Cruise goes impossibly deep to decode AI

Otago Daily Times

23-05-2025

Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. Photo: Paramount Pictures and Skydance/TNS
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Cast: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Henry Czerny, Angela Bassett
Rating: (M)
★★★
REVIEWED BY AMASIO JUTEL
As the stunts get bigger and better, the framing gets duller and more convoluted. Despite its outstanding stunt spectacles, Mission: Impossible's post-Fallout two-parter continues to disappoint its characters and viewers.
Producer/star/stuntman/king of movies, Tom Cruise, helms the final franchise entry, The Final Reckoning. Ethan Hunt must diffuse a global cold war by dismantling "The Entity", a rogue all-powerful AI that has seized control of half the world's nukes.
It's a premise dripping in sweat, but the decision to reframe the cyber villain from slapstick trickster to cyberspace anti-God, driving humanity towards self-annihilation, completely detracts from the immediacy of Cruise's action.
Against the pre-eminent might of cyberspace and the entity's spiteful disinformation war, Ethan Hunt is the planet's last hope and, with a (literal) presidential seal of approval, he's bestowed a strategic military submarine to deep-sea dive to retrieve the entity's source code.
Hunt and his team slingshot across the world, chasing clues and racing against time in a diverse array of settings and set pieces — here, the classic Mission: Impossible viewer ecstasy ascends.
The screenwriting hole they dug themselves in part one, the unreasonable lack of Ving Rhames as Luther and discourteous removal of Rebecca Ferguson's Isla in the previous instalment, slightly dirty the supposed franchise apex.
However, the mind-blowing half-hour silent underwater sequence in the middle of the film corrects the overhyped CG train stunt of Dead Reckoning. Not to spoil the singular reason to see a post-Fallout Mission film, but one is left mouth agape in the theatre, questioning how Tom Cruise did not die during filming.