Genre: Action
Premise: Ethan Hunt’s mission, should he choose to accept it, is to destroy an evil AI that wants to blow up the world. He’ll do anything, including going to the bottom of the ocean, and soaring to the highest point in the sky, to achieve his goal.
About: The last Mission Impossible movie was supposed to be Part One in a Two-Part Mission Impossible franchise finale. But the movie did so poorly that Paramount regrouped and repurposed today’s film as more of a standalone finale. The movie took in 77 million dollars over four days, losing out to the live action Lilo & Stitch film, which broke records with a 180 million dollar take. But at 68 million dollars for the regular 3-day weekend, Mission Impossible 14 secured its highest ever opening weekend take! Who says theatrical movies are dead!!??
Writer: Christopher McQuarrie
Details: 3 hours long!
I want to start off by acknowledging how amazing Tom Cruise is. The dude is literally risking his life for our entertainment. That is not an exaggeration. He does these insane stunts that all bear the risk of death just so that we can sit in an air-conditioned theater and enjoy ourselves for 8 hours. I mean 3 hours.
I’ve seen a couple of interviews with him recently where he talks about making movies and it’s incredible that, at his age, with how many movies he’s made, that he still has the same drive that he had at 23 years old.
It’s almost in-explainable. Scientists should study him. Cause that doesn’t happen with anybody in any career. There’s always a natural downtick in their drive. Praise the Thetan gods, I suppose.
Tom Cruise is the last movie star not by accident. It is because he outworks everybody that he’s had this continued success. And let that be the big lesson from this movie. If you want to succeed as a screenwriter, outwork everybody. You do that and you will find success, I promise you.
I am going to give you a highly simplified summary of Mission Impossible 18 simply because I don’t have the mental capacity to track all the nuances of the plot, of which there are thousands.
A singular AI is taking over the world, getting access to the nuclear arsenals of all the nuclear countries one at a time. The only way to stop this is to get the AI’s original source code, which will be used to turn off the entire internet. This source code is at the bottom of the sea in a crashed submarine.
Ethan Hunt convinces the president of the United States to give him an aircraft carrier so he can go get this source code. He preps his newest team to be there when he arrives back up topside. Except he doesn’t know where that’s going to be yet so they’ll have to stand by.
He goes down, gets the source code, comes up in Antarctica where his team miraculously finds him. But then we head to some cave space where both the government and Lame Villain are waiting for him to take his code. Lame Villain triple crosses everyone in order to get the code and make an escape. Ethan then chases him on a biplane. He defeats Lame Villain, turns off the world, purging it of the AI, then reboots everything back up again. The End.
Before I go medieval on the atrocious screenwriting in this movie, let me say what I liked about it. I liked that they brought back the CIA desk operative from the original Mission Impossible. That’s still the best Mission Impossible movie. That moment of Cruise breaking into the white room is iconic. This was the guy who designed that room. For his failure, he got sent to Antarctica for 30 years.
It ended up being shockingly heartwarming. He met his wife out there. And he gives Ethan Hunt the knife (that Hunt dropped at the last second) back, which brought out the Carson goosebumps. Then this guy gets to join the team! How cool is that! And don’t you love the irony? That Ethan Hunt “ruined” this guy’s career and now they’re teaming up together. That’s actually smart screenwriting.
But that’s the end of any love I had for this movie. The rest of it is an utter mess. It’s sloppy. It’s poorly written. It’s overwritten. Pretty much everything I warned writers about in the Friday article came true in this screenplay.
Dude, you could’ve cut out the entire first hour and lost nothing. Lost absolutely nothing. There is ZERO reason for a 3 hour Mission Impossible movie. Zero. This is Screenwriting 101. Don’t start your story earlier than you have to. McQuarrie starts his movie literally an hour before he needs to. We don’t get the crux of the goal until an hour into the film. That’s inexcusable.
And the plotting?
Well, in each of the last four Mission Impossible movies, I lost track of the plot. So, when I went into this one, I said to myself, “I am going to focus so hard and listen so intently to every plot point that I never lose track of what’s happening in this movie.”
That lasted about 30 minutes.
I don’t want this review to turn into an attack on Christopher McQuarrie but the dude has settled into some really poor writing habits, the most problematic of which is his obsession with turning McMuffins into black holes of confusion.
You see, McQuarrie doesn’t just give you a McMuffin. He’ll give you half a McMuffin. They must go find the other half of the McMuffin somewhere else. Then, we hear about a new McMuffin, which the two-halves of the first McMuffin will open. But before we can get this McMuffin, we must first go off and get a code. Where is this code? This code is at the bottom of the sea, in a submarine. Oh, but before we can go to his submarine, we must first figure out where it is. Which means we have to go find its coordinates. Where are the people who know the coordinates? In Antarctica.
