I thought the last film in this mostly wonderful franchise was a bit dull and, since there’s been a lot of word of mouth and critical response that the first hour or so of this one is pretty dreary before it picks up, I was going into Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning (which should rightly be called Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 2 but I suspect there’s a very good reason it isn’t, perhaps to do more with the box office returns on the last one rather than any superstitious caveats the main lead has with the number two) with not so high hopes. So right up front I would like to refute all those claims because, frankly, I had at least as much fun with the pre-submarine sequences in this as I did with the rest of the movie. Perhaps more than the rest of it to an extent.

This one sees the return of most of the crew from the previous three films... Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, and Ving Rhames (alas, my favourite character played by Rebecca Ferguson was killed off in the last installment) along with recent new regulars Hayley Atwell and the increasingly brilliant Pom Klementieff. Plus assorted newcomers.

Cruise’s Ethan Hunt character is in hiding, now possessing both parts of the cruciform key needed to lift the next gadget to help bring down the Artificial Intelligence (AI) known as The Entity, which is gradually taking control of the nuclear arsenals of the world for a big bang day to wipe out humanity. It’s obviously down to Cruise and some new, acquired on the job team members (including an absolutely brilliant call back character who was a very minor character in one sequence of the first film and played by the same actor... who’s has a lot more to do here and is just fantastic) to help him in his quest.

It’s fast and furious and everybody is really good, with some intense scenes between the president (played by the great Angela Bassett) and her staff, who want to start the nuclear war just a little early. Can Cruise and co come through in time? Well, the highly improbable set of split timing sequences which make this a possibility, leading to a thing which has to be timed blindly to within literally a blink of an eye, requires... people performing the usual superhuman style antics which takes a lot of suspension of disbelief, for sure.

Now the two big action set pieces of the last two hours of the movie were, to me, a little dull... a submarine suspense sequence and a bi-plane suspense sequence (I prefer the more punch punch, shooty shooty explosion style set pieces myself) but all in all I’d say this film has a much more even tone than the last one and it is, I’m glad to say, a fair bit better than that one (even with the exclusion of Rebecca Ferguson). The score by franchise newcomers Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey is serviceable but seems to be lighter on the Lalo Schifrin themes than some of them... that being said, since it’s so far not had a proper CD release at time of writing  (just a rubbish digital and scratchy vinyl release) it may be that I don’t ever get to hear it away from the movie, which would be a shame.

All in all, I didn’t find this film at all slow and I’m scratching my head at some of the comments by the critics. A criticism would be that Shea Whigham’s character did not, this time around, need an almost ‘so tacked on it seems fake’ callback to one of the characters in the first movie... that was kind of dumb and unnecessary, I thought. However, having said that, I’d like to throw out a big shout out to Rolf Saxon and Lucy Tulugarjuk, who were both brilliant here. Not to mention Love Lies Bleeding star Katy O’Brian, who doesn’t have much to do here but who certainly has a lot of screen presence.

And that’s me done with Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning other than to say... final reckoning my backside. Cruise and his cast and crew could easily make another one of these if they change their minds and the big bad of the movie could also easily be brought back if that is what the writers intend. Not the best of the Mission Impossible films (that would be this one, here) but nowhere near the worst of them and with some nice shout backs which tie it back to a number of the previous films too. Works well at the cinema and would probably suit a big TV set too, I suspect.

Guardians Of The Galaxy Holiday Special 2022

Christmas Bacon

Guardians Of The
Galaxy Holiday Special 2022
Directed by James Gunn
2022

A quick note... I’m writing this very brief review in  the last days of Christmas 2022 and so it’s probably bad timing to put this one up before 2023. I’m going to pre-empt myself here and say that, by the time this review is published in December 2023, I will have already seen and reviewed Guardians Of The Galaxy Volume 3 for the site (right here). Therefore, any character arcs and terminations (which I suspect will be the case) are not yet known to me as I’m writing these words... so please read this in that context since, I’m sure some of the things in this might seem a little contradictory by the time this review sees the light of day.

Okay, so we have a specific Marvel Christmas special this year (as opposed to a Christmas TV miniseries such as Hawkeye... reviewed here). I have to say that I’m the only member of my household who actually thought this was any good and the only one who stuck with it properly until the end (even though it’s only 41 minutes long). There are a few bad things about it and also some good stuff. And this is going to be a fairly short review so, let’s look at the good stuff first.

Okay, so we have the film starting on a flashback sequence done in a late 1970s/early 1980s variant of rotoscoping animation, telling of how Yondu (played by Michael Rooker) ruined Peter Quill’s Christmas. So, yeah, the start looks deliberately cheap. Quill, aka Starlord, is once again played by Chris Pratt and he’s joined by series regulars Vin Diesel as Groot, David Bautista as Drax, Karen Gillan as Nebula, Bradley Cooper as Rocket Racoon, Pom Klementieff as Mantis and Sean Gunn as Kraglin. Once Mantis and Drax are told this story, it switches into live action and the two pledge to bring Christmas back into Starlord’s life... by travelling to Earth and kidnapping Peter’s longstanding childhood hero in the GOTG series of films... Kevin Bacon, in order to present him to Peter as a christmas present. Comedy shenanigans ensue and Bacon eventually finds himself hanging out with the Guardians on their newly acquired base on Knowwhere (following on from Avengers Endgame).

There are some nice jokes, some songs (mostly terrible, although I liked the first one... nobody else in the house did), some tiny comic action sequences and... a bit of sentiment here and there. It’s pleasant and mostly harmless fun and, yeah, I guess for me that’s fine but I think others in the household wanted a lot more from it.

