‘Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning' Review: Tom Cruise Delivers but the Convoluted Eighth Entry Takes Its Sweet Time Getting There

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25-05-2025

Two extended stunt sequences in Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning are as bold and original as anything seen in the enduring spy franchise's almost three-decade history. That includes Tom Cruise, as covert CIA division agent Ethan Hunt, riding a motorcycle off a 4,000-foot cliff and BASE jumping the final 500 feet of a ravine, or the breathless climactic train mayhem in 2023's Dead Reckoning, the opening installment of this two-parter.
In the new film, Ethan navigates a sunken Russian submarine, his movement between flooded and unflooded compartments destabilizing the vessel and sending it barreling down a slope into the depths. Later, he chases down a villain by scrambling between two vintage biplanes flying at 10,000 feet, frequently dangling from a wing over stunning South African landscapes.
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Cruise's commitment to performing his own stunts and giving audiences the analog thrill of in-camera daredevilry instead of digital fakery has progressed to ever more astonishing feats over the course of eight Mission: Impossible movies. It's the key reason for this franchise's longevity — along with the self-destructing mission instructions, the identity-switching facemasks, the heroic sprints and the high-speed vehicular chases.
The trouble is, aside from a pre-titles sequence in which Ethan and master thief turned Impossible Mission Force recruit Grace (Hayley Atwell) are captured and threatened with torture by slick terrorist Gabriel (Esai Morales), we have to wait out roughly half the almost three-hour movie for much of the exhilarating action and fabulous locations that are the series' lifeblood. It's a relief when uber-cool assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff) — now on Ethan's team and eager to ice Gabriel, her former employer — grabs a machine gun and starts mowing down Russians in the Arctic Circle.
If Dead Reckoning risked overkill with its barrage of spectacular set-pieces — that car chase around Rome and down the Spanish Steps with Ethan and Grace in a Fiat Bambino was an all-timer — Final Reckoning spends a disproportionate amount of time trudging through recaps, reams of exposition and mind-numbing cyber-speak. There are so many round-robin conversations about the gravity of the situation, it feels like being trapped in an endless committee debriefing. At times, it borders on self-parody.
Director Christopher McQuarrie and his co-writer Erik Jendresen planted the seeds for a more brooding, rueful Ethan in Part One. I lost count of how many times we hear the IMF oath: 'We live and die in the shadows, for those we hold close, and those we never meet.' The melancholy vein runs deep as Ethan is repeatedly confronted with the wages of his rogue espionage activities in a film laced with callbacks to previous installments, stretching all the way back to Brian De Palma's still great 1996 kickoff. McQuarrie peppers snippets of the earlier films throughout, resurfacing not just moments of high-octane action but also lacerating losses.
The script works hard to mythologize Ethan as a tragic hero, who can save the world but must go forever unacknowledged, always acting 'for the greater good,' but more than once at the cost of someone he loves. Cruise plays all this with corrosive interiority alongside his characteristic physical stamina. But as compelling as his performance is, the movie feels dour and heavy for long stretches at a time. The tongue-in-cheek wit of the franchise at its best is largely absent.
Then there's the unfortunate matter of 'The Entity.' Introduced in Dead Reckoning, that sentient AI menace is capable of infiltrating the financial institutions, law enforcement and nuclear facilities of the world's most powerful nations, unleashing chaos. In the months since Ethan evaded capture in Austria at the end of the last movie, the Entity has expanded its power, building a fanatical cult, sparking global violence and inching toward the annihilation of humankind.
The U.S. — led by former CIA deputy director Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett, welcome back), who's since been elected president — wants to control and weaponize it. Ethan, convinced no one should have their hands on that much power, wants to destroy it. Even more so after he gets a Clockwork Orange-type indoctrination from the gizmo itself: 'It's the Entity's future, or no future at all.' Gabriel, who failed the Entity and is now an outcast (I'm not making this shit up), wants to use it to dominate the world: 'The Entity will answer to me. It's only a matter of time,' he declares, tacking on a hint of maniacal 'bwa-ha-ha' laughter.
