In Review: 'Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,' 'Lilo & Stitch'

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning
Dir. Christopher McQuarrie
170 min.

For a man who’s spent months on the run burdened with the knowledge that he’s all that stands between humanity and, as one character later puts it, “the end of the world as we know it,” Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) appears to be in remarkably good shape in the opening scenes of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. Lean, fit, alert, and ready to spring into action, he’s clearly been prepping to redouble his efforts to take down The Entity, the malevolent AI let loose over the course of 2023’s now confusingly titled Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One. It’s the film around him that feels a little flabby.

The eighth film in the Mission: Impossible series, Final Reckoning has to attend to a lot of business left unfinished by the seventh film, which ended with The Entity threatening to exert its power on a global scale and Gabriel (Esai Morales), Hunt’s most recent archfoe, planning to harness that power for his own ends. As Final Reckoning begins, The Entity is already deep into what seems to be Phase One of the operation, using its power to blur reality and sew division across the globe,even inspiring a doomsday cult along the way. It’s a bold storytelling move that takes the series deeper into science fiction territory than it’s ever been. But boldness isn’t always successful.

Put simply, The Entity is boring, a dreary addition to M:I’s otherwise colorful rogues gallery. (Gabriel at least gives Hunt a human foil, but Morales isn’t given much to do but sneer for much of the film.) The Entity also requires a lot of explanation—or at least Dead Reckoning thinks it does. Much of the film’s opening act is taken up by laying out what the Entity wants and how it works, with some recapping of the previous film thrown in for good measure. The past weighs heavily on the film in other ways, too, as events from previous M:I films come to play a role in the plot, with mixed results (though the return of a seemingly throwaway character from the first Mission: Impossible pays off nicely).

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Much of that might be expected of the eighth film in any series trying to do right by its legacy and expanding cast of characters, particularly one that’s been packaged as Cruise’s farewell to one of his most famous roles (though he’s hedged on that). Less predictable: the overwhelming sense of gloomy solemnity that tamps down any moment that threatens to make the film fun. The stakes have never been higher, we're reminded again and again and again. (And, in case you ever forget, a portion of the film takes place in an underground command center with a countdown clock.)

But what really makes Dead Reckoning disappointing relative to the high standards of the series is its stinginess in parceling out the action set pieces that have been the M:I trademark from the moment Brian De Palma blew up a Prague aquarium nearly thirty years ago. When they do arrive, however, they’re predictably strong, particularly a biplane chase that’s among the series’ best moments. Getting there, however, requires a lot more patience than usual. —Keith Phipps

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning arrives in theaters tonight.

Lilo & Stitch
Dir. Dean Fleischer Camp
108 min.

Released in the summer of 2002, before the wave of computer animation had crested at Disney and other major studios, Lilo & Stitch deployed painted watercolor backdrops of a kind that hadn’t been used since the earliest days of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, and Dumbo. Though the film is generally seen, with appropriate affection, as a modest 2D comedy with a little anarchy and a lot of heart, it cannot be overstated how much its visual texture, starting with those warm pastels, sets the right tone. Set on Kaua’i, the smallest and least populated of Hawaii’s four main islands, Lilo & Stitch succeeds first at capturing the lush, laid-back quality of its tropical locale and the quirky communities that inhabit it. In an environment like that, not only does the destruction brought by the universe’s most adorable chaos agent really pop, but the family-first message seems wholly rooted in the setting.

There’s rarely any good reason to do a live-action remake of an animated feature, other than the cold calculation of studio beancounters squeezing every last dollar from their IP. Yet Lilo & Stitch is about as bad a candidate for live-action as any film in the Disney catalog, because so much of what makes the original charming is completely obliterated by the process. Without those painted backdrops and minor-key island vibes, the comedy turns grating and loud, and Oahu (subbing in for Kaua’i) looks generic and artificial, despite the photorealism of shooting on location. Given the largely slavish adaptation of the plotting and major setpieces, there’s nothing new to appreciate here other than how the same basic material can result in films on opposite ends of the quality spectrum. The technical wizardry involved in turning a beloved animated gem into a grating piece of shit is like some demented magic trick that audiences are seemingly craving.

The one place the CGI actually belongs in the film is outer space, where a galactic council has determined that Experiment 626, a tiny blue six-limbed alien forged in a genetic lab, is too destructive a force for the universe to tolerate. So 626 is jettisoned to the faraway planet of Earth, where its capsule crash-lands on Hawaii rather than in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, which the creature could not survive. Meanwhile, six-year-old orphan Lilo (Maia Kealoha) lives with her older sister Nani (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong), who has struggled so mightily to take care of Lilo after their parents’ death that a social service worker (Tia Carrere) is threatening to put the kid in foster care. When Lilo spots the rambunctious alien, who she names “Stitch,” at a local animal shelter, she brings him home as a pet and he immediately makes Nani’s case for permanent guardianship that much harder.

There’s a lot of other comic business here, too, mainly coming from a team-up between Zach Galifianakis as Stitch’s deranged inventor and Billy Magnussen as an agent tasked with tracking the alien down and keeping Earth’s natures from ever finding out about it. Of the two, Magnussen fares better, because he commits himself to the physical lurching of a one-eyed alien trying to operate inside the gangly body of his human clone. But much of the film is devoted to the problem-solving exercise of translating animated sequences into a live-action/CGI hybrid, so now when Stitch is smashing a sandcastle like Godzilla, it looks like a three-dimensional being leveling real sand.

How is that better? Who keeps wanting this? These are the sorts of questions that need to be asked in order to blow up the animation-to-live-action pipeline. Lilo & Stitch is bad enough to make those questions louder. — Scott Tobias

Lilo & Stitch opens in theaters everywhere today. And all of those theaters have sticky floors and bedbugs.