Mission Implausible

Mission Implausible

Tom Cruise’s new movie has amazing stunts, a ludicrous plot, and doesn’t understand Artificial Intelligence. Here’s my snarky review.

By Brad Berens

“Thank you for saving my marriage.” That’s what I said to my friend Jeff when we exited the IMAX theater at 10:30pm on Wednesday, having taken in the 7:00pm Mission Impossible: the Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise’s eighth appearance as super-spy Ethan Hunt.

MI:FR is not La Profesora’s kind of movie. I did the math: at the time Jeff and I saw it, La Profesora and I were 98.6% of the way to our 30th anniversary. If I had cajoled her into seeing MI:FR, we might not have made that final 1.4%.

If you haven’t seen it and plan to, then let me warn you both a) that there are spoilers ahead, and b) that spoilers for a Mission Impossible movie don’t matter, since the story doesn’t matter with movies where the plot is a thin handful of ligaments holding together the bones of amazing stunt after stunt.

Going to MI:FR for the story is like going to PornHub for a documentary: you can look, and maybe even find one, but you’ve missed the point.

The movie.

The best special effect is Cruise himself. The man is about to turn 63 and looks decades younger. We get to witness the ravages of time (despite Cruise’s hardy constitution and talented plastic surgeons) because MI:FR achieves some of its nearly three- hour length (2:49) by indulging in flashback after flashback showing tighter-skinned Cruises in amazing stunt after stunt.

Three hours? Schindler’s List was three hours and fifteen minutes long, but it wasn’t an action movie. The plot of MI:FR is all about pulse pounding urgency, like the old TV-show theme music. MI:FR is a race against time.

Our heroes are trying to get two MacGuffins (I’ll get to it) and fit them together in order to save the world from an evil AI called “The Entity” (I’ll get to it) that wants to destroy the world for inscrutable reasons. Since Angela Bassett (who is always wonderful) plays the U.S. President in MI:FR, perhaps The Entity’s motivation is disappointment in the 2024 election results.

MI:FR is old fashioned in a different sense: its antiquated notion of AI is Orwellian rather than third millennial. Orwell’s 1984 came out in 1949, at the dawn of a one-to-many mass media era that is now well behind us. MI:FR’s notion of dictatorship is an update from Orwell because, instead of Orwell’s mighty human bureaucracy, The Entity is a single, nigh-omnipotent AI.

The pace of this race against time is agonizingly slow, featuring soulful glances and setup shots where our heroes—who have always had time to stop by an upscale boutique for middle-aged adventurers to get fresh and fashionable outfits—pose for a selfie before jumping into the next harrowing action sequence. Get on with it, I thought, looking at my watch.

As I drove home after MI:FR, I wondered about the dictionary definition of lugubrious. Per Merriam-Webster, it’s “exaggeratedly or affectedly mournful,” which is about right for this movie.

MacGuffin is a term Hitchcock made famous for the arbitrary thing around which a plot revolves. Usually there’s one, but MI:FR has two MacGuffins: a hard drive containing malware (the source code of The Entity) and a “poison pill” thingie containing even… mallerware that fits into the hard drive to kill The Entity or at least to put the genie back in a bottle.

The point of software is that it can be infinitely copied, so having the two kinds of software trapped in physical devices is ridiculous. When Simon Pegg’s Benji says the “genie + bottle” bit out loud, it tells the audience, “ignore this pseudo-explanation: it doesn’t matter—more stunts coming soon.”

Cruise carries the previous film’s MacGuffin, a cruciform key (two keys that fit into each other to make a cross; it’s also a subtle hint that Ethan Hunt is Jesus coming to save us), in his pocket like a rabbit’s foot.

If you are confused by all this, then you are right on schedule.

I can’t let calling the villainous AI “The Entity” go unremarked: were all the good names taken? We’ve had AIs called the Borg, Skynet, Samantha, KITT, T-800, Marvin, Eddie, and Hal—but Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie couldn’t lean on the screenwriters for something less vague? Belial, Loki, Jupiter, Adolph, even Fred would have been better.

By the way, for MI:FR to pay off the “Final” in its title, Ethan Hunt would have needed to die or retire at the end. He doesn’t.

The biggest flaw in MI:FR is how old-fashioned it is when it comes to AI.

Old-fashioned can be good. Lots of folks think Cruise is the last old-fashioned movie star who can open a movie just by being in it (although MI:FR is underperforming in the box office).

MI:FR is old fashioned in a different sense: its antiquated notion of AI is Orwellian rather than third millennial. Orwell’s 1984 came out in 1949, at the dawn of a one-to-many mass media era that is now well behind us. MI:FR’s notion of dictatorship is an update from Orwell because, instead of Orwell’s mighty human bureaucracy, The Entity is a single, nigh-omnipotent AI.

But The Entity (a.k.a. Fred) is still a single source of Foucauldian surveillance, which is so much simpler than what we face today.

In the age of AI, on one hand, we have ever-increasing number of eager-to-please algorithms crawling across every aspect of our lives—mostly delivering ads. On the other hand, other algorithms are working to please the gigantic corporations that want to deny our healthcare claims, make it harder to get a job, and spin misinformation into our minds.

The fantasy at the heart of MI:FR isn’t that one superhero can save the world; it’s that the superhero can do so by flipping the off switch on one AI.

The stunts really are amazing.
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Brad Berens is the Center’s strategic advisor and a senior research fellow. He is principal at Big Digital Idea Consulting. You can learn more about Brad at www.bradberens.com, follow him on Blue Sky and/or LinkedIn, and subscribe to his weekly newsletter (only some of his columns are syndicated here).

 

*Image Prompt: “create a title image inspired by the text of this essay.” The only unusual word in the prompt was “title,” which resulted in the movie-poster-like image.

 

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June 11, 2025