Pop Culture Happy Hour - Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning And What's Making Us Happy

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

In Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise has to save the world (again). But this time, as the movie stresses repeatedly, the stakes are really, really high. Higher than the buildings Tom sprints across or the planes he fights bad guys on. There's an AI that wants to destroy humanity, and Tom and his allies try to pull off the feat of all our lifetimes. Will he? Does it even matter? It's Tom Cruise doing Tom Cruise things in London, the Bering Sea, and beyond. In honor of Toy Story's 30th anniversary, we're ranking the Pixar movies. What do you think is the best Pixar feature? Vote now! We'll talk about the results in an upcoming episode.Follow Pop Culture Happy Hour on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/nprpopculture See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

In Mission Impossible, the final reckoning. Tom Cruise has to save the world again. But this time, as the movie stresses repeatedly, the stakes are really, really high. Higher than the buildings Tom sprints across or the planes he fights bad guys on. Higher than ever before. There's an AI that wants to destroy humanity,

and Tom and his allies try to pull off the feet of all our lifetimes. Will he? Does it even matter? It's Tom Cruise doing Tom Cruise things in London, the Bering Sea, and beyond. I'm Linda Holmes. And I'm Ayesha Harris. And today we're talking about Mission Impossible, the Final Reckoning on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. Joining us today is Waylon Wong.

She's the co-host of NPR's Daily Economics podcast, The Indicator from Planet Money. Hello, Whalen? Hello, hello. And also with us is writer Chris Clemick. Hey, Chris. Hey, Aisha. I just want to say briefly to everyone listening, thank you for allowing us to entertain you and for listening to this podcast the way it was meant to be experienced in your ears.

Thank you, Mr. Cruz. Thank you. Thank you. I love it. So look, unlike Marvel movies, the Mission Impossible franchise isn't steeped in some deep lore and crucial plot points you need to follow from movie to movie. It's all about the set pieces and the stunts. So if you haven't recently revisited the previous installments before watching the final reckoning, like I did not, you're in luck. A good chunk of this film includes flashbacks and ex-explications. that we remind you that Ethan Hunt, the star agent of the Impossible Missions Force, is the only one who can save the world from being annihilated by the entity, an ominous AI program. Ethan is, of course, played by Tom Cruise.

He's aided by his longtime sidekicks, Luther and Benji, played by Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg, as well as his most recent brunette love interest, Grace, played by Haley Atwell. As with the three previous Impossible films, the final reckoning is directed by Christopher McCrory. It's in theaters now. Waylon, I'm going to start with you. Did you go along for this ride with Tom, Cruz, and Gang? How do we feel about this? Yeah, I really like this one.

I will say I'm in the tank for this franchise. I'm in the underwater tank. I'm holding my breath for six minutes, just like Tom Cruise. This is my favorite action franchise. It's definitely my favorite movie franchise where the narrative seems to consistently hinge and what happens to a flash drive. I will say that with this one,

it's probably the valedictory installment, and as such, it has a lot of business to take care of that I think kind of drags down the first part of the movie. But once it gets going, it has some, for me, pretty amazing memorable set piece action sequences. So overall, I enjoyed it. I think it does ask you to kind of trudge through a bit at the beginning, but it does reward your patience. Yes, yes. Thank you, Waylon. All right, Chris, how are we feeling here? So I am equally in the tank with Waylon. You know, Mission Impossible 2 is the only one that I don't like, so I've only seen that one like 12 times.

No, I'm not going to entertain MI2 slander. Right. And, you know, the set pieces never let us down in this series, right? It's always the other stuff around it. And the other stuff is particularly hairy in this one. When I watch a new one of these, I am always aware that I'm beginning a long relationship with a movie. My impression of it will evolve. And what's echoing in my ears is I know when we discussed Dead Reckoning Part 1 on this show,

two years ago, I said, like, I feel like I watched an assembly cut. Like, I was watching a preview screening and I'm going to give my notes and they're going to make some trims. And then I saw that film again, and it seemed much more polished and refined to me. But I really did feel like I was watching a rough cut of this movie, particularly in the first hour. I would describe the editing style of this film, again, particularly that first third where I don't know what's a flashback and what's, you know, progressing the narrative forward as Baroque. We talked about the exposition in the briefing room scene in the last one. It just kind of tracks as confusing and weird.