There’s some bad stuff too, though... but the one thing I will bring up in that context is Groot. I mean... what? What happened to the CGI stuff? Did they use it or not because, frankly, if looks like someone wearing a bad Groot costume for most of the time. It just looks cheap and horrible and I can’t help but think that maybe more extensive use of CGI effects might have been planned but either money or, perhaps more likely, time... was not on the side of the crew here? Yeah, I don’t know why but it just felt wrong. I’m hoping this is not the same kind of effect/look they’re going to be going for in Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 3 when it comes out... but if it is, you’ll certainly already know that by the time this review sees the light of day on this blog.

Countering that though, Mantis seemed a little less subdued as a character and given much more to do, asides from being revealed to Peter as being his half sister. She was great in this. I could have done with seeing a lot more of Nebula and Rocket though, truth be told.

And, yeah, that’s me done with Guardians Of The Galaxy Holiday Special 2022... it was basically fine but, certainly in my household, I was in the minority. Most people here seemed to think it was pretty rubbish so, whatever, I certainly think it was by far the best of the stand alone Guardians Of The Galaxy adventures though*... which, to be fair, isn’t saying much but, no, again, it’s basically fine.

*Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 3 is better than all of them by a long chalk, it turned out.

Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2

The Groot, The Bad
And The Ugly

Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2
USA 2017 Directed by James Gunn
UK cinema release print.

And so I come to one of the Marvel movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) that I’d been looking forward to the least... Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2. I’d been wary of this one because the first of the GOTG movies (reviewed by me here) was one which, although I found it mildly entertaining and, perhaps, gave it a better review than it deserved... I was mostly unimpressed by.

It’s been widely said already that this new volume in the series is either better than the first movie or at least as good as that one. I’d have to say that now I’ve seen this second outing, neither of these popular sentiments are something I would agree with. The second movie is at least consistent with the previous, though, in that it both fails and triumphs in the same areas as the first... for this viewer anyway.

Okay, the negative stuff. Action for the sake of action can be dull and mind numbing and this pretty much sums up a fair amount of my cinema experience with this one. Even though the movie was big and loud and dumb enough to be the kind of joyful Hollywood popcorn fodder I would hope for, this was a film in which I consistently found myself nodding off for a few seconds here and there, especially during the convoluted action sequences in the second half, which were edited in such a way that I couldn’t really work out what the heck was going on for a lot of the time anyway.

Perhaps one of the problems was that it felt like nothing was at stake. Even with a high stakes sacrifice towards the end of the movie (no, I’m not going to put any spoilers in here by elaborating on that statement), it felt kind of lifeless and ultimately like it was really not addling much to the current Marvel Cinematic Universe movies we’ve seen thus far. The director has gone on record saying that it’s a stand-alone piece and this does, at least on the surface, seem to be the case here. So you really don’t need to see this one to make sense of any of the MCU movies which are about to be unleashed on us... although there is at least one or two characters who would be unfamiliar or, in one instance, unexpected in their inclusion of future films if these characters are, as I suspect, making appearances in the forthcoming Avengers: Infinity War movie for 2018.

So yeah... for me this movie was noisy enough to keep me awake some of the time but, alas, dull and dreary enough for it not to succeed at that for any great length of time.

All that being said, there’s also some nice stuff happening in this movie too...

The regular Guardians cast... Chris Pratt as Starlord, Zoe Saldana as Gamora, Dave Bautista as Drax, Vin Diesel as Baby Groot, Bradley Cooper as Rocket Racoon, Michael Rooker as Yondu and Amy Pond herself, Karen Gillan, as Nebula... are all as solid as you would expect them to be and they are joined by such great actors as Pom Klementieff as Mantis and some old timer superstars such as Kurt Russel, Michelle Yeoh and Silvester Stallone. There’s some lovely stuff with a ‘younged up’ Kurt Russel set prior to the opening of the last movie which I can only assume is CGI and the character chemistry and development is, mostly, as good as it was on the first film... one of the strengths of the franchise, as far as I’m concerned. This meant, however, that as much as I enjoyed Bautista’s portrayal of Drax... he felt a little bit over-the -top and forced into his new role in some ways. Still pretty funny though, so there’s that.

And there were some great moments with characters from other bits of the Marvel Universe referred to or mostly unexplored getting a look in here. A character from the first movie which was a big surprise in the last one has another little moment here. There’s also a reference to a Christ-like Marvel figure who looks like he will at least appear in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Stan Lee continues his cameo against a creature (or creatures) who, similarly, also got his/their debut in the pages of Fantastic Four and this is all very nice. About that cameo... Stan has two sequences in this film and there are also, if you are interested, five post credits scenes in this one... which play out at regular intervals throughout the cast and crew shout outs. And absolutely none of them seem to have any relation to other movies upcoming in the MCU other than the creation of a certain person coming for Vol 3... who is mentioned by one name only. Also, about that Stan Lee cameo... it’s pretty cool because it references at least one other Stan Lee cameo and does so in a context where the seemingly random (as they were originally conceived) Stan Lee cameos can now be part of a single character cameoing at different points through Marvel history so... yeah, that was quite cool.

Ultimately though, as I said before, this wasn’t interesting enough of a movie to keep me from falling asleep for a few seconds at a time and it certainly, in my humble opinion, wasn’t as entertaining or as vastly ‘Universe trotting’ as the first installment. That being said, the audience I saw it with were certainly getting a kick out of it (kids dancing in the aisles to the end title sections) and if you were a big fan of the original movie then you are almost certainly going to love this one. Not a film I’d recommend to anyone else but, if you liked the original Guardians Of The Galaxy, then this is kind of a necessary watch, for you.