Next week on the LAMBcast we’re going to have a Tom Cruise draft. This makes perfect sense because essentially Tom Cruise is the last of the movie stars. There’s not anybody close to Tom Cruise when it comes to opening a movie. He hasn’t been able to make everything he’s in a success, but his batting average is pretty damn High, and with the final Mission Impossible film on the schedule, Tom puts in his all as he usually does to give us some thrills.

Let me start out by saying that although I like this film quite well it does have a couple of significant problems. First of all it is almost 3 hours long and that seems excessive for what is mostly an action film. A second problem might be the thing that makes this feel long, the first hour of the film is filled with exposition narrative that is clunky and struggles to connect the events of the previous films into a single storyline. I’m all for fan service especially when it comes to the final film in a series, but only a couple of the things that they attempt, work very well.

The most logical extension that they have found for these films is suggesting that the MacGuffin from the third “Mission Impossible”, is in fact The Entity, the AI Boogeyman that arrived in episode 7 “Dead Reckoning”. In the earlier film it was referred to as the Rabbit’s Foot, and we never got to know what it was all about. The idea that it is some sort of blueprint for creating the AI that everybody is worried about here in the last film is a minor stretch, but one that works pretty well.

The connection between this film and its predecessor however is not as smooth. Many of the things that happened in the previous film are vaguely referred to, but none of it seems to be strongly connected to the events of this film. The exception being the location of the submarine that contains the original algorithm of The Entity. The way this problem was approached in the last film is completely different from the way it is approached in this film. That doesn’t mean that it couldn’t work, it just didn’t.

The stakes in the film are, as always, a little elevated. It seems that Ethan Hunt has to save the world repeatedly like some comic book superhero instead of dealing with a more manageable problem that could offer us some thrills with a believable set of consequences. To be honest it’s unlikely that any film of this ilk is going to have the audacity to let the world end. If that conclusion is off the table then given what has come before, “Mission Impossible Final Reckoning” feels like it is just a structure that exists, not to build suspense but to hang the set pieces on. At least those set pieces are really good.

I have no doubt that a number of other reviews will mention the two big sequences in the movie. I’m not clever enough or alert enough today to try to find something deeper so I will just repeat what should be obvious to anybody who’s heard of this movie, the submarine sequence with it’s underwater photography is ambitious, and,  come on  the bi- plane sequence terrific. Along the way we get to see Ethan Hunt run, get punched, do a lot of punching of his own and give us a couple of fakeouts. The plan is outlined in  its broadest sense. We usually  get a description of what’s supposed to happen, and then it happens .Of course there are always one or two complications along the way, but the complications that take place in this movie have less to do with the details of each individual problem and everything to do with just trying to move the pieces around on the board so we stay interested.

The IMF needs to be a little bit more engaged with Ethan to make us care about what’s going on. In this story they seem mostly reactive and taking their time just to be sure that Ethan will be able to do what he wants to do. The only one of the team that really gets the opportunity to feel like a part of the story is Luther, the character played by Ving Rhames. Even then, the resolution of his storyline feels a little manufactured.

I will mention that one of the things that was different about this movie is where we saw it. We had traveled to New York for the holiday weekend to catch several Broadway Productions. We got there early enough on Friday that we could fit in a movie, so we got a chance to use our AMC “A list” membership and see a film right in Manhattan. The theaters are built vertically rather than horizontally, which makes getting in and out of them feel a lot more like a puzzle. You have to go up a level or down a level to find an exit or the bathroom. So it was an experience as much as it was a Mission Impossible movie.

Cruise is great and I’m glad that he continues to do his own stunts and care about the way the movie looks. His partner Christopher McQuarrie, directed and co-wrote the screenplay, and he was a lot more effective managing the filmmaking then he was getting the story ideas right. The movie looks great but doesn’t always make a great deal of sense.

In the 30-year history of the franchise there have been some highs and lows. The first and third films are my favorite but both “Rogue Nation” and “Ghost Protocol” are excellent. I wish I could say the final films, which are direct sequels to each other, topped it off with the best, but they actually fit in the lower half of the eight films. At least they’re better than MI- 2.

Have we set our final farewell to Ethan Hunt? It’s hard to say. Tom Cruise is 62 years old, although he looks like he’s much younger than that, and it appears that he is quite capable of continuing the action beats necessary for a movie like this to work. I just get the impression that the story lines have gotten a little tired and that there’s a struggle to find something worthy to make as the subject of the film, and I’m not sure that’s what is really important. It seems to me that the characters and the incidents are the things that make these movies work.