Reckoning hard, or finally reckoning?

Well, it finally happened. Tom Cruise's (supposed) final Mission: Impossible movie is here to culminate a 30-year film franchise, and what a ride it has been.

If you like action films at all and haven't seen any of the most recent four Mission: Impossible movies, you're doing it wrong. If you want to see this most recent one, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, I recommend you go the extra mile of seeing it in true IMAX, if at all possible. Tom Cruise is our last movie star who is truly addicted to "the movies" at a concept, and he has packed every last square inch of The Final Reckoning with movie. You owe it to him (and mostly to yourself) to view maximum movie in the largest available format.

And make no mistake: this is a LOT of movie. It's the longest M:I film at nearly three hours long, and it really cements the franchise's legacy as the flip side of the Fast & Furious saga. I won't go as far as saying that F&F is M:I for dumb people, or the inverse, because Mission: Impossible movies are spectacularly dumb,* and Final Reckoning often veers into outright stupid.**

*Complimentary
**Extremely complimentary

Saying that M:I is highbrow and F&F is lowbrow gets a little more into it. F&F tends to be the more populist franchise, but even then the entries from Fast 5 onward have plenty of opulence porn. (The main rule of spy/espionage movies is that the billion-dollar intelligence swap will always happen at a rave inside a castle. The criminal and terrorist underworld is absolutely lousy with castle rave mercenary payoffs.) Both franchises have a hardline bifurcation (from the fourth film on, F&F becomes about former criminals becoming international intelligence assets, while M:I turns into a "how will Tom Cruise die on camera" circus in its fourth film), but the main difference is that The Fast and the Furious began life as a bunch of stolen DVD-peddling meatheads who become a found family, and continues to be that, even as they drive a car into space. Mission: Impossible began life as Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) being the most talented and fearless special agent in the world who will stop at nothing to protect it, and continues that central theme even as the seriousness of the movies around him transmutes into what it eventually settled on. There is a big "found family" component of the Misison: Impossible themes, but that all takes a backseat to the bombast and pulse-rattling set pieces in the movies. F&F is about a big dumb meathead mumbling that he's doing this for his "FAMBLY" while everything explodes, while M:I is about a tiny, overly-qualified meathead brow-furrowingly insisting that he's the only person who can do this, because the world will die otherwise.

The two franchises are also tied together in one-upsmanship: they dangled Tom Cruise off the Burj Khalifa (for real) in the fourth Mission: Impossible, so Furious 7 jumped a car between the Etihad Towers (using movie magic). Tom Cruise drove a car down the steps in Rome (for real), so Vin Diesel drove a car down the steps in Rome while being chased by a gigantic CG boulder before blowing up the entire Vatican (which the IMF team had infiltrated in Mission: Impossible III, of course). The most significant difference is behind the scenes, however. The F&F franchise is dictated by a bunch of people who don't get along very well and results in stupid things like contracts legally stating that Vin Diesel and The Rock have to land the same number of punches if they fight, and that neither can definitively "win." Mission: Impossible is the Tom Cruise show, and his career arc is all-important when considering what the series has become at this point.