Mission: Impossible Teased a Whole New Origin Story for Ethan Hunt … and Then Failed to Deliver It

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Warning: This article contains some spoilers for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. It probably would have included more if the movie didn’t completely abandon the storyline we’re about to discuss!

Despite its nearly three-hour runtime, director/co-writer Christopher McQuarrie‘s Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning unfortunately doesn’t leave itself enough room to sufficiently address some important aspects of the franchise, especially if it really is the last film in Tom Cruise’s signature series. Between the large assortment of new characters introduced by the eighth entry and its immediate predecessor, Dead Reckoning, as well as the returns of several characters who had been absent from the series for lengthy periods, some of the more regular members of the supporting cast have been underserved by the two-part epic, with The Final Reckoning in particular being light on beloved technology expert Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg). But even more glaring is the new film’s almost complete abandonment of a major storyline that McQuarrie had just introduced in Dead Reckoning.

‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’ Doesn’t Resolve the Last Movie’s Big Mystery

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Two years ago, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning introduced a more elaborate backstory for Cruise’s Ethan Hunt than he’d had in previous entries, with it being revealed that he and many of his colleagues, including Benji and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), initially chose to join the secretive Impossible Mission Force rather than go to prison for unspecified crimes. Ethan’s clouded criminal history also somehow connected to a long-lasting grudge between him and Gabriel (Esai Morales), a mercenary who in the present works as the lead operative for the Entity, the malicious artificial intelligence that is the main antagonist of both the seventh and eighth films. A few brief, silent flashback sequences repeatedly shown throughout Dead Reckoning also suggest that Gabriel killed a woman named Marie (Mariela Garriga) who Ethan was close to, although Ethan himself also clearly feels guilt about her death. While attempting to turn skilled thief Grace (Hayley Atwell) against Ethan, Gabriel alludes to Ethan’s supposed culpability in what happened to Marie, but when Grace asks why she should trust him, Gabriel admits that she shouldn’t.

Although Gabriel again serves as the primary human villain in The Final Reckoning and flashbacks featuring the younger versions of him, Ethan, and Marie are some of the many bits of archival footage used throughout the film, neither the exact nature of their relationship nor the full details of Marie’s death are revealed. This is especially odd and distracting because the film also goes out of its way to add a few additional details to the story, without clarifying exactly what they mean. Most notably, when Jasper Briggs (Shea Whigham) is taking Ethan into custody for the U.S. government, he notes that Ethan was specifically being charged with murder before being given the choice to join the IMF. The idea of Ethan being a killer — even an accidental one — before becoming a spy could have added a layer of moral ambiguity to the character. However, for this to be the case, The Final Reckoning needed to provide more concrete details about Ethan’s arrest and Marie’s death, if they are indeed directly related. For all we know, Ethan could have been innocent and set up for the crime.

Even more problematic, the lack of answers about why he hates Ethan makes Gabriel an even less compelling and more one-dimensional villain than he was in Dead Reckoning. To his credit, Morales seems to realize this, and, especially in his final scenes, plays up the character’s petty and arrogant qualities to such an extent that they become somewhat comical. Unfortunately, this still doesn’t make up for the fact that he simply isn’t formidable enough to pose a believable threat to Ethan and the other long-time team members, given the challenges and opponents they’ve conquered in the past.

Ethan Hunt Didn’t Need Another Origin Story

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The inclusion of Gabriel and the additional backstory for Ethan were two aspects of Dead Reckoning that proved divisive with long-time fans of the series despite the film receiving generally positive reviews from critics overall. The betrayal and subsequent deaths of Ethan’s original IMF team from the first film had always been a perfectly fitting beginning to his story, as these events clearly continued to influence his emotions and actions throughout the sequels. Going back to before this point to give him elaborate reasons for joining the IMF was unnecessary, as was creating a new, supposedly long-term arch foe, when the fifth and sixth films had just featured a more convincing nemesis in Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), whose rivalry with Ethan viewers saw develop in real-time. However, just because McQuarrie and Cruise seemed to realize these truths after Dead Reckoning’s release doesn’t mean that abandoning much of the storyline was the right decision, as doing so now makes the two-part story feel tragically incomplete.