It goes on and on and on and on and on.
And I don’t know why McQuarrie would think any of this was even slightly entertaining. I suppose he thinks it’s “smarter” than going with one clear McMuffin. But dude, we’re not here to play your game of McMuffin Roulette. We want to watch some cool set pieces! By making us suffer through 40 minutes of gobbledygook exposition between every set piece is disastrous screenwriting.
It’s so bad that I’m actually reevaluating McQuarrie’s entire screenwriting career. Has he ever been a good screenwriter? I’m starting to wonder if his only value to the movie industry is keeping Tom Cruise alive long enough to finish each movie.
Then, we finally get to the big impossible mission, the submarine dive, AND IT SUCKED! That set piece sucked. I’m sorry. It was Tom Cruise swimming in silence for 20 minutes. I love Tom Cruise but there is a limit to what I’m able to bear with him. Quietly swimming through a wrecked submarine to find the source code for the evil AI (why in the world would the AI source code be in a submarine??????) was peak levels of “who the hell cares.”
Even the most dramatic part of the set piece is something THEY TOLD US WAS GOING TO HAPPEN AHEAD OF TIME! They say that Ethan Hunt is going to die while he’s in the freezing water before he can get to the surface but that’s okay because the frozen water is going to preserve his body and they’re going to bring him back to life.
And that’s exactly what happened! So there was no suspense at all. “Here he is, dying. Here they are, grabbing him. Here they are, reviving him. Oh, and, yup, they revived him, just like they said!” Where’s the suspense when you’ve already told us exactly what’s going to happen?
I’m even going to push back on the featured set piece of the movie, the bi-plane sequence. For starters, why are we flying perfectly brightly painted World War 1 airplanes? What’s the logic behind that?
Are we even trying to connect the dots anymore? Clearly, they wanted to use the bright unique planes in the climax but didn’t spend a single moment coming up with a reason for why these planes would be available to the characters.
You have to try!
Steven Spielberg loves making movies this way – stitching together plot beats to get to set pieces. But what’s so great about movies like Indiana Jones is that all of the set pieces MAKE SENSE.
When Indy is dragging himself underneath the moving jeep at the end, it’s because that line of cars is transporting the Ark of the Covenant. So he’s trying to catch up to the ark. These planes have absolutely nothing to do with the movie. It’s almost like Ethan Hunt ran over to an airport and the movie production said, “Here, use this one.” There was no attempt to integrate the planes into the story in any logical way.
And the scene wasn’t even that good! There’s no dialogue, which you would think would be a good thing as this was an action set piece, but there were several key moments where it was unclear what Ethan Hunt was trying to do and why. There were two seats in the plane and I think he accidentally got into the wrong seat, the one that doesn’t control the plane. But that one still has basic controls for the plane? So he was using secondary, harder, controls for the plane?
What am I supposed to be thinking in that moment? Am I supposed to be in suspense because Ethan is trying to decide whether to risk his life attempting to get to the “real control” seat or stay safe using the “less reliable control seat?” Who knows! Cause nobody tells us.
And if you’re internally arguing with me about how exciting this scene was, let me ask you this. If you didn’t know that Tom Cruise was doing all these stunts for real, would you think it was a good scene? I get that Cruise and his stunts are part of the package here. You can’t take away one without taking away the other. But I’m judging this ending on the dramatic impact to the story. And the story in this plane chase was ho-hum. Chase, get close, grab on, punch guy. That was it.
I did like when the bad guy gleefully screamed that he was the only one with a parachute before getting his head split open on the tail. That was great. But then Tom Cruise ends up having a parachute later!!!! That perfectly encapsulates the last 5 Mission Impossible movies. Logic does not matter. We’re told Ethan is screwed cause he doesn’t have a parachute. But then he just does have a parachute for some reason.
I’m glad these movies are over. They’re not as cool as James Bond films. They’re not as gritty as Jason Bourne films. They’re not as pretty as John Wick films. And they’re not as fun as Fast and Furious films. They were always second rate to me and it’s nice to finally put them to bed.
I would not recommend ANYBODY see this movie. You will be disappointed. There isn’t a single memorable moment in the film, in my opinion. It’s a total waste of time. But thank goodness it’s the last waste of time.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If there was ever an example of why you should keep your plotting simple, it’s this movie. It’s ridiculous how over plotted this is. It’s ridiculous how many boring exposition scenes we’re dragged through as a result of that over plotting. Please, I beg of you – keep your plots simple. Or else they’ll end up like Mission Impossible 26.