Confusing and weird. That is tenfold in this. Like, I really was confused for the first hour of this not quite three-hour film. And then it gets really good. But, yeah, you need to be patient. Yeah. Oh, man. Too much exposition.

Do you need a definition for that? This is it. But Linda, I heard tell that you might have had to run to the bathroom during the middle of this because it's such a long movie. I ratted you out, Linda. I'm sorry. Listen, the thing about this movie, this franchise has always been for me one where the story they are telling, the underlying story that they are telling is usually not only very convoluted, but also a complete snooze vest. But it is lifted up by the stunts and the set pieces and stuff like that. So I basically just like, I mean, you can go to the bathroom if you need to any time when story is happening and it won't matter at all.

To me, this was the first one that tipped fully over into the story being. such as NewsFest and also so portentous and everybody is just constantly, it's so self-serious. I don't think anything really fun happens in this movie for like the first hour. It's less the exposition. It's more that like you're going an hour in a movie like this with nothing fun. And by that time, I was really pretty turned off. And it's not that the series has not always been portentous. You know, This one, it really got out of hand. I felt uncomfortably at times like I was looking directly into Tom Cruise's brain. Because of how influential he is on these movies.

I mean, the way they eventually show this AI is very kind of ordinary. It's very like the way it would have looked on an 80s space movie. And I continue to feel, and we talked about this in the last one, a godlike AI is a bad villain because you can't really figure out how to get your arms around it. This was the first one that to me was so far out of balance with how much I did not care about the story that it tipped over into I did not enjoy it. Despite the fact that I very much enjoyed Tremel Tillman, who everybody loves from Severance and is... Mr. Real Chick. And is fun in this.

Yes. I enjoyed seeing Hannah Waddingham in this. I enjoyed seeing Nick Offerman in this. They kind of raided, like, television, good television actors, which I appreciated. But on the whole, I am sorry to say, I was bored. Well, I didn't mean to write you out on the bathroom thing, Linda. I too had to use the restroom. I don't usually.

I almost always try to stay. But at one point, I looked at my watch, saw that there was an hour left. This is a movie that is just under three. hours long. I went. I came back. I don't think I missed anything. It's the three hours long, man. I think I fall a little bit more on the side of Linda here. My audience definitely perked up when Tremal Tullman showed up. He's playing the captain of a submarine that at one point rescues Ethan. And he had like the best comedic timing. He had great moments. He was just like milking that small part for all it's God and it was great. I can't wait from this though feeling as though

it clicked for me when the first like minutes felt like it was just a clip show and like flashing back to previous movies and previous movies that I haven't watched in like 20 years. And I was like Tom Cruise wants what the Fast and Furious franchise has. And I know I'm sitting here with two like, am I super fans? Chris is going to. I know. This is going to rattle your bones a little bit. But like he wants this devoted audience like you. I guess it exists. I'm convinced. But that's invested in the space. films lore and characters, regardless of how, like, silly and bloated it might get. And, like, are Vin Diesel and Tom Cruise really that different? I don't think so. Like, they both pour their gooey souls into their respective franchises. They speak of their franchises as if they've been, like, touched by another dimension and they're, like, through their daring car chases and kick-ass fight scenes and leaps from tall building to tall building.

I can't buy into it. Like, I know Ving Rames. I know Simon Pegg, but I don't know their character's names. I don't even remember, like, Michelle Monty. who has been in previous, like, who are these people? I understand why Tom Cruise wants something like that, but this is not it. And he has something special that Ben Diesel has it, which is like, I think he's a far better actor.

But at the same time, Mission Impossible is not the Fast and Furious franchise. And this movie felt as though it was trying to turn it into something that people could emotionally attach to. And I couldn't emotionally attach to this. This taping already has more effective tension than the movie, in my opinion. But let me ask you this, Chris. Let me ask you this. You have definitely been known to dislike the Fast and Furious movies since we are following this thread, in part because of the absurdity and the unconvincingness of the whole like, it's about family.

