The Final Wreckoning 😵
Keanu goes full angel, The Return of the King still rules, and a film about plumbing.
Hey cinema sickos. There’s a new Wes Anderson film out in the world, maybe you’ve heard of it? While all of Anderson’s movies sort of exist in the same aesthetic universe (or hall of records? Yep, “aesthetic hall of records” feels right), I found myself thinking of another film while watching the trailer for the notoriously specific director’s 13th movie: Fantasia 2000. This bit of cinema was a big deal to 12-year-old me – mostly because it cemented my obsession with George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” – but also because of Igor Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite,” which is extremely dope. This piece of music now appears in The Phoenician Scheme trailer, which is such a wild musical crossover that seems to tickle just two people in the world: Wes Anderson and me. It’s nice when extremely successful filmmakers and I see eye to eye on something absurdly niche, isn’t it? Anyway, have a great week and let me know what you thought of Anderson’s lucky 13th feature if you saw it this weekend.
Cheers, MB
In this week’s issue:
👼🏻 The role Keanu was meant to play
🔑 The endless bloat of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
🔚 Four actually good film series finales
🪠 A movie about pipe fitting, and so much more
The Weekend Take: May 30-June 1💰
Final Destination: Bloodlines continues its march towards supremacy having hit $230 million globally on a $50 million budget. Not bad for a movie that was supposed to go straight to streaming on HBO Max (that’s what it’s called again, right?).
But First, the News 🗞️
• Now that the Mission: Impossible franchise has “come to an end,” Tom Cruise and his brother-in-Christ-cinema Christopher McQuarrie are staying very busy with more sequelization. While appearing on a recent episode of Happy Sad Confused, McQuarrie mentioned the pair had “cracked the story” on Top Gun 3, while also exploring ideas for a Days of Thunder follow-up AND looking into making a stand-alone movie focused on Cruise’s Les Grossman character from Tropic Thunder. Long story short, future Cruise is planning to be even more omnipresent than current Cruise.
• On a different note, Richard Linklater’s black-and-white ode to the French new wave, Nouvelle Vague, was purchased by Netflix for $4 million. On the one hand, this means Linklater will get to make another good movie. On the other hand, a bit odd that a film celebrating cinema history will not, in fact, be given a proper theatrical run.
• In one of the more fitting casting choices of the past few years, Keanu Reeves is playing the angel Gabriel in the new film Good Fortune, which was written and directed by Aziz Ansari (remember him?) and also stars Seth Rogen and Keke Palmer. Have a peak, it looks somewhat funny!
• Sinners 2 will eventually, probably happen at some point. We think? If you’ve seen Sinners, then you know there are approximately 17 different options for prequels, sequels, and spinoffs seen throughout the film, so it only makes sense that one’s already been quietly slated for production. My hope is it follows the Choctaw tracking our Irish vampire friend across the Delta, but the movie’s more likely going to follow Michael B. Jordan and Hailee Steinfeld’s freaky romp through time, which I am also pro.
• And lastly, Sam Mendes’ Beatles tetralogy is reportedly going to take 15 months to shoot. At three to four months per movie, this tracks. Although there’s always the chance that the John Lennon movie takes six months, Paul’s takes another six, George’s takes two, and Ringo’s film only gets a month to shoot, which would be… fitting.
A Way-Too-Short Review: Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning ✝️ 🔑
How do you (potentially) put a bow on an eight-movie franchise? How do (maybe) close the book on 30 years of cinematic storytelling? How do you (sort of) say goodbye to a character that’s become inseparable from the actor who has portrayed him since the Clinton administration? Short answer: you don’t, not really at least. Instead, Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning plays out as two hours of “remember when?” with 45 minutes of some of the best action filmmaking…ever. Like all things with this franchise, this eighth and (supposedly) final Mission: Impossible entry is full of competing goals: to wow, to finish a story, to deem Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt as… Jesus Christ? And while that description might sound convoluted and over the top, it’s nothing compared to Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning itself.
I should start by saying that, again, this movie contains two of the best stunt sequences in recent film history, and it’s almost a shame that the Stunt Design Oscar won’t be around until 2027 for Cruise to finally win an Academy Award, but also, again, this is why The Final Reckoning was only maybe, probably, potentially the last Mission: Impossible film. Outside of the absolutely bananas biplane chase/fight sequence–which contains stretches that were so dangerous to film that it’s legit just Cruise up in the sky, in a plane, essentially doing gymnastics while hanging off the plane’s wing, and filming himself sans-camera man–we also get Cruise dodging unexploded nuclear warheads that are swashing around inside of a sunken submarine as he tries to recover a cruciform key to access the source code for the evil AI that’s slowly taking over every nuclear power’s arsenal around the globe. Did I mention this movie is… bonk?
The other thing to point out here is the tremendous cast, which includes Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Pom Klementieff, Esai Morales, Hannah Waddingham, Nick Offerman, Holt McCallany, Shea Whigham – I was trying to do this in one breath, but unlike Cruise, I am a human being and that is proving difficult –Tramell Tillman, Greg Tarzan Davis, and F*CKING Hayley Atwell. Unfortunately, not a single one of these people is given anything to do. However, all of them will now receive a Tom Cruise Cake during the holidays for the rest of their lives, so at least they’ll have that.
