Three years after flying into the Cannes Film Festival with Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise is returning to the Croisette this year with Mission: Impossible - Final Reckoning – his rumoured swansong as superspy Ethan Hunt.
The film will screen out of competition at the 78th edition of Cannes on 14 May and the Cannes accredited members of the Euronews Culture team are getting giddy already.
Until you get our verdict and hopefully making your own mind up when the film hits theatres on 23 May, you can check out the trailer, which looks mighty promising and seems like Final Reckoning could redeem the previous M:I instalment, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, which personally left me a tad underwhelmed.
However, there’s one aspect of the trailer which made me wince: the send-off before the title reveal.
Now, everybody has clichés and cinematic tropes they treasure, can get on board with or tolerate.
When it comes to action / adventure movies, I can just about excuse ye olde coming-out-of-retirement-for-one-last-job bit. I can also understand that the practicalities of filmmaking mean that the convoluted sight of villains patiently waiting their turn to attack the protagonist makes for a visually cleaner thrill. I’ll forgive the seemingly never-ending rounds, the walking away from a gunshot wound like it was a papercut, and the last-second bomb dismantles. And yes, James Bond will always have apparently couriered and impeccably pressed suits wherever he goes on a mission.
However, my main quibble when it comes to hackneyed tropes usually resides with the script – specifically certain lines of dialogue which should really be outlawed by now. And it pains me to say that when Cruise’s Ethan Hunt dramatically pleads “I need you to trust me, one last time” at the end of the Final Reckoning trailer, my eyes rolled so far back into my skull I must have looked like the world’s bitchiest mime.
It was going so well until that old chestnut, which made me draft a non-exhaustive list of overused lines I never want to hear again in an action film:
- "We've got company!"
- “Is that all you got?”
- "Don't you die on me!"
- "I have a bad feeling about this."
- "It's not over yet."
- “The fate of the world is at stake...”
- “Breathe, dammit!”
- "This is my fight, not yours.”
- “If I’m not back in (xx) minutes, go without me...”
- “I’m not leaving you.”
- “I’m hacking the mainframe... I’m in!”
- “You’ll never take me alive!”
- “He wanted us to capture him!”
- “Are you trying to get us all killed?”
- “If we make it out of this alive...”
...And pretty much every single word growled by Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto in the Fast & Furious franchise.
Now, just because there’s one cringe quote in the trailer, doesn’t mean I’m not excited to see what the eighth M:I film delivers. Since Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible in 1996, the series has gone from strength to strength – if you charitably consider M:I-2 as a deliriously entertaining dud that handily encompasses the action movie trends of the early 2000s.
It's been a blockbuster anomaly over the decades, chiefly because typical franchise rules haven't seemed to apply to the impressively enduring series. Usually, a continuing saga will yield diminishing returns, in terms of both quality and box-office, especially in an era of franchise fatigue. Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt has been the exception to the rule, with each M:I entry attempting to top the previous chapter and succeeding... Until 2023.
Can Final Reckoning win me back and ensure that the series didn’t peak with 2018's Fallout? Not long now to find out, and I have no doubt that the death-defying stunts and a hopefully more polished script (considering the film was delayed) will make up for the odd clichéd one-liner.
However, I will be taking my "overused action movie lines" bingo card to the Cannes screening just in case this (possibly final) M:I instalment does decide to double-down...
Because unlike the indefatigable Cruise, I’m starting to get too old for this shit.
The line-up to this year's Cannes Film Festival, running from 13-24 May, is unveiled tomorrow. Stay tuned to Euronews Culture for the full debrief.