And I've always agreed with you that as much as I enjoy the car stunts, that that's all very silly. I don't know that I think all of this business about it's all down to you to save the world because the AI wants this. And I don't know that I think that all of that stuff is any more fraudulent of a way to create emotional bonds with the audience than we're all a family. Let's have a BBQ. You know what I mean? And Corona. Raise a Corona. No, I can hear that.

And I feel like the way Tom Cruise relates to his co-stars in these movies is like it's a much more soft power version of what Diesel is doing where like I, yeah, like I'm not kidding myself that there isn't some rigid script, you know, they're going on Tonight Show or whatever and talking about, like, what a great relatable guy, Tom Cruise is. But I also don't see Vin Diesel learning to fly a helicopter, which, you know, we can talk about how relevant that is to filmmaking or to art, but it is a difference. I mean, I think that the reason that there is often an emotional disconnect with this franchise is that the franchise took a while to figure out what it wanted to be about, and it's had the series of directors, right?

And for the first few movies, Ethan's team changes with each movie, right? Like, I really like MI3, but then it's like, gosh, what happened to Maggie Q and Jonathan Reese Myers? It's like, you just never hear from them again. And I thought Paula Patton was so good when she joined. And then like, she was in that. Yeah, she was so good. And she gave that movie very good emotional stakes.

And then she was like, poof, gone, like totally memory hold, never hear from her again. There's this kind of expendable quality to the. team that I think has diminished the franchise's capacity to create an emotional connection. There is no family because you swap out these team members. By the time you get to this installment, you've got Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg, you know, you've got Haley out well. But the film is asking you to care about them as a unit and to believe that Ethan would do absolutely anything to save these people in his life.

I understand why audience members have trouble making that emotional leap. And to be like, why should I care about these people when they don't do a lot of work in establishing the relationship between those characters or even giving them distinct personalities? I think that's demerit. That's what I mean is that like this entire franchise is mostly just hinges on Tom Cruise doing stunts. And look, I love watching Tom Cruise doing stunts. I do think also like the other thing here that I found really to like to, like, to. go back to the point about the AI of it all. Like, I found it really fascinating that the AI, it's not a good villain, I think, in part because we also don't see what is happening across the

globe. We have no real sense of like what's happening on the outside world. In the beginning of this movie, they introduced like a doomsday cult that is like not really followed through. And instead here, we're just focused on them saving the world. But like, what are we saving here? Pretty much all the discussion. It's just like, oh, we have Angela Bassett as the president and everyone in the war room being like, well, the only things left, the only security left is like, you know, China, Russia, the U.S. and us and the UK. And like, yeah, the stakes are just his team. That was one of my, my big notes, too, is the doomsday cult because, you know, we talk about the difficulty of personifying an AI-based villain, which the Terminator franchise has done for

40 years, right? We're going to embody it mostly in the form of this, this one robot. But the way that these last two Mission Impossible films depict a malevolent AI as basically manipulating humanity into doing what it wants instead of sending robots out to do its bidding. That's not something I've seen before. Like, I do think that is a truly original and interesting idea that they introduce and then completely like bop the execution, like you said. Like I actually, I wanted more doomsday Coles. It still comes down to a flash drive. My God, like the thrilling action sequence at the end involves like plugging one thing into another cartridge. It's like bonkers when you think about like how mundane it is. Again, it's a flash.

strive of it off. Right. And I will say, I think, as much as we're being, you know, pretty hard on the emotional stuff and the story here, I have always felt roughly this way about the stories in this franchise. But in the last one, my feeling was I can overlook all of that because of how fun the airport sequence was, the car chase was, and the train was. For me, in this one, there's nothing that competes with any of those three things in terms of how fun I thought it was. They seem to me to be focusing more on what I would think of as like a ship in a bottle, which is you can look at it and say, oh man, I bet that was really hard. But that's sort of the point of it. There are a couple of sequences like that.

