REVIEW: Mission: Impossible drags then soars thrillingly

So not so much Mission: Impossible then. Much more Mission: Extremely Difficult But Just About Doable If You’ve Got Tom Cruise On Your Side, Tons Of Luck And An Awful Lot Of Time.

And it’s the time that’s the slight issue here. The final hour and a half are truly epic, thrilling cinema, but The Final Reckoning, by any reckoning, is pretty slow off the blocks – which is an awfully ungrateful thing to say when Tom as Ethan Hunt is busy saving the world and all of us in it.

As you’d expect, it’s a super-sophisticated plot with a super-sophisticated enemy – a truth-eating entity which is intent, just because that’s what it does, on destroying us all. Our only hope, as the US president quickly realises, is to get Ethan Hunt back on board. He’s off doing his own thing, but the president realises he needs to be reeled back in as soon as poss. Only Ethan can put the pieces of the puzzle together and then risk life and limb, mostly by dangling off things, to pretty much literally put the evil genie back in its bottle.

The first half is for the aficionados who will understand the flashbacks and remember the last few impossible missions. They are great films, but they don’t linger in memory in much detail for most of us. So the opening hour is disappointingly a bit of a drag – all part of a ludicrously long running time, predicated, it seems, on the belief that this film is so important that it absolutely has to push towards the three-hour mark. It doesn’t. It really, really doesn’t.

But once Tom gets out of the stricken submarine, losing his diving kit and somehow getting from the bottom of the ocean to the frozen surface intact in just his swimming trunks, it all perks up brilliantly, the film finding the pace and the tension it needed right from the start.

Simon Pegg, who joined Mission: Impossible back in 2006 as Benji, gets injured as mayhem threatens. Oddly he requires to be done to him pretty much what Gabriel Oak did to the sheep all those years ago in Far The Madding Crowd. We really need him to hang on. He’s dishing out the instructions while Tom dangles in a race against time to get the missing component.

Meanwhile, intriguingly, as Armageddon threatens, we get the prospect of a US government doing the right and decent thing. Fiction is clearly and tragically ahead of reality. You couldn’t imagine Trump doing the same. But fortunately this is Tom’s world we are temporarily living in – and we have got Tom to save us.

The film serves up brilliant flourish after brilliant flourish, and it certainly ends up a cracking film. But there is no escaping the whiff of self-indulgence in that opening hour.