The collective reviewer wisdom on "Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning" seems to be that (1) it's good but not great; (2) there are some impressive action set pieces, but (3) there's way too much exposition from all of the characters. Further thoughts I've gleaned from multiple, non-spoilery reviews: the villain Gabriel remains bland and uninteresting,* the plot-interrupting callbacks to previous films simply bog the story down with yet more exposition, and they try too hard to make previous MacGuffins fit into the final film. And most importantly, there's no sense that this really is the swan song for the Mission enterprise. I'm definitely waiting for this one to appear on streaming. I have no interest in going out of my way to see it in a theater, even if I am curious as to whether Charles's prediction (made in his review of the previous movie) comes true, and the AI turns out to have a human behind it.
CORRECTION: in rereading Charles's Liminality essay, I see that Charles's "prediction" wasn't so much a prediction (he explicitly writes, "This is not a prediction, mind you; I just think it would be really cool if it turned out this way") as an expressed wish for how the story might go. Shortly after expressing this wish, though, Charles writes, "The problem—and the reason I am not all that confident about this [wish]—is that rogue AIs are just too flashy and exciting. From my perspective, a human villain using a super-AI would be far more terrifying because it is far closer to our present reality, but I suspect that audiences raised on AIs 'becoming sentient' and 'going rogue,' might find the misdirection devious or disappointing."
REPOST: let me repost, here, my own prediction from my review:
In "Dead Reckoning," one character specifically claims that the Entity has "no center," but I suspect that, in Part II, we're going to discover that the thing does have a center, in the form of either something physical or its source code. Prediction, then: Part II is going to end the way so many alien-invasion movies do: find the mothership (i.e., the center) and destroy it, thereby destroying all of its ramifying tendrils. As plot devices or tropes go, this is an overused, cliché idea, but I don't see the movie ending any other way... unless the screenwriters decide to go balls-out and end Part II on an inconclusive note, with the possibility that the Entity is out there and will reappear someday. Then again, you could counterargue that "find the center and kill it" is as ancient a trope as shooting an animal in the head. What are animals if not coordinated collections of cells?
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*I disagreed in my own review of the previous film.
We just saw this last night, and I do intend to write up a full review, but I can tell you (without getting into spoilers), that it was fun. Were there plot holes? Uh... yeah. Enough to drive a fleet of trucks through. And the AI makes even less sense than it does in the first film. That being said, I still enjoyed it, because it was a good high-octane action/adventure flick. I am capable of turning off my brain for a film like this, even if I do turn it back on again afterward to pick through the numerous issues (which I will do in my review). So, yeah--it wasn't anywhere near perfect, but I enjoyed it for what it was.
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