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MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE-THE FINAL RECKONING

2025

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie

Written by Erik Jendresen and Christopher McQuarrie

Spoilers: moderate

Mission: Impossible-The Final Reckoning (which, as the direct sequel to what was then called Mission: Impossible-Dead Reckoning, Part One, was, naturally enough, initially subtitled Dead Reckoning, Part Two, but then Dead Reckoning, Part One didn't do exceptionally well, and executive brains don't work like yours or mine*) has arrived with the implicit promise that it is, indeed, final—the capstone to a film series that began all the way back in the ancient year of 1996, as one more adaptation of a nostalgic TV show amongst several (even if De Palma made it the best), but over the intervening three decades mutated into the personal creature of its lead actor and, simultaneously, lead stuntman, Tom Cruise, and notwithstanding a legacy sequel that complicates the claim, the last and greatest bastion of this so-called Last Movie Star's stardom.  The ageless Cruise has begun, at last, to succumb to his human material: some of Final Reckoning may have been filmed after his entry into his seventh decade on Earth, and it is, anyway, the first time I've ever looked at Cruise and said—I mean this respectfully, but, again, the man's sixty-two—"actually, you are getting old."  Accordingly, he knows it's getting time for him to move away from some of the components of his latterday stardom: thrilling us with unsafe leaps out of windows, hypnotizing us with his endless sprints into danger, tantalizing us with the possibility that he might really fall off an airplane.

And the finality sought is a full-on structural component of Final Reckoning, manifesting with the solemnity of a funeral but memorializing what is, fundamentally, a goofy action film series about watching a famous and widely-disapproved-of man do increasingly stupid and risky things, so that if it actually turned out it weren't Cruise's final reckoning with impossible missions, I might actively dislike the vast stretches of the film that are devoted to meditating upon bringing its series' legacy to a close rather than Cruise either courageously resisting our planet's gravitational field or helplessly tumbling through it.  I'm a big enough fan to not hate its self-aggrandizement, although I cannot find it my heart to endorse it—hell, they already did their "crushingly solemn, self-aggrandizing" Mission: Impossible back in 2018 with Fallout, which likewise had an air of a final chapter in some regards, and I didn't actively like it then.  So even if I at least found it better-integrated there than here, with aesthetic choices better-built to support it, I had previously been quite relieved to discover that Dead Reckoning had been conceived with a much bubblier attitude in mind, despite in many respects being more dramatically consequential than Fallout had been.  (It turns out I was way off in my suspicions that Rebecca Ferguson's Ilsa Faust wasn't actually dead.)  Meanwhile, there is something not entirely agreeable about a direct sequel (even second half) for Dead Reckoning that disregards its tonal discipline and its particular flavor of overheated dialogue/monologue, and doubles back down on a self-seriousness bordering on the hectoring, and a sequel that further seems to have consciously willed itself out to seven minutes longer than a movie that was already 163 minutes long itself, apparently out of some unexamined instinct that the finale needs to be longer than its immediate series predecessor (or, indeed, any predecessor!) because the last installment is, by definition, more important than its predecessors, and as a matter of pure mathematics, it couldn't be more important if it were shorter.  This sure seems like the mentality guiding it, anyhow, even when being shorter would benefit Final Reckoning and even if it objectively doesn't even have as much story content as Dead Reckoning had, which itself sits at a 163 minutes that are justified principally by the fact that its (larger number!) of big setpieces are all pushed right to the limits of their sustainability, plus it also had to introduce a whole new female lead who may or may not have less to do here, but evidently did reach a state at the end of Dead Reckoning that rendered her as another inert plug-n-play component for a more impersonal M:I machine.

This is—and it's rather reflective of the film under discussion—all an overcomplicated and superfluous way of saying what everyone has already said about Final Reckoning: its first hour is slow and sucks.  This isn't entirely true—for one thing, it's an hour and several minutes—but I don't think I'd go so far as to say it sucks as much as it's just wearyingly redundant with itself.  I approve of some of what it's doing—reverent clip montages of previous M:I films moreso than excavating plot points from previous M:I films, notably a connection between M:I 3 and the Reckoning duology's inhuman antagonist—and I do continue to approve of the fact that Tom Cruise's final statement as the leading proponent of humanity in action cinema pits him against a malign artificial intelligence, such as he and director/co-writer Christopher McQuarrie presumably invented in c. 2020 as a metaphor, and which now is not.  And I would probably have less of a problem with the beginning's whole evocation of fatal gravity if it committed a little bit more wholeheartedly to it: I'll redact this, out of propriety, but it's probably obvious that I mean Ethan Hunt probably ought to have died, succeeding in his mission between when he fell without a chute and when he hit the ground (God, imagine that secondary chute shot if it panned up to reveal Ethan placidly at rest?); and I was earnestly annoyed by how Simon Pegg's veteran hacker sidekick, Benji Dunn, did die, on screen, but then he actually didn't, much like how Pom Klemntieff's new lancer sidekick, Paris, basically died on screen in the last movie but apparently actually didn't because she's in this one, leading me to wonder if I'm the idiot, of if McQuarrie is just bad at this one specific storytelling challenge; well, whatever the case, there's something unseemly about a "final" reckoning that's spent so much effort, even counterproductive effort, in assuring you that its name means something, that still closes with a last set of shots that portend yet another M:I adventure, if we choose to accept it.  But, to be fair, we didn't accept it—so there probably won't be a ninth Mission: Impossible, at least not in the near future—and in a real sense, we didn't have the ability to accept it, not the way Cruise would have needed us to; for somehow this movie, that's sort of only half of a movie even at three hours, cost so damnably much that it needed to have made around a billion dollars to just break even.  And I sort of find that counterintuitively charming in this one, idiosyncratic case, even making its self-insistence more palatable, because if we attribute any rationality to Cruise and McQuarrie, then they did know they were making a money-losing vanity project and fan tribute, and did it anyway.