The moral of The Final Reckoning’s story is that AI should be feared and the only thing that can save us are practical effects. And maybe Tom Cruise, which might also sound convoluted and over the top, but after eight increasingly absurd movies over the course of almost 30 years, it’s clear that Cruise’s Ethan Hunt thinks he’s the only one who can save the word, while Cruise himself thinks he’s the only one who can save the movie industry. It’s just a shame that somewhere along the way, from 1996’s Mission: Impossible to 2025’s Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, he just stopped caring about anything else other than the story of making the film vs. the film itself.
The TL;DR
Rating: 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿
What is Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning? Forty minutes of unbelievable stunt work + two hours of unbelievable plot gobbledygook. The biplane, however, is indeed rad.
Should you make time for this movie? The highs are high, but the rest is just a mess. I’d say it could be good for a plane ride, but if you’re going to see it, it should be on a massive screen. Maybe just invite yourself over to the person in your life with the sickest home theater set-up and watch it on Paramount+ in a few months. That way you can fast forward through the 30 years of throat clearing and basically every line of dialogue.
Will it win any Oscars? It will not, however, the fact that they’re adding a stunt Oscar in 2027 makes me wonder how dead this reckoning really is…
What will you remember most from this film? The alt-universe comedy of Tom Cruise in a giant water tank with a bunch of fake nuclear warheads. Or how hot Hayley Atwell is. Maybe both?
Four Actually Great Franchise Finales 🎬
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
There may be no better final installment in any movie series, and while an eighth film in the franchise, The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, is slated for December 2027, The Return of the King is and shall remain the finale. Rarely does the last chapter finish off the arcs of so many individual characters, but this one does it in spades as Frodo, Sam, and Aragorn all see their stories come to perfect ends, while just about every other fixture of the epic series also gets fulfilling moments to wrap things up. I could wax on about LOTR, but the good homie Danny Boyd over at Cinemastix framed it better than I ever could. All I’ll say is that yes, the eagles could’ve made this a whole lot easier by showing up way sooner and giving the hobbits a lift straight to Mt. Doom, but hey – what kind of fantastical romp would that have been then, hm?
Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Look, I don’t want to hear it. When Captain America uttered the all-time “Avengers, assemble” line? Fuggin’ goosebumps. When Tony Stark dropped the mic on Thanos? I mean, come ON. And yes, I am aware that technically this isn’t the last movie in Marvel’s phase three, and that they’ve produced approximately 734 mid to bad movies since, but Endgame was the end in many ways–it’s literally in the title–and if you don’t like it, then you can find yourself a different timeline where I don’t include it on this completely perfunctory list. That’s right, how ya like me now?!
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011)
Is this movie a perfect encapsulation of one of the greatest final books of any series ever written? No, it is not. However, it still really hits a lot of great notes. The Harry/Snape connection and pensieve flashback sequence? Beautiful. Dumbledore uttering the iconic line, “Of course it’s happening in your head, Harry. But why should that mean it’s not real?” Es perfecto. Harry… breaking the Elder Wand and throwing it into the ravine next to Hogwarts? Absolute dumbassery that makes no sense whatsoever, but still, this movie could’ve been quite poor and instead is good to very good. Also, my girl Minerva gets to use the spell she always wanted to and I think that’s really nice.
Creed III (2023)
Did you know there are six Rocky movies? That’s a lot of Rocky. Did you also know there are three Creed films? Well, that’s also a lot of Rocky, but also plenty of Michael B. Jordan as Adonis Creed, which is a good thing. While it’s impossible for Creed III to be better than Creed since Creed is the Creed with the best Creed scene in all the Creed films, Creed III is very good AND it was also directed by MBJ as well. As a result, the movie has a slightly different feel, which can partially be attributed to MBJ’s love of anime apparently, but the fights still rock and while it’s since come out that the movie’s antagonist was played by a pretty awful human being, the film itself deserves to be on this historic document to finale greatness. Right? Probably? Yeah, sure.
What the F*ck Is This Movie? 🪠
The Passionate Plumber (1932)
As Tom Cruise has moved from leading man/movie star to action goblin, there’s no actor he’s embraced the style of more than physical-comedy pioneer Buster Keaton. The falls, the dodges, the use of the entire world as your personal prop, Keaton walked so Cruise could, well, you know.
There are plenty of Keaton movies to enjoy at your leisure, but I picked 1932’s The Passionate Plumber because 1) the whole movie is up on YouTube and 2) it’s a film called The Passionate Plumber, which sounds like an A24 dark comedy centered on Chris Pine as a plumber who ends up seducing one too many of his customers (patrons? clients? anyone?).
Although, with a synopsis consisting of, “A woman of Paris (Irene Purcell) poses a plumber (Buster Keaton) as her lover to make her boyfriend jealous,” maybe Keaton and co. were really just ahead of their time.
Seen anything good lately (other than The Passionate Plumber)? Are you ready to experience the bends in exchange for Hayley Attwell’s love and affection? Did I miss a glaringly obvious perfect end film in a franchise with more than three movies? Let me know by responding to this email.