Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning: Shea Whigham’s Character Is a Missed Opportunity

This article contains spoilers for Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning.

“Good evening, Jim. Your mission, should you choose to accept it is…” Long before Tom Cruise became a Hollywood icon, these words would open many episodes of the television series Mission: Impossible. They were addressed to Jim Phelps, one of the show’s two main protagonists, alongside Steven Hill as Dan Briggs, who would receive his orders and gather a crack team to do the impossible.

The 1996 film began the same way, with Jim—now portrayed by Jon Voight—receiving his mission and learning about his team, a team that would all die horribly. Well, all of them except Ethan Hunt (Cruise). Beyond that handshake between the two iterations, the movie seemed to leave the television series behind. That is until the latest entry, Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, saw Jim Phelps return. Sort of.

The bizarreness of the reveal is it’s a character we’ve seen before, albeit not as Jim Phelps. We first met our new Jim in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning as intelligence agent Jasper Briggs (Shea Whigham), a dogged pursuer of Ethan Hunt. At the start of Final Reckoning, Briggs finally captures his white whale. That’s when Ethan calls him Jim. “That’s your name isn’t it? Jim Phelps Jr.?”

To put it bluntly, the Jim Phelps Jr. reveal stinks. It stinks in a way that underscores the many problems that plague The Final Reckoning and places doubt on the future of Mission: Impossible.

Jim Phelps Returns

For almost the entirety of its first 90 minutes, Final Reckoning is a drag. There are no incredible stunts but only a handful of action scenes, one of which occurs largely off-screen—with the violence of the bit communicated as a gag through sound effects and reactions shots from Hayley Atwell as Grace. In their place, director Christopher McQuarrie and his co-writer Erik Jendresen fill the space not so much with exposition about the all-powerful AI called the Entity, but with self-mythologizing.

That mythologizing is front and center during the Jim Phelps Jr. reveal. As Ethan and Briggs bicker, the movie cuts to scenes from the original 1996 movie; snippets that occur too fast for anyone who doesn’t know who Jim Phelps is, and too distracting for anyone who remembers but doesn’t really care. By this point, the movie has also already made it clear that Ethan Hunt is a godlike force of good, and the Phelps reveal only serves to make the point again, only louder. Thanks to Cruise’s megawatt charisma, we believe Ethan when he looks at the camera and pleads with a character to believe that everything will work out.

Furthermore, we accept that Ethan can do incredible things when we see him do incredible things. When he’s scaling the Burj Khalifa or hanging from a biplane, we’re mesmerized by his unstoppable will because the movies show us that will in action. But there’s nothing to show when Ethan figures out Briggs’ true identity. He simply says that Briggs is Jim’s son because Ethan knows that Briggs is Jim’s son, because Ethan is the living manifestation of destiny.

Instead of making Ethan look cooler, it makes the world around him look smaller. If Ethan knows everything, if he has powers of perception heretofore only available to the gods, then his missions aren’t really impossible. The incredible, death-defying stunts that draw us to the films get diminished because, in-world, we know that Ethan will be fine. With such preternatural knowledge, Ethan’s missions seem actually quite possible.

Impossible Legacy

Today it’s almost impossible to realize the power of the first movie’s villain reveal. That’s partially true because Jim Phelps has become a minor footnote in the annals of Mission: Impossible, buried by the legends of Ethan Hunt, Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), and Luther Stickwell (Ving Rhames). But it’s also true because no modern franchise would dare disrespect a figure as integral as Jim was to the original series.

However, the move was necessary back in the ’90s. Free from the shackles of fan expectations, Mission: Impossible could reinvent itself as a movie franchise instead of a vehicle to reward pre-existing fans for their knowledge of the original series. It gave room for the movies to be about gigantic stunts and flashy filmmaking, moving the misdirection and theater of the original series to the background.

For a moment, it seemed like Final Reckoning would do the same, just in the opposite direction. Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) died fighting Gabriel (Esai Morales) in Dead Reckoning. Luther died disarming a bomb midway through Final Reckoning. Benji gets what appears to be a mortal wound, and Ethan seems like he’s done running. Even Briggs’ partner Theo Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) has joined the new team. The stage is set for someone else to take over. Who better than the son of the man who trained Ethan?

Alas, it’s not to be. Briggs and CIA Director Kittridge (Henry Czerny) play supporting roles in the climax, but it really all comes down to Ethan and his team. And in the final moments of the film, we see Ethan and his team briefly reunite before disappearing, leaving the door open for more of their adventures. There’s no mention of Jr., no sense that he’ll continue on and redeem his father’s legacy. Instead of passing the franchise onto Jim Phelps in the same way the first film passed the franchise to him, Ethan Hunt again slams the door and keeps it all about himself.

An Overdue Reckoning

By this point, it’s hard to imagine Mission: Impossible without Tom Cruise. His star power and insane willingness to put himself in mortal danger for our entertainment has been the driving force of these movies. He truly transformed an aged television series into modern blockbuster entertainment. But no amount of hair dye and good lighting can distract from the fact that he’s getting old, five years older than Voight was when Jim Sr. was put out to pasture. If Mission: Impossible is going to continue, it can’t be just about Ethan Hunt anymore.

At 56, Shea Whigham certainly isn’t the guy to be hanging off a biplane in the next entry. But he could easily fill the team leader role that Jim Phelps played in the original film, gathering a team and orchestrating events while a new group—perhaps retaining surviving members like Benji, Grace, Paris, and Degas—does the action stuff.

If Mission: Impossible is going to survive, it has to move beyond Ethan and Tom. But if the botched Jim Phelps reveal proves anything, turning down the job is one mission Ethan Hunt can never accept.

Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning is now playing in theaters.