You have to time your arrival at cinemas carefully if you want to avoid the high-volume, rapid-fire edits of trailers for upcoming mind-rot. That’s conceptually impossible with Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. The first half an hour is a debrief in the form of an extended trailer of highlights from previous missions. At one point during this hyper-extended prelude Tom Cruise and a pal sneak into a disused London tunnel, as if to an underground club. This planted the seed that the rest of the film would be an all-action allegory of a group of friends’ determined efforts to get into the Entity, a sinister Berlin nightclub whose bouncers had previously denied them admission.
The non-allegorical, lower-stakes reality is that a truth-eating parasite called the Entity is poised to wipe out the entire world. There’s a lot of talk about this Entity, most of it lost on me. A line in the credits was also rather baffling. ‘Written by…’ What could that possibly mean? That someone actually wrote this bollocks? Among the pleasingly gender-equal and diverse cast there’s a lot of exposition in the form of baffled Q&As about the Entity and the power it exerts – ‘We are all in the Entity’s reality’ – but the Entity in question is clearly the very film in which it is being touted. The threatened end of the world is the one underwriting this conception of cinema. Everything in the film is a coded description of the experience of slogging through it.
When Cruise is told of the various agonies in store if he ascends too quickly from the depths of the ocean, we hear a diagnosis of the symptoms from which we’re suffering. ‘High-pressure nervous syndrome’ is a variant of the ADHD induced by a jeopardy-ridden Earth becoming a globalised stunt park. One in which the Hitchcockian formula for suspense – someone has to accomplish something while a clock counts down the time available – has been so extravagantly enhanced that every few minutes the characters are obliged to spend their time discussing how little time is left before everything goes tits up.
Having met – in the sense of survived – the impact of one catastrophic deadline we’re instantly hurtling to another. No sooner has Cruise been coptered on to an aircraft carrier – with seconds to spare – than he has to hitch a ride on a sub. Sometimes these multiple plot deadlines are not successive but simultaneous. During relaxed interludes we’re ten minutes from Armageddon but at moments of maximum peril, this can shrink-wrap to ‘the blink of an eye’, that classic edit-point. It’s all cut so fast there’s no time. To think. To. Complete a sentence. (I’m on a deadline, too.)
‘Written by…’ What could that possibly mean? That someone actually wrote this bollocks?
God, what an immense waste it all is – of time, obviously, but also of the actors’ faces. When they’re not fighting, stabbing, shooting or asking how much time there is, they look askance at each other. Then they all gather round to look askance at Cruise. Their time might be better spent pondering an unscripted plot twist whereby Simon Pegg seems to be turning into Tim Roth, but maybe that’s to be expected in a film where half the cast look like someone else: there’s a George Clooney lookalike and several iterations of the Leslie Nielsen character from Airplane. Cruise himself looks like a Tom Cruise stunt double with longer hair. (Is there time to suggest that, at some oceanically deep philosophical level, this instantly recognisable actor no longer even has a face?)
They’re all in it together. It being the apotheosis of an idea of cinema that takes us back to its origins – if the Lumières’ train had not just arrived at the station but exploded and taken out half of France with it. So this apotheosis is also a consummate degradation. We can see every pore on every high-earning IMAX face, but it’s a waste of one’s eyes. I don’t want to be a killjoy. Stunts like the postered climax high up in the South African sky, or the submarine sequence down in those oceanic depths, insist on close attention – how could they not? – but none of it is nail-biting in the way of Alex Honnold’s climb in Free Solo or, for that matter, a GoPro clip of teenagers in sneakers dangling from the girders of an unfinished skyscraper in Kuala Lumpur.
Before taking off on that final dogfight, Cruise says there’s nobody around, they’ve all gone home. If only! I was still there, stuck on the inner edge of my seat, looking askance, wondering, in rhetorical solidarity with the rest of the cast, how much time we had left. That’s the ironic twist of this pell-mell style of maxed-out adventure: it ends up (about 20 minutes after kick-off) being as boring as L’Avventura.
No block has ever been more thoroughly busted.
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