Tom Cruise hunts all the Mission pieces in The Final Reckoning
So Tom Cruise gravely intones as he makes another bid to own the summer box office - Barbie and Oppenheimer put paid to his efforts in 2023 - and perhaps brings the curtain down on a near-30-year franchise that got better as it went along - while he and us counted more grey hairs from the stunts alone.
Picking up where 2023's Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning - Part One (cannily, the title was changed to Final Reckoning to appeal to those who hadn't seen Part One) left off, the on-the-pulse plot sees agent-errant Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his team trying to stop "parasitic AI" The Entity as it seeks to end the world as we know it. Hunt's fewer-by-the-hour supporters champion him as "the best of men in the worst of times" while the ever-growing list of doomsayers warns that "for every life he's tried to save, he's gambled millions more". Bragging rights are the least of everyone's worries.
For anyone who tired of 'Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise in a Tom Cruise production of Tom Cruise ' a ways back, his latest offering to the movie gods won't do anything to change your mind, but for those of us still on board a train that went off a cliff at the end of the last instalment, Final Reckoning is a hoot and a muncher of a must-see.
It does, however, pack one big frustration for the first hour and a bit: there's too much talking. With Cruise's charisma feeling strangely dialled down in the early stages and the supporting cast issued with signs that read, 'Will do exposition for close-ups', Final Reckoning gets stuck in missionsplaining amid the IP stitching, unnervingly recalls those 'If John has half a bucket of water' questions from maths class, and leaves the faithful fearing that they're going to be shortchanged when it comes to global salvation.
But come the 70-minute mark longtime director Christopher McQuarrie's movie really comes into its own and rages until the close. Having done cars, bikes, and choo-choos the last time, the vehicular mayhem here involves an aircraft carrier, a submarine, and a biplane. A suspense-stacked Arctic sequence leads to a stunning underwater ordeal and then on to a franchise-best showdown where everything is literally up in the air. Once again, Cruise takes practical, in-person stunt work to new depths/heights - what a pity they're not handing out the first Stunt Oscar until 2027. The bit out on the wing? He did it nineteen times - and still wanted to go again. Bananas.
The closing scenes are beautifully done, just right in terms of sentiment and style. Does Ethan Hunt survive? As Cruise, ever the bottom-line showman, laughed to Empire, "You gotta see the movie." As for his own plans after this, well, a line from the script says it best: "He'll figure it out." Always does.
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Irish Daily Mirror
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[ 'I'm a woman in my early 30s, and I'm exhausted by dating' Opens in new window ] Despite the presence of Pascal's financier, the characters inhabiting Song's film are transparent about their financial lives: salaries, rents and debts. Evans's John shares a cluttered Brooklyn flat with roommates who steal his phone charger and leave used condoms on the floor. Love will always shrug off capitalism's attempts to colonise it. That's why love is freedom, and why it's always worth it 'Love is the only thing that can't truly be bought,' Song says. 'But capitalism keeps trying to get people to believe that only the wealthy can be in love. Like Jeff Bezos 's insane Venice wedding. The media over-represents romance as something expressed through Cartier necklaces, Birkin bags, private restaurants rented out with a string quartet playing. All reserved for the wealthy. 'It creates the illusion that love is only for people with money. But love is ancient. Just because you're wealthy doesn't mean you can have more of it. You might have better luck in dating, but that doesn't guarantee love. Love will always shrug off capitalism's attempts to colonise it. That's why love is freedom, and why it's always worth it.' Song was born in Seoul, in South Korea, into a family engaged in the arts; her father was a film-maker, and she was named after Juliet Berto's character in Jacques Rivette's knotty nouvelle-vague classic Céline and Julie Go Boating. 'I was always around film,' she says. 'But I had to meet film-making. It was only when I started making my first film that I felt, 'This is where I belong, in cinema. I'm going to do this forever.'' [ Online dating fatigue: 'Irish people are terrible on the apps' Opens in new window ] When Song was 12 she relocated with her family to Ontario, in Canada. She