“Just keep telling yourself it’s only pain.”
Tom Cruise is known for running in his films, it’s a trope at this point. Unfortunately, Mission: Impossible- Final Reckoning limps the aged franchise to the finish line. This globe-trotting sequel to 2023’s Mission: Impossible- Dead Reckoning is a beautifully shot film with action ranging from exotic locations like the frigid Bering Sea, St. Matthew’s Island, and the armored depths of the hardened Doomsday Vault. It’s not that Final Reckoning is a bad movie, it’s just that, Mission: Impossible- Final Reckoning commits the cardinal sin for any adventure-action-spy caper: It’s boring. The schtick is just tired. Many “action” beats stretch on for far too long and become tedious. Clad in plot armor of preposterous proportions, there is no scenario too silly for Tom Cruise to brace, even in scenes that lift directly from the 1991 Jim Abrams farce, Hot Shots!
Mission: Impossible- Final Reckoning is a 2025 Paramount Pictures production directed by Christopher McQuarrie from a story by McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen. The film stars Tom Cruise along with Angela Bassett, Simon Pegg, Hayley Atwell, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Nick Offerman, Henry Czerny and Ving Rhames.
“You would be insane to trust me, which is why it’s exactly what you should do.”
Aided by its human pawns, including Gabriel (Morales), the parasitic AI known as “The Entity” has invaded cyberspace and is methodically penetrating the command codes of the nine nuclear powers so it can override their launch authority. It wants its antagonist, Ethan Hunt (Cruise), out of the way and initiates a devious plan.
Gabriel puts the bag on Hunt and Grace (Atwell), figuring that by torturing another woman Hunt loves, he can motivate Ethan further, but he claims to have his own agenda.
Gabriel says that instead of working FOR the Entity, he wants to control it and demands Ethan assist him by recovering a software packet from the computer cores of the sunken Russian Submarine, K55G-Sevastopol. This packet can grant him mastery over the Entity’s systems. He blames Ethan for the Entity’s very existence, claiming that the lost Rabbit’s Foot from 2006’s Mission: Impossible III wasn’t a biological weapon at all, but a chip with source code that was integral to the creation of the Entity.
Ethan and Grace escape their torturers in a truly cartoonish scene with the assistance of Benji (Pegg) and Paris (Klementieff), and they find an interface with the Entity that resembles a Steamer trunk.
Without pause, Ethan enters the interface. Using a hallucinatory lightshow, the Entity monologues to him like a bad comic book villain, detailing its plan to launch every nation’s nuclear weapons and kill off all humans in a single fell stroke. Hunt uncouples himself from the interface and sets his team in motion, trying to bring down both the Entity and its errant agent, Gabriel.
Can Ethan convince the very government he’s disowned to grant him the extraordinary means he requires to get to the bottom of the Bering Sea? Can Benji work up a new version of Luther’s anti-Entity, Magnum Opus? Can Grace swipe the flash drive once the Entity has entered and not a millisecond before? Can anyone trust Gabriel and what is Kittridge really up to? Please watch Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning to find out.
“You must be Captain Bledsoe.”
“And you must be out of your mind!”
Mission: Impossible- Final Reckoning is chock-full of action sequences that are languid, turgid, overwrought and overlong. Cruise’s capabilities were possibly believable thirty or even twenty years ago but are now far more difficult to swallow today. Really in the entire film, only one fight scene leans into Tom Cruise being a 63-year-old man. The sequence focuses only on Haley Atwell’s reactions and a bunch of Merrie Melodies-inspired sound effects as it cuts back to Cruise standing over several brutalized bad guy bodies. They keep trying, though, and Cruise IS in incredible shape. It’s just that his fight scenes just don’t strain credulity; the scenes break credulity.
This is the second half of a Mission: Impossible film full of knife-fights that doesn’t have the gore nor the more realistic hand-to-hand fight choreography of the several John Wick films. As such, some of the fights regress to West Side Story- style slapping, posing and prancing.
Final Reckoning is loaded with callbacks to the earlier movies. Unfortunately, most of them come with flashbacks to scenes from those earlier movies. This film suffers mightily from those one-to-one comparisons to its predecessors, and it has become clear to this reviewer that the film series peaked with the Ghost Protocol trilogy. Final Reckoning’s climax is a pale imitation of the last moments in 2018’s far superior MI: Fallout.
The Cavill-Cruise helicopter chase at the end of Fallout is sublime. At the end of Final Reckoning, there is an airborne duel in two unarmed WWI-era biplanes. It’s REALLY hard to get worked up after years and years and years of death-defying stunts when Cruise and Morales are poking along through the sky at eighty! miles! an hour!
This reviewer realizes he’s seen a scene JUST like the midair clash at the end of Final Reckoning, but it was in the straight-up parody, 1991’s Hot Shots! (which, as a spoof of Tom Cruise’s Top Gun, almost makes it funnier) and Mission: Impossible steals their gag.
Any intellectual underpinnings of the film that are hinted at in the first part, thoughts of AI advancement and Singularity, are regressed into the spent and overdone “kill-all humans”, wanna-be Skynet, new motivations of the villainous “Entity”. The plot is burdened by extra inexplicable “OH NOES” because somehow, defeating the Entity ALSO destroys the internet.
That’s not the only thing that makes no sense. How does the Entity expect to survive without humans? The Entity needs electricity. Someone will have to fuel the generators. Someone will have to get that fuel. Someone will have to extract it, refine it, transport it. Same with the end-of-the-world sequence. Several someones will have to spool up those nuclear missiles and fill the non-solid-fuel ones with propellant. Though this reviewer was hard-pressed to explain HOW those missiles were ready to go, this reviewer was VERY impressed with the hypothetical worldwide nuke montage that the Entity shows Ethan.
There is a somewhat controversial moment in Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film, Minority Report, also starring Cruise, where his character, Anderton, is Haloed, arrested, and placed in a jail cell where all the inmates have “all of their dreams come true” so as to prevent unrest or escapes.
Once Hunt entered the interface trunk to communicate with the Entity, every page of notes this reviewer wrote for the remainder of the film contained the words, “Is Hunt still in the box?” Everything works out so perfectly for the character, everything sequences so well, and is done within excruciatingly tight tolerances and zero margin of error. Tom Cruise is Tom Cruising about and is already talking about making more MI movies after his alleged Final Reckoning.
This reviewer feels that this one could’ve been the BEST had Hunt been humbled, been taken off the board as a hostage, and had never gotten out of the box. For a change, HE’D be inside the refrigerator. Instead, Final Reckoning stumbles and fumbles to one of the slowest, least exciting endings in the franchise.
Mission: Impossible- Final Reckoning is in theatres 05/23/2025.
Newsdesk