You have to time your arrival at cinemas carefully if you want to avoid the high-volume, rapid-fire edits of trailers for upcoming mind-rot. That’s conceptually impossible with Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. The first half an hour is a debrief in the form of an extended trailer of highlights from previous missions. At one point during this hyper-extended prelude Tom Cruise and a pal sneak into a disused London tunnel, as if to an underground club. This planted the seed that the rest of the film would be an all-action allegory of a group of friends’ determined efforts to get into the Entity, a sinister Berlin nightclub whose bouncers had previously denied them admission.
The non-allegorical, lower-stakes reality is that a truth-eating parasite called the Entity is poised to wipe out the entire world. There’s a lot of talk about this Entity, most of it lost on me. A line in the credits was also rather baffling. ‘Written by…’ What could that possibly mean? That someone actually wrote this bollocks? Among the pleasingly gender-equal and diverse cast there’s a lot of exposition in the form of baffled Q&As about the Entity and the power it exerts – ‘We are all in the Entity’s reality’ – but the Entity in question is clearly the very film in which it is being touted. The threatened end of the world is the one underwriting this conception of cinema. Everything in the film is a coded description of the experience of slogging through it.
When Cruise is told of the various agonies in store if he ascends too quickly from the depths of the ocean, we hear a diagnosis of the symptoms from which we’re suffering.
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