Maybe in the future we’ll get a documentary or a book chronicling the troubled production of these last two (final?) installments of the series. This really does feel like the final third of a story stretched out to feature length and then ladled with so much retconning, fan service, and deification of Ethan Hunt…and you really don’t need all that! You get the sense that there’s an incredible three-hour cut of the Reckoning films somewhere in the pieces of both.
The first third of this movie feels bogged down by the story’s insistence that it all has to build to something transcendent and yet it only achieves that when it is purely about GETTING THE THING, whether underwater or in the air.
All that said: I was not able to see this in theaters and I really wish I had, because those standout sequences are so thrilling and it would have been great to see them on a giant screen.