If you play a drinking game pegged to every time someone gravely intones the words 'the Entity,' be warned you'll probably be hammered within the first hour. The existential threat of Artificial Intelligence, starting with its incursions into privacy and security, is all too real, as is the notion of a cyber force manipulating the truth. But renegade AI programs make incredibly boring supervillains, and the scariest part is that we're bound to see a bunch more movies about them. I'll take marauding robots over angry screensavers.
Every time someone says something idiotic like, 'The Entity, it wants you to hate me!' or 'Madam President, we're in the Entity's reality now,' Final Reckoning lurches further into self-seriousness, which doesn't sit well on a plot as maddeningly convoluted and, well, silly as this one.
A lot of risible dialogue doesn't help. Lines like, 'You're forgetting the bomb! The nuclear bomb!' delivered during a particularly hairy moment, make you wonder if the writers are winking at us. When Ethan — spoiler alert — saves the day and a high-level doubter in Sloane's administration sighs, 'He did it,' you just know 'That son of a bitch' is coming next. Did McQuarrie and Jendresen use AI to write this stuff?
Gaining control of the Entity is a multipart undertaking, the first step achieved in Dead Reckoning when Ethan took possession of the bejeweled 'cruciform' key. Or was that just a MacGuffin? The crucial next step is retrieving the source codes from a gadget called the Podkova, which was lost when the Sevastopol, a Russian submarine, vanished on its maiden voyage at the start of Dead Reckoning, thanks to some Entity treachery. It now sits below the polar ice cap in the Bering Sea. Only Ethan knows how to locate it, which is why Gabriel wants him kept alive and President Sloane puts her faith in him, against the advice of her defense and intelligence chiefs.
The Podkova needs to be activated at a precise split second to stop the Entity from launching the nuclear warheads of eight nations and claiming billions of lives. So the pressure is on. Activation also requires an additional component stolen by Gabriel from Ethan's trusty hacker sidekick Luther, played by Ving Rhames, the only actor besides Cruise who has been with the series since the start. That history is warmly acknowledged here in an affecting moment.
Ethan's bantering rapport with his close collaborators Luther and Benji (Simon Pegg) is always pleasurable, though it's limited here by how much time Ethan spends globe-hopping solo. Atwell is a welcome presence again, even if her character has lost some of the mischievous charm she had as a thief, becoming more serious and less fun since joining Ethan's IMF crew and having to learn new skills on the job, like defusing bombs.
It's good to see Ron Saxon back as William Donloe, the CIA analyst baffled by Ethan's entry into the supposedly impenetrable black vault in the first movie. Likewise Bassett (her second time playing a U.S. president this year, after Netflix's Zero Day) and Henry Czerny as Kittridge, the ex-IMF chief now heading the CIA. But all the tense meetings at Virginia Emergency Command are staffed by over-qualified actors given too little to do — Janet McTeer, Nick Offerman, Holt McCallany. Same goes for Hannah Waddingham as an aircraft carrier commander.
Tramell Tillman has an amusing wild-man energy as U.S. rescue submarine commanding officer Bledsoe ('Mister, if you wanna poke the bear, you've come to the right place!') And Bledsoe's vessel provides the setting for some frantic mano a mano, when an Entity convert tries taking out Ethan, conveniently while he's training shirtless in athletic boxer briefs. But I wish someone had explained what exactly these killer cultists expect to get out of serving the Entity.
I did get a kick out of Klementieff's Paris muttering arch nonsense like 'Who will live and who will die?' or 'It is written.' Her response — delivered in French, in a perplexed deadpan — when asked to perform emergency surgery on Benji is priceless: 'I kill people.'
But despite the expected pluses of slick visual polish, muscular camerawork by Fraser Taggart and a dynamic score by Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey, The Final Reckoning ends up being a bit on the dull side. If it's going to be the last we see of one of the most consistently entertaining franchises to come out of Hollywood in the past few decades — a subject about which Cruise and McQuarrie have remained vague — it's a disappointing farewell with a handful of high points courtesy of the indefatigable lead actor.
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