There's another flying thing, as they've done before. Yeah, but they haven't done it in biplanes before. Yeah, with East I. Meryl's trying to stab Tom Cruise through a fuselage. Wow. But is it that different? It is, well, I mean, as a physical matter, it is completely different. I mean, don't ask a former air and space editor about the difference between. I was just going to say, I understand it's a man who used to have to work on an aviation magazine. But I guess what I would say is the point of that flying sequence to me seems to be all the close-ups that are supposed to make it very clear that Tom Cruise is. actually doing this. He's a show your work guy. But I'm not there to admire you. I'm there to have a good time. And I didn't find that sequence to have enough in it to make up for how boring I found most of the rest of the movie. I was going to say, I do co-sign what Linda is saying about an absence of fun because I was thinking back to some of the previous installments. And in the previous

installments, for the most part, you are given something fun and or funny, just like straight up comedic, right? Like, I'm thinking about the Kremlin heist in Ghost Protocol. I'm thinking about the opera house sequence in Rogue Nation, where you're introduced to Rebecca Ferguson. So good. You know, so good, right? These are, like, incredible. The Wolf Blitzer thing. Wolf Blitzer thing, so fun. And I think, you know, Macquarie has figured out that he wants to put all the big stuff at the end, right? Like, you don't want to burn off a big set piece at the beginning. So now they've all kind of, like, shifted to the end. But I think in this one, you're just missing something fun. There's very little mask work. There's one mask. There's only one mask full. Yeah, that's not enough.

There's not much speed. A lot of what happens happens really slowly. It's people talking in a room about the annihilation of cyberspace, which is like absolutely humorless, self-serious, to Linda's point. So I do wish that they had injected more fun at the beginning. I think they were like, clip show highlight reel is fun, which it was to me as a Mission Impossible fan, but it's not going to be enough for a lot of people, I think, who want a little bit more zany energy, right? There's not a lot of humor in this one. I agree. Like, I do feel like there is a dire, grim tone that comes into this that I think they felt was necessary to give it a sense of finality. And I know from years of doing the show

that I, you know, I like a slightly more intense blockbuster and Linda likes a, you know, a jokeyer, buoyant kind of blockbuster. I will say, counting my crumbs, one of the things I've always appreciated about this franchise is that Ethan always gets his briefing by us a different obsolete form of physical media, right? Whether it's an analog record or a micro-cassette recorder. And in this movie, he pops in a VHS tape that turns out to be a message just for him from President Angela Bassett. And it's on like one of those combined, you know, VHS TV players from like the 90s. And I was like, I love this because it's analog and it's like for all you, you know, Gen Xers out there who have kind of grown up with this. These are highly rewatchable movies. So I kind of felt like that was what I was supposed to take from the VHS tape mission briefing.

Well, you know what? Maybe we come back and who knows if Tom Cruise is doing another Mission Impossible movie in three years from now, who knows? Maybe we come back and then we're saying the same thing that you said about rewatching the last movie, right? Like, it wasn't that bad. Actually, it was great. I don't know if that's going to be me, but one can. hope. We shall see. Well, you should tell us what you think about Mission Impossible, the final reckoning. I'm sure you will have a lot of thoughts. I'm sure a lot of people are going to go see this this weekend. Find us on Facebook at facebook.com slash PCH and on letterbox at letterbox.com slash NPR pop culture. We'll have a link to that in our episode description. Up next, what's making us happy this week. And now it's time for our favorite segment of this week. and every week what's making us happy. Waylon, I'm going to start with you.

Okay, my pick for this week is a documentary that came out in 2008. It's called Every Little Step. I am raising a theater kid. I love this doc. Oh, you do, yeah. So my daughter requested it for a family movie night. This documentary follows the casting for the 2006 revival of a chorus line. So you get a really fascinating behind the scenes look at the

absolutely grueling audition process and all these thousands of hopefuls who come to the door with their songs and their monologues hoping to be cast in a chorus line. And then that footage is interspersed with the original recordings that Michael Bennett, who's the choreographer and the director of the original chorus line, he made all these recordings of Broadway dancers talking about their lives and careers. So you hear bits of those original recordings, which then, was the basis for a chorus line. The whole thing just really worked for me. I mean, I love the world of musicals and showbiz as well.

I'd never seen such an intimate look at what it's like to just be in the room. And it's available on YouTube with ads. And it's called Every Little Step. Thank you so much, Whalen. I love that. Sounds like Linda, you are a fan too. Absolutely. It's very suspenseful and exciting, seeing who's going to get cast.

