This movie was awesome, even though it wasn’t perfect.  Let’s get into the stuff that bothered me first, and then I’ll start praising the heck out of it.  By the way, I’ll do this all without spoilers, so – you can read on, without fear, if you didn’t see this movie.

DIRECTION 

The Final Reckoning was directed by Christopher McQuarrie, one of Tom Cruise’s long-time creative partners in the film industry, and closest friends.  He’s done everything from helping to write one of the many drafts for Top Gun, to directing all of the Mission: Impossible movies since 2015.  His list of credits are very impressive, to say the least.  

And, before he became Cruise’s Creative BFF, he wrote for NYPD Blue and penned the script for The Usual Suspects.

He knows filmmaking, there’s no doubt about it.  Which is why I’m rather surprised at how poorly many of the exposition scenes were directed.  At several points in the movie, characters dove into their troubled past, and actors were given the chance to let the inner conflict of their character shine.  These are academy award winning scenes.  But instead of holding the shot and slowly dollying the camera towards the actor for their close up, like most movies do, the director chose to insert b-roll shots from previous Mission: Impossible movies.  

And, it just didn’t stop stop there.  Anytime a character mentioned a solution or a plan, the director chose to cut away to more b-roll shots.   If they mentioned a widget, they’d cut to that widget.  If they mentioned a loved one, they’d cut to the loved one. 

EVERY.

SINGLE.

TIME.

At one point, I said out loud, during the movie, “Dude, this is too much.”

This is a movie you’re making here, not a Dateline Murder Investigation special.  I don’t think McQuarrie does this in all of his movies, at least to this extent – or does he?  I just don’t understand why he chose to direct The Final Reckoning differently.

He did direct the action scenes very well, though.  So, it wasn’t all bad.

DIRECTION: C

WRITING (WARNING! very minor spoilers)

Strong stories always need a VERY strong antagonist with a VERY interesting backstory.   The Entity was a strong antagonist in Dead Reckoning, but we didn’t see it do much in The Final Reckoning.  We all fear what Ai could do to us in the future.  An Ai gone wrong could actually turn your vacuum cleaner against you, or run your Tesla into oncoming traffic, turn off our power grid, or take control of our air traffic control systems.  But nothing that creative, which isn’t creative, was written into the script.

Plus, we didn’t get more backstory of The Entity.  It would have been VERY entertaining to learn about the programmers who worked on creating his deadly Ai.  Were there whistleblowers?  Maybe, one of them could have been a genius teenager who went into hiding, who the Entity is trying to kill, and only Ethan Hawke can save him?   Or – maybe something more complicated than that?

There’s so many missed opportunities here.  And, by the way, this isn’t the first movie to have an Ai as the antagonist.  Anyone remember The Terminator?  How about I, Robot?  How about 2001: A Space Odyessy?  That’s from 1968.   Of course, we got the Matrix.  All of these scripts had their Ai antagonist flushed out much more.

This script just needed a few more drafts to get it right.  It just wasn’t a strong.   

WRITING: D