"Mission Impossible 8" Gets Old, Looks Its Age

One of the greatest movie sins these days is to believe and show that old people can do anything that young people can.

Tom Cruise continues, in Mission Impossible 8 (MI8), to be the chief of sinners.

His Ethan Hunt character, worn in the face but with long dyed hair that a younger female character compliments, of course, defies gravity once again, impossibly for his age.

Back in the hit movie Top Gun: Maverick, one scene had Cruise pulling dozens of g’s that made every young pilot pass out, but not his 60-year-old Maverick. This time, Ethan Hunt can not only survive gravity-defying plane stunts, he can dive to bottomless depths in Arctic oceans, shirtless.

There’s no environment on Earth that the AARP-qualifying Hunt can’t infiltrate and master, including cyberspace, which is great because in MI8 the arch-villain is “The Entity,” an all-powerful AI that takes over the entire Internet and every nuclear power’s weapons systems.

Somehow, in three days’ time from the movie’s beginning, The Entity will shoot off all nukes on Earth and kill everybody, unless Hunt and his crack team use a cross-like key to deliver the Entity’s source code and a “poison pill” USB stick with an anti-Entity algorithm on it, all to the right destination in a secret South African cave.

I could barely keep track of the last paragraph. Most viewers will not keep track of the ongoings in MI8, as nobody I asked afterwards could explain why the Entity is trying to kill the human race or why some people are “fanatics” who are actively trying to help it.

But it gets worse. MI8 expects you to feel great nostalgia for its franchise’s lore, as if it has hordes of MCU-like fans. Maybe it does and I’m not familiar with this hidden society?

But in case you are not familiar with the franchise lore, MI8 will supply you with at least eight flashback montages that recall what happened in prior films. I stopped counting at eight. Probably there are more. Undoubtedly there are more. Expect montages galore, and more and more.

I liked parts of MI8, but only the parts that went VROOM! Two big showstopping scenes are included, with one, the last, being Cruise’s crème de la crème, as far as the action stunts he’s performed himself.

My total count for MI8 went like this:

• Two nuclear bombs needing to be stopped

• Three countdown clocks

• Four sprinting scenes

• Five shirtless Tom-Cruise scenes

That’s likely the most important stuff. Otherwise, MI8 utters countless fortune-cookie sayings, which the franchise has piled on as it’s went.

Those sayings amount to existentialism writ-large, the philosophy that supposedly will combat the A.I. takeover of the world. Dead Reckoning: Part One had strong Christian themes, what with a character named Grace, a cross-shaped key as the MacGuffin, and several instances of adoption and deus ex machina salvation.

However, Part Two tells us that Ethan Hunt is the one good person in the world who can be trusted with the deadliest weapons and most fearsome choices. Unlike Tolkien’s view in Lord of the Rings, in which no one can carry the Ring of Power because it corrupts all, Hunt is such a good man that he can handle MI8’s own version of the Ring. You’ll know it when you see it.

I think many viewers will feel uncomfortable by MI8. They can sense it because the visual forms are off. The movie is shot tight and close for most of its runtime, often with Batman-style tilted shots that amp up the claustrophobia and sense of gravity being warped and defied.

And it takes 90 minutes for an extended action scene to occur!

That’s maybe the most stunning element of MI8, the bad kind of stunned, like being tased, as Hunt is.

For the first hour and a half, characters in close shots yap at each other about arcane plot points for long stretches. Almost all of them are over 50. If nothing else, you’ll get to see, up close and personal, how old this franchise really is.

It’s true that Cruise’s abs are pretty good. Rest assured, you will get to check them out.

I really liked Part One of this movie, which may account for the letdown here. One problem is that splitting a movie in two, then releasing them two years apart, create memory problems for viewers and continuity problems for storytellers. You can’t treat the two parts like a serial TV show. Solutions tend to cause even more problems.

All in all, I highly recommend the MI franchise, from films #4 to #7. Cruise and co-director/producer Christopher McQuarrie have made some great action cinema along the way.

It may be time to hand this off to someone younger, though.