Talk about coming a full circle...
30 years ago when Cruise was still earning his spurs in the action department, following a string of commercial successes in the drama genre, came along the first M:I, a movie at that time of its release was dubbed Plot : Impossible, for the amount of complexity the writers built up in what was supposed to be a mainstream action fare. But there in lied the rub. The movie was being helmed by Brian De Palma, a Hitchcock acolyte, who was building up the plot like a serious suspense fare, and Cruise, doubling also as the producer for the first time, on the other hand, seeing the movie as a straight up action picture, and the mishmash of the visions landed the movie somewhere in the middle, a neither here nor there, saved only in the end by a couple of eye-popping action spectacles. Sure, the rose tinted glasses of nostalgia provides the necessary halo to all things past, blurring out all developmental hell issues, the genre-transgressions and unmistakable stamps of each of the heavy hitting heay hitting screenwriters (David Koepp, Robert Towne and Steven Zallian) in the hodgepodge of the final script, making the first M : I as a good start, if not a great one.
Funnily enough, the second installment was even more Hitchcockian, with a plot directly borrowed from his "Notorious" mashed up with the high octane style of the then happening Hong Kong action director, John Woo, and the final result was even more perplexing, sentimental and dramatic, again to the disappointment of Cruise, who simply wanted to make a white knuckle action entertainer.
It wasn't until the third edition in the franchise this time under the Hollywood Wunderkind of the time, J J Abrams, that M : I finally found its footing and Cruise has really hit his stride, quite literally (featuring him running full steam in at least one sequence in the movie, a feature that remained a permanent fixture, along with Ving Rhames). From thereon, each subsequent version raised the stakes, in terms of the tone and physicality, quietly assured of who Hunt was and what the movie was supposed to be. If the movie had a good plot along with the jaw dropping stunt sequences, then it was definitely a bonus, but lack of it was never knocked it down.
And this is why, "M:I The Final Reckoning" feels as though it is back to where it started - convoluted, confused and unclear about what it really wanted to be. And that is definitely a shame, considering its predecessor, Dead Reckoning, the first part in the two movie arc, was arguably one of the best movies of the franchise and now, its continuation (not a sequel), racing towards the opposite end in typical Cruise style, of course, full steam. In what appears as the last outing for Cruise in the M : I series, it was as though McQuarrie wanted him to bow out in a more cerebral feature, than in a standard issue Cirque de Cruise movie, penning a position paper on the rise of Artificial Intelligence in mutually destructive defence networks, than settling for a serviceable script that simply had the slug lines [Cruise does his ne'er before action sequence] at regular intervals and let Cruise take over with his stunt department, desigining some of the most daring, dreaded and downright insane stunts ever committed to celluloid. Instead, the movie chops its legs down in the entire first hour of its duration, engaging in Nolan-esque exposition about the pitfalls of the increasing (dependence on) automation, only to realize midway this wasn't that sort of movie, and so hurriedly scurries towards the acrobatic stunts, which were the true price of the admission, and indeed those two massive action sequences do deliver. But the damage was already done by then...
The pressures of bowing out on a high could make the makers overshoot their marks probably for the simple reason that they feel they would never get a chance to get near the material once again (except in some director's cuts sometime in the distant fututre) and so overanalyze even seemingly straightforward stuff trying to bring an action feature the much elusive "respectability" cred. It happened with the "The Dark Knight Rises", it happened with "No time to Die" and now "M:I" falls prey to the same Respect-ivitis. Hunt has to save the world - this is the simple foundational mantra of the franchise and how it does it over a series of near impossible stunts is the structure. How McQuarrie and Cruise botched this simple tenet after having applied the same principle to electrifying effect in the last 2 features, is simply astounding. For this feature, the team tackles the doomsday clock. If it was rogue actors or crazy heads of state earlier who pushed the world to the brink leaving it to the IMF team to pull it back from the precipice, it is Artificial Intelligence, this time around, a cold calculating perpetuating engine moving the defence assets around the world in direct opposition to one another for a head on collision. The doomsday scenario is the stuff spy novels are made of. Ken Follett's recent novel "Never", a thriller about a similar situation of how unrelated events across the globe, triggered by regional pushes and pulls set into motion an apocalyptic juggernaut, plays this much more realistically, in that the protocols that are set in place to overcome human emotions and fallibilities in critical situations, end up tightening the noose around the same humanity's neck, giving it no breathing room for last second manoeuvres. Yes, this is all Chess, move against move, strategy against strategy, and "M : I" was supposed to be Checkers, never Chess.
Overburdened by a script with misplaced intentions, Cruise, regardless, does his part steaming ahead full tilt, except, even at 62, it is not his age that bogs him down, metaphorically speaking. It is the lofty goal of the makers to turn the movie into a novel that does him in. Well, at least, it came back to where it started, thirty years ago. That should account for something.
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