But surely Final Reckoning has enough preface, so getting down to somewhat-brasser tacks, what that first hour is doing plotwise is, basically, reminding you what Dead Reckoning's stakes were, then re-reminding you, and then re-forwarding CIA boss Kittridge (Henry Czerny) and his featured stooges (Shea Whigham** and Greg Tarzan Davis) in a meandering subplot that does eventually intertwine in a consequential way, and another, even more meandering subplot with the U.S. president (Angela Bassett; o tempora) that initially just feels like it's not even a "subplot," but simply a way to re-introduce Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and satirize the frankly-ridiculous number of times he's gone rogue, then to re-sanction him with an imprimatur second only to God's.  It's more than that, and it eats up so much time, occupied by people standing in a room and arguing about anti-AI strategy in a Fail-Safe vein, sketching out characters who don't need to be characters in a movie where the montages of ICBMs and evilly-unfurled flags are already doing all the lifting of re-re-emphasizing the "Entity's" ultimate goal of hacking the nukes and killing all humans.  (The theme is "trusting in hope," and it's not necessarily "bad" so much as it feels like an unnecessary and even underconceived sideshow, as it also does that common thing of not understanding nuclear war, so that, for instance, it is never suggested that China having lost control of all their nuclear forces to a genocidal machine-mind might actually want the United States to destroy its weapons in a counterforce strike, especially if it's the United States that eats the real, countervalue consequences.  I am overthinking this to an insane degree, but one of the key negatives of shunting the story off into so many non-action, non-thriller sequences is that it invites you to think about a plot that doesn't want you to do so.)

It further re-introduces Ethan and company, and you will notice how many times I have used the English prefix signifying "again" during this clunky plot summary, so now I'll try to stop, and just cut to the chase: somewhere in this first hour, Gabriel (Esai Morales), formerly the prophet of the Entity and now one of its many adversaries but still in opposition to Ethan's quest to destroy rather than control the hyper-dangerous AI (though in all respects Gabriel remains written and Morales still performs him as a religious visionary committed to the Entity's cyber-future, and I dunno, whatever), manages to steal the "poison pill" created by tech guru Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) that has the capacity to neutralize the Entity.  This snowballs into a situation where both Gabriel and the Entity extort Ethan's cooperation, with only the barest chance that he can use their now-conflicting goals to defeat them each in turn, and this sends him off to the stealth Russian SSN Sevastopol to recover the Entity's source code (arguably re-explaining what happened at the beginning of Dead Reckoning, though in this case it's more like "after four hours, explaining for the first time with any real clarity what happened at the beginning of Dead Reckoning"), while the rest of Ethan's allies—Grace (Haley Atwell), Benji (Simon Pegg), Paris (Pom Klementieff), and Theo (that's Davis, who gloms onto the IMF team when they rescue former enemy Paris)—are sent off to retrieve from a sonar station the actual location of the Sevastopol's wreck, which Ethan doesn't know, hence prompting a great number of scene-stealing looks of dubious incredulity from U.S. submarine captain Bledsoe (Tramell Tillman) as Ethan attempts to explain his plan of action.

Now, if you somehow had the constitution to watch Dead Reckoning and Final Reckoning back-to-back, I think this first hour-and-change would be like stepping on a series of rakes, and it leaves a much smaller amount of time in which to do actual M:I action-thriller stuff than the bloat indicates, and its spy-thriller mechanics are such that you kind of just have to believe the movie isn't abusing your trust (and, in fairness, I don't think it is), and there's a lot of shoeleather in the pacing, summed up by how Ethan actually explains himself to two Navy captains, one after the other, and the bald functionality of "getting Ethan to the SSGN-726 Ohio" absolutely does not feel like it needs, like, four separate scenes (or four other featured vehicles!)—but this does flow reasonably well, and moreso as it goes along, thanks, I believe, at least as much to editor Eddie Hamilton as to McQuarrie.  And there's some nice flourishes as soon as we open, and then some nice knuckle-cracking cross-cutting as Ethan and his friends do explain his plan of action, and then a real all-timer of what-feels-like-a-jump-cut as Ethan foolhardily leaps into the dark waters of the Bering Sea with every reasonable expectation of freezing to death, but the second time he bobs out of the water, menacingly-framed rescue just appears.  But you can feel, like a shockwave through your very bones, the movie actually heaving itself into true motion, when Hamilton shows you what he's going to be doing: Ethan is about to head down into the inky abyss while the rest go to a remote Alaskan island (where "legacy" is again invoked in the form of a CIA man (Rolf Saxon) once burned by Ethan and his wife (Lucy Tulugarjuk), somewhat as a fans-only Easter egg that, with acute strangeness, expands into a fully load-bearing part of the plot), and Ethan is confronted by a knife-wielding AI-loving maniac and Grace et al are confronted with trigger-happy Russians, and, right here, Final Reckoning starts, with cross-cutting between the action in the two frames so exciting it's like a series of beautiful slaps to the face.

