Join Me in Prayer for Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning

+ can we move past John Wick already?

First, I think enough time has passed that I can share I wrote ~anonymously~ for Delia Cai’s recent Hate Reads series! I think you can probably guess which one was mine.

“It’s like if Mr. Robot was John Wick,” is how I found myself explaining The Amateur. I had been dying to see The Amateur, Oscar winner Rami Malek’s recent attempt to remind us that he is a silver screen leading man, since I saw the trailer where he explodes an infinity pool. It’s a simple premise: Malek plays Charles Heller, a supersmart CIA decoder who vows revenge after his wife is killed in a terrorist attack.

It’s not Elliot Anderson because he’s wearing a black blazer, not a black hoodie

Also in theaters is The Accountant 2, the sequel to the surprise 2016 hit. The series features Ben Affleck as Christian Wolff, an accountant who cleans up the financial records for various criminal organizations. Like Heller, he is a genius whose intelligence has made him functionally a superhero. Also like Heller, he is absolutely a terrorist whose ethics go unchallenged by the movie. While Heller at least struggles with his newfound heeldom, Wolff’s seeming amorality is portrayed as a characteristic of his autism. I will leave it to the reader to decide whether this premise is stupider than it is offensive.

I recently watched The Accountant on an airplane, and like with most movies I’ve watched on planes, I loved it even as I missed entire chunks of dialogue to stare at the screen showing Emma. (2020) four rows down. But the first Accountant movie isn’t just an action movie. It’s an action romance.

Affleck has been a bankable, if complex, romantic lead since the early days of his Hollywood career, and The Accountant leans into his black sheep charisma. The Accountant is mostly silly, bogged down in ham-handed flashbacks of a young Christian’s meltdowns, tedious monologues from Farmers Insurance’s own J.K. Simmons, and a typically bad Jon Bernthal performance. But there’s one bright light: Christian’s connection with regular, non-terrorist accountant Dana (Anna Kendrick) whose whistle-blowing has made her a target. Dana is an aggressively Kendrick character, the kind of 2010s heroine that got the word “adorkable” in the dictionary. Their relationship aligns entirely with romance novel tropes: he is tall, taciturn, and strong while she is essentially a cartoon chipmunk.

Basically Bridget Jones

But Hollywood has leaned away from romance since The Accountant, and perhaps that’s why Dana did not return. In the nine years between The Accountant and The Accountant 2, we’ve standardized a formula for new action movies: the John Wick model. Though there are only (currently) four movies, a television show, and a comic books series officially in the universe of the 2014 hit, there are several “Wicklings” every year that plug a Hollywood archetype into the Wick formula, targeting a different stanbase and market segment. The girls got Atomic Blonde (2017), the olds got Nobody (2021). Lowbrow idiots got Extraction (2020), while highbrow idiots got Pig (2021).

Do we prefer “Wick-Offs”?

John Wick obviously isn’t the first action-revenge movie but it did set an easily imitated mold defined by three elements: violent, splashy martial arts inspired by Asian action cinema, including The Raid (2011) and Hong Kong gun fun; an ascetic lone wolf protagonist whose godlike physical abilities are attributed not to magic or machine but to an intense, single-minded focus; and a revenge and redemption plot. Though The Amateur prefers explosives to guns or hand-to-hand combat, and The Accountant series has a second lead, the triads are otherwise observed.

Which brings me to the other action movie coming to theaters this month. Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. The film’s predecessor, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One wasn’t a financial failure but it was a box office disappointment. In its wake, Final Reckoning has made some clear marketing recalculations. The title has been simplified while the poster highlights the film’s uniquely jaw-dropping practical stunts and gives Tom Cruise even larger billing.

Maverick, is that you?

Neither The Accountant 2 nor The Amateur took big swings. Neither was a hit. What does this mean for Mission: Impossible? Maybe nothing. It’s a franchise that has historically favored a director’s individual style over excessive trend-chasing: Brian DePalma’s pulsing paranoia, Brad Bird’s animated zeal, J.J. Abram’s sloppy cluelessness. Perhaps this tendency will benefit the franchise’s longevity — fitting as Cruise has said he wants to play Ethan Hunt into his eighties, the closest he’s come to outright threatening to die on camera.

Don’t let the recent success of the much-buzzed Sinners fool you: franchises and IP aren’t going anywhere. The major studios are still trusting that big-budget blockbusters will lure price-adverse and AI-desensitized audiences to the theaters. But is Cruise’s willingness to take his life into his mortal hands enough to convince an audience — an audience that didn’t show up last time — that now is the time to embrace the red, white, and blue Americana of Mission: Impossible? Are action audiences ready to move past the dominance of the John Wick model? We’ll find out next week. I’ll see you at the box office.