Cruise's latest 'Mission: Impossible': not a microsecond for the viewer to stop and think

Cannes , the world's most prestigious film festival, trendsetter and flash- grabber, doesn't only live on serious cinema, and for the survival of art house there must also be room for gossip and popcorn . Thierry Frémaux , the Cannes patriarch, knows that if he wants the media to continue giving the festival space in this multi-screen age of attention deficit, it's better to have a Tom Cruise parachuting out of a plane than the eagerly awaited - and very cinephile - tribute to the Nouvelle Vague with which Richard Linklater is competing for the Palme d'Or this year.

In previous editions, it was the sequel to Top Gun —French supersonic jets flew over the Palais des Festivals—and the latest Indiana Jones installment that brought a bit of fanfare to the affair. This year, Tom Cruise returns with Mission: Impossible: Judgment Day - Part 2 to add spectacle to the red carpet. If Cruise stole the show at the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics by taming a Harley Ethan Hunt-style, what did he have in store for what is supposedly the final installment of the saga? In the end, to the disappointment of many, Cruise simply strolled down the red carpet like any other human being, like you and me, where the riskiest thing we do is take the stairs three at a time. Cruise was joined at the premiere of the latest Mission: Impossible by his teammates and cast members, including Simon Pegg, Angela Bassett , and director Christopher McQuarrie . Will the franchise finally be an octology? Although, you know, this is like with Scorpions , who have been on a farewell tour for fifteen years.

This week was Cruise's third visit to the festival : the first in 1992 to present Far and Away and the second in 2022 to receive the Honorary Palme d'Or . Tom Cruise has spent four decades surviving an increasingly ephemeral movie star market, and at 62, he continues to keep in shape and reinforce his race against time through bare-chested shots. F ew actors are as dedicated as Cruise, on and off screen, dedicated to his image as the latest generation of great movie stars. Ethan Hunt, meanwhile, has been surviving impossible missions since 1996, the first with Brian de Palma , the last four with McQuarrie.

Tom Cruise is now running to escape a mutant and uncertain present , from global threats that, redundantly, have also changed over time: from the disclosure of classified information or the trafficking of biochemical weapons to artificial intelligence, the great enemy of Mission: Impossible: Judgment Day - Part 2 , which opens in Spain on May 23. The fear the world faces has changed, and the sides have changed. The female co-stars have changed too: from France's Emmanuelle Béart to Britain's Hayley Atwell, passing through Sweden's Rebecca Ferguson. Even the narrative of cinema has changed, which has embraced a hellish speed: not a microsecond in which the viewer can stop to think. The only one who hasn't changed is Ethan Hunt.

Mission: Impossible: Final Judgment – ​​Part 2 lives up to its tacked-on title and epitomizes cinematic sludging . More than an hour and a half of its two hours and forty-five minutes runtime act like an endless trailer in which not only the action sequences follow one after the other with barely any transitions, but the actions themselves are linked together without much concern for how we got there. It's as if the life of a normal person were summed up as you are born, you reproduce, and you die. Yes, the facts are important, but the essence of life is found in the collateral. McQuarrie cuts out anything that isn't pure adrenaline , which results in a confusing jumble that mixes the present, flashbacks, and explorations. As if it were a tribute episode to itself, the film opens with a review of all the previous missions, their respective villains, their corresponding love interests, and the key scenes from each episode, in a great sample prepared for the final remix. The postmodern food processor now devours itself, like reality shows.

This time, we pick up Ethan Hunt right where we left off: at the beginning of the search for the Sevastopol, a Russian submarine reminiscent of the Kursk, sunk at an undetermined point near the Arctic and harboring within its submerged bowels the primeval prototype of the great threat that, as the characters insist on repeating, will cause the "disappearance of the world as we know it." And that threat is artificial intelligence at its most imaginative, capable of delving into Hunt's own memories through augmented reality masks, or something like that.

Artificial intelligence , as I was saying, has run amok and is beyond human control; it has decided to exterminate civilization by creating confusion and chaos, favoring the spread of fake news and encouraging outbreaks of violence among the population. The most fanatic - in a clear allusion to extremist and populist social phenomena - have infiltrated institutions to help artificial intelligence create a new order. But the key piece in getting AI to end civilization is Gabriel ( Esai Morales ), the Renfield to our virtual Dracula. Ethan Hunt and his team of renegades, hackers (Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames) and more analog criminals, such as the pickpocket ( Hayley Atwell) and the bounty hunter ( Pom Klementieff ), have to stop it and restore, as far as possible, the analog balance. Therefore, the world McQuarrie designs is more like a retro-presentation of early 20th-century airplanes and bunkered salt mines.

The plot is so intricate and confusing, and the sequences leave so little room between them that, at each stage of the search, the characters must repeatedly remember what has happened so far and what their plans are: the film jumps from one setting to another, the characters are so numerous and they have changed sides so many times that all that's left is to let Tom Cruise guide them and hope for miracles . Nothing matters because, supposedly, everything matters: on the one hand, the governments of the nuclear powers have lost control of their weapons; at the same time, Ethan Hunt has to avoid having his skull pierced by a bullet, an axe blow, or a torpedo hit, and the villains must avoid taking out "the one person he cares about." And Ethan Hunt cares about all of us, especially the viewer.

It's when the film slows down a bit, when it returns to the classic structure of an action movie, when Mission: Impossible: Final Judgment - Part 2 , when what happens to Ethan Hunt becomes important again. First, in an underwater sequence, completely silent , dark, full of mystery and even with hints of terror. And second, in an aerial scene that the director handles with high doses of comedy. Because if there's one thing that characterizes the great action blockbuster of the 21st century, it's its commitment to humor and its lack of sex . Here, no character openly shows attraction to anyone else. Grace's character (Atwell) plays on the terrain of ambiguous seduction. Although Cruise , yes, is seen in his underwear on occasion: Ethan Hunt is a deadly weapon, even in his underwear.

Also striking—and this has become common in recent years—is the lack of care with which the digital effects are worked on in this type of franchise, which contradicts Cruise's physical work; why those disastrous chroma keys right at the end? It's hard for Mission: Impossible: Final Judgment - Part 2 not to be a box office hit. And it's hard for them to let the goose that lays the golden eggs die. The film press insists—we insist—on repeatedly retiring the great heroes: once James Bond is dead, anything is possible. They said this would be Ethan Hunt's last adventure, but as Scorpions sing, "Leavin' life and all your pain/ Everything wants you back again ."