Latest ‘Mission: Impossible’ proves 8 is way more the enough

At some point during the first hour of “Mission: Impossible Final Reckoning” and leaned to my right and said to my movie-going buddy, “My God, this is boring.”

“How did this get made?” she replied with genuine bafflement

The eighth “Mission: Impossible” movie is a violation of both the entertainment fans expect from these films and the action film genre as a whole.

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The movie runs 2 hours, 43 minutes and it dedicates rough 2 hours, 20 minutes to nothing but endless exposition.

Characters just sit around and talk about what is going to happen, broken up with sporadic flashes forward to let the viewer know this thing they’re talking about is, in fact, going to play out exactly as it has been described.

“Final Reckoning” has all the excitement of a high school cross country meet.

Tom Cruise, who plays series hero Ethan Hunt, lacks the intensity he typically brings to the role.

What Cruise brings to this movie is more of his signature running.

He runs through a maze of under ground tunnels in a myriad of countries.

He runs through a field.

He runs after a propeller plane In a scene that borrows the classic imagery of Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest.”

“North by Northwest,” by the way, is 2 hours, 16 minutes. I recommend watch that and use the 27 minutes you save to give thanks to your higher power of choice that you didn’t go to “Final Reckoning.”

To be fair, it’s hard to maintain that intensity when you spend most of your time telling the audience in excruciating detail what is going to happen the next scene in the movie.

There’s a plot, but who cares? You just want the characters to shut up and do something.

There’s two McGuffins. Cruise and his motley crew have one. The bad guy has another one. Meanwhile, an AI called the Entity is taking over the world’s nuclear arsenal and the end of the world looms.

There’s a subplot where the President (played by the criminally misused Angela Bassett) must decide whether to launch a preventative nuclear strike or risk the U.S. arsenal fall into the hands of evil AI.

This portion of the story is shamelessly ripped off from the 1964 Cold War thriller “Fail Safe,”

“Fail Safe” runs 1 hour, 38 minutes. You could watch that instead of “Final Reckoning” and have enough time left to scratch build and bake a lasagna.

The movie tries to build tension in the final act with Cruise performing aerobatics jumping between two prop planes, his team trying to disarm a nuke, with Grace (played by the equally underused Hayley Atwell) trying to capture the AI on a fancy flash drive.

This movie manages to make dull a prolonged diving scene into a Russian sub sunk more than a decade ago which has one of the MacGuffins behind four or five hatches and mountains of tumbling torpedoes.

It might have been slightly more interesting if the characters had not explained exactly how Hunt was going to survive this harrowing process about 10 minutes earlier.

Let’s hope the “Mission: Impossible” franchise takes the “final” part of “Final Reckoning” seriously. Eight “M:I” films is not only enough, it’s about three too many.

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Daniel P. Finney is a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative, but don’t hold that against them. Please visit their page to view a full roster of writers and consider subscribing to their columns. Writing is hard work; people ought to get paid for it. If you enjoy it, throw them a couple of bucks. They earned it.