At the end of the day, that is still what we're doing here, after all: we're here to see the bodacious world-beating stunts accompanied by some less-bodacious but still-entertaining normal thrills, and eventually Final Reckoning delivers, albeit only two burly sequences, the first of which I just told you about (though I did not describe, for instance, the part of it that I wonder might've been the most actually-dangerous stunt in the whole movie despite its quotidian scale—Cruise flying off a fast-moving treadmill as he preps for deep diving—or the part that's one of the most creative action beats of the last couple of years—using said treadmill to rip up some dude's face).  In the middle, there's something that might rise to the level of a third "big" sequence and I'd be happy to call it that (versus, mind you, Dead Reckoning's four), the whole voyage to the bottom of the sea that Ethan undertakes, which kicks off with another pretty fucking great gesture of absolute novelty, which I do not wish to outright spoil it's so cool ("disembarking from a submarine and almost getting struck by another submarine" is quite likely the single coolest idea I'll see visualized this year—even if this part is pretty much all CGI), and then sends Ethan into the tomb of the Sevastopol and McQuarrie and photographer Fraser Taggert are treating it exactly as such, a haunted graveyard, with a great deal of physical heft to sets that are, probably, even under Cruise, still partly CGI (at least I doubt a giant torpedo prop really did hit him in the noggin), but surprisingly, indeed unnecessarily big parts of it impress upon you in the way they interact with the flickering light their physical reality.  It's more "survival thrills" than "action"—not that this is any sin—and if I were being inordinately bitchy, it can slightly feel as if they had a beginning and an end but not so many elaborations to put into its middle (maybe he needed to fight a squid); but it's a pretty damn great sequence of rising tension and increasing impossibility (aha) and, in comparison to its nearest analogue in this franchise, Rogue Nation's server heist, it's much superior watery terror.  It even gets a nice, dreamy concluding grace note (sorry for the pun), though as long as we're doing "notes" I think someone ought to have asked Ferguson (or Michelle Monaghan, even better) if she'd have done a real quick, composited-in cameo.

Then there is the finale in South Africa, which mostly follows headlong from the preceding, and this is Hamilton giving us another big-ass, tour-of-force cross-cutting sequence that would very much like to be compared to Return of the Jedi's, and of which I am of two minds about: on one hand, it splendidly communicates pressure and teamwork and, on the other, one thread of it is so much more interesting than the rest that the rest (a nuclear bomb and computers in a stultifyingly-colored cave set) can be a bit of an imposition, when that main thread is Tom Cruise jumping on a Goddamn biplane and hijacking it so he can jump onto another biplane, a feat that I hope self-evidently justifies the use of overlapping emphatic typefaces and my breathlessness about it.  It is, I think I could call it though I don't want to be pinned down, the raddest single thing in the entire franchise, and I suspect your decision about whether to go see Mission: Impossible-Final Reckoning was made years ago when Cruise told you this would be his last stunt, so reviews, in the "consumer reporting" sense, are not very useful beyond telling you whether it was awesome.  And it was, yes, very fucking awesome.  (And the villain denouement is some ecstatically surprising stuff.)

The movie has such self-inflicted problems I don't think I could call it great, and even some of those stakes that they keep repeating, as if hearing something six times when you caught it the first five makes it more epic, don't come into play.  (This movie continually refreshes the idea that to destroy the Entity is to destroy cyberspace—that our movie is, explicitly, "Tom Cruise destroys the Internet!"—and while I'm not asking for speculative fiction, I expected them to do something with this alluring idea, and not forget they brought it up entirely.)  But while I cannot fully join in with some of my fellows in praising this to the heavens, nor would I dream of casting my lot in with those declaring it a failure.  It's imperfect, and a noticeable qualitative drop, which is harder to bear when it's also the last, but damned if it's not satisfying where, and when, it counts.

Score: 7/10

*Or perhaps it simply took somebody that long to at last persuade everyone that Mission: Impossible-Dead Reckoning, Part One was always a comically horrible name.

**And speaking of "this treats with the legacy of the M:I franchise in perhaps annoying ways," Whigham is apparently playing the son of the 1996 film's traitorous villain, something I guess I missed, and I'm kind of happy I did although it makes the Meaningful Denouement between him and Hunt slightly more emotionally comprehensible.