No Cruising here: It’s perpetual overdrive

Les Moonves, a very wise (and sometimes foolish) man, once told me, “There’s no such thing as trying too hard.”
He was wrong, of course. (Wise people sometimes are.) And the latest proof is “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” (shown here).
Granted, there are many good things about the film. Its action scenes are sensational; a marathon biplane chase through canyon country is about as good visually as a movie can be. Tom Cruise is intense (as usual) and perfect; his cast is full of top people in small roles. (We only see Oscar-winner Angela Bassett briefly. She does, however, save the world.)
The script, by director Christopher McQuarry and Erik Jendresen is smart … to an excess. There’s a lot of excess here.
It’s the classic case of trying too hard, adding layer upon layer until it becomes one mass. You can’t have mountains without some valleys; you shouldn’t have epic choruses without intervening verses.
In a way, the emperor might have made sense when he told Mozart there were too many notes. Sometimes, there are.
The film has dizzying obsession with quick flashbacks, as if we’re still watching a trailer. It also overuses the notion of simultaneous conversations in two different places.
Within the first half-hour, Ethan Hunt (that’s Cruise) has been captured three times. And there’s still another two hours and 19 minutes left.
His colleagues are also captured from time to time. That gets repetitious — somehow, James Bond is only captured once per movie — and strains credibility when everyone keeps getting free.
Alongside of that is a thick plot. I, a reasonably alert and aware human, understood about 13 percent of it, but it had something to do with the world coming to an end unless Ethan did something.
And then, just as it might be winding down, it got to the biplane marathon.
No, I don’t believe that someone can climb aboard a careening plane that’s trying to ditch him. Then again, I’m not sure how this high-tech story ended up in a couple of brightly colored World War I planes.
Then why did I still enjoy (moderately) the film?
Partly because the action was so well-done. The biplane scenes in particular are amazing.
And partly because the 13-percent I understood was interesting.
And especially because the cast is so good. No one does intensity better than Cruise and he’s brought back many of his previous “M:I” co-stars, including Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Henryt Czerny, Bassett and the always-excellent Hayley Atwell.
Added on are lots of other top people. In the president’s command center, Bassett is surounded by Nick Offerman, Janet McTeer and Holt McCallany.
Then there’s Hannah Waddington as a ship commander and Esai Morales as (breaking all Hollywood rules) a villain even more handsome than the hero. There’s Pam Klementeff as a memorable (if terse-tongued) killer and Lucy Tulugarjuk as maybe the best Inuit character in movie history.
There are a lot of good things in “Final Reckoning” … and then a lot more things. Which sort of brings us back to Moonves, who was (until sexual accusations ousted him) the head of CBS.
Moonves took pride in helping cast reality shows. One summer, there were complaints that a “Big Brother” contestant was too overwrought, even brandishing a knife.
Reality producers often try to cast colorful or controversial people. Is it possible, I asked Moonves, that this time they’d tried too hard? No, he said, you can never try too hard.
But you can. Your mountains lack a valley, your chorus lacks a verse, your hero ends up dangling from the bottom of a careening biplane.