Tom Cruise is the savior of the world and of the latest 'Mission: Impossible'

Special Envoy to the Cannes Film FestivalIn 1996, in the first installment of the saga Mission: ImpossibleEthan Hunt, the character played by Tom Cruise, was just another agent on a mission in Prague that goes awry. Three decades and seven installments later, Tom Cruise is no longer just another star, nor is Ethan Hunt just another secret agent. The actor has become a kind of messiah of entertainment cinema designed to be projected on the big screen and with impressive scenes shot in real locations, and Hunt is now an almost mythological hero with the manifest destiny of making the impossible possible and saving the world from certain destruction. Such a heavy burden to carry that only an actor with Cruise's almost pathological self-esteem and determination could have taken on without the film descending into ridicule.

Mission: Impossible. Final Verdict, which was screened this Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival, amplifies the problems and the virtues of the previous and uneven installment in the saga: the film's big action scenes are dazzlingly spectacular, pure cinematic energy that captivates the viewer with a Tom Cruise who was born to hang himself and retrieve a hard drive from a submarine. On the contrary, the film accumulates in the first hour an overdose of expository footage loaded with dramatic dialogue that the viewer could easily do without.

Cruise has not officially commented on whether this installment will be the last in the saga. In fact, when he burst into the talk given by director Christopher McQuarrie in Cannes on Wednesday, he preferred to talk about Final judgment as a "culmination" and shifted the responsibility for the saga's continuity to the public (i.e., at the box office). However, his age (62) suggests that yes, this mission will be the last. And the worst thing is that Mission: Impossible is precisely that this awareness of the end of the journey shared by filmmakers and audiences translates into an excess of gravity and self-awareness of the film, which contains many inserts from previous installments and recaps of the journey. The autonomy that each episode of the saga had is now sacrificed on the altar of the culmination of the work that Cruise mentioned, exaggerating the heroic and tragic dimension of the protagonist.

That said, the new Mission: Impossible offers, especially from the second of the nearly three hours of footage, a prodigious and brave exercise in action cinema that constantly tries to surpass itself with superlative sequences in which the work of the direction and the extras matters more than the hours of work of the special effects technicians. On this occasion, the villain on duty fails a little, an AI without a voice or body that, in some way, functions as a metaphor for all this intangible cinema of interchangeable digital images that Hollywood has embraced and that we have ended up seeing with indifference. This never happens in Mission: Impossible, especially due to the suicidal tenacity of its star, who, although he doesn't do all of his own action scenes—a myth fueled by marketing—does achieve something much more important: making you forget who does them.

Cruise's charisma and tenacity are the raw material and the main asset of the film, which brings together around the protagonist a team of familiar faces, with Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames at the helm and a handful of additions from the previous installment and, to close the circle, even from the first. It lacks humor and a more competent script that doesn't get bogged down in so many unnecessary descriptions, but it will be difficult to find a comparable spectacle on the billboards for the rest of the year. And it is a more than worthy end to a saga that has managed to stay relevant for three decades and evolve with judgment and ambition.