Love it. Love it. Chris, what? is making you happy this week. Well, I could not say what sent me back to a book that I first read about 25 years ago, but I have, apropos of nothing, been rereading William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade. This is William Goldman, I mean, the novelist and screenwriter behind Marathon Man and its adaptation, Princess Bride and its adaptation, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, you know, incredible credits, right?

And he was like the kind of script doctor rewrite guy for a generation or so. And he was willing to spill all the tea about how the industry works, the coiner of the famous, you know, dictum, nobody knows anything. What resonates with me now in a way that I didn't quite get the first time I read this book long ago, this was published in 1983, so he's mostly writing it like 82. And he is lamenting the state of the movie business, circa 1982, how it's all getting juvenile. He's using the phrase comic book movies all over the place, again, not referring to films that are adapted from comic books, but just to describe the sort of juvenile sensibility.

You know, since like Chris Nashawati published his book about explicitly how great the genre films of 1982 were, and what a rich year that was. In much of the same way that now we're talking so fondly about what a great unqualified success, Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part 1 was. So in short, 1982 was a great movie year, and William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade is a great book. Yeah, that's one of my favorite things to do is just like read contemporary news articles and reviews and just like see how the more things change, the more things stay the same.

Yeah. Linda, what is making you happy this week? I'm so glad you asked. If you listen to this show regularly or semi-regularly, you know that I've said for many, many years that I was not really a horror person. I wasn't really a gore person. I have kind of gradually been reevaluating what exactly that means to me. And as we record this, we have experienced the very big opening weekend of Final Destination Bloodlines, which we talked about on the show, and which I thought was a hoot. hoot and exactly the kind of thing that for years and years and years I said I didn't like.

But I was watching there is a, it's about 40 minutes long, there's a YouTube video with one of the producers of the Final Destination franchise. And it's called, and I'm going to tell you this because it's on YouTube and you got to look it up, every final destination death explained by the producer. And so they go through and they, all of these grisly, weird, Rube Goldberg deaths that they've done, He goes through and he explains, here's what we thought was funny about it. Here's why we did it this way. Here's how we shot it.

Just take such delight in how silly and gross and, like, splattery they are. Again, it's called Every Final Destination Death explained by the producer. It comes from Entertainment Weekly. And that video and its place in my horror journey is what's making me happy this week. I love it. I love it. Well, what's making me happy this week is. is a podcast, which is the Reliving Single podcast.

Good title. Yes, I know, Reliving Single. It is Peg 2, the classic 90s sitcom Living Single. It's hosted by Kim Coles, who played Sinclair and Erica Alexander, who played Maxine. They have such great chemistry. They are rewatching the series, of course. But what I most like about this show is the fact that they are also, as they are talking about their experiences on the show, they're demystifying the business to show to show what it's like to just be.

a regular working actor. They explain callbacks. They talk about what an A or B plot in a TV show is. Their chemistry is real. They get into colorism. They talk about the friend's elephant in the room. The fact that there were disparities in how their show was treated versus other shows with mainly white casts.

And what I appreciate the most about this is that it's just like a couple of actors who have paid their dues. They clearly love what they do. And they truly understand what the show has meant to their fans after all these years. And so I highly suggest if you're a fan of living single or just of hearing about what the 90s were like to be, you know, working in TV at the time. Reliving single, you can find it wherever your podcasts are found. And that is what is making me happy this week. And one thing I am very, very excited about, this year marks the 30th anniversary of Toy Story, which is, of course, Pixar's first feature.

So we are going to be doing a power ranking of the best Pixar films and we need your help. I know you have a lot of opinions. We all do. What do you think are the best Pixar movies? We'll have a link to that poll in our episode notes. Go vote now. I am so excited to see how the vote shake out. And we will definitely be talking about that on a future episode.

And that brings us to the end of this show. Waylon Wong, Chris Clemick, Linda Holmes. Thanks so much for being here. This is fun, even if we are on. different sides of the Mission Impossible to abide here. That's when it's really fun. Nothing is more boring than consensus. Thank you.

Thank you. This episode was produced by Hufza, Fatima, and Liz Metzger, and edited by Mike Katsif and Jessica Breedy. Halilkamin provides our theme music. Thanks so much for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Ayesha Harris, and we'll see you all next week.