In 1986, at the age of 61, the blue-eyed heartthrob Paul Newman reprised his iconic role as the hustling pool player ‘Fast’ Eddie Felson for the legacy sequel The Color of Money. By this time, Newman had settled into the old-man phase of his career, slackening his youthful vitality and allowing himself to appear past his prime. The text of the movie demarcates this shift, with Eddie being outmanoeuvred by a smart-mouthed young buck. That young buck was Tom Cruise. Now a year older than Newman was in ’86, Cruise has resolutely refused to transition into Fast Eddie parts. In Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning he plays the heroic, world-saving spy Ethan Hunt – who’s supple enough to pummel his adversaries, astute enough to foil their evil plans – for the eighth time. It’s also the last time.
The closing film in any franchise carries a lot on its shoulders. It must consolidate the legacy of the series as a whole, and The Final Reckoning wears this responsibility heavily. The stakes have never been higher. The Entity, the sentient AI that was the big bad of the previous instalment, has spent the ensuing two months wreaking immense global havoc, resulting in martial law and civilian distrust of technology. The AI has been taking control of each nation’s nuclear-weapons cache one by one – as indicated by several alarming shots of flag-emblazoned warheads poised to attack – and is plotting the annihilation of the human race. The mission Ethan and his team have chosen to accept is finding The Entity’s original source code to bring it down. Their chances of success are estimated at one in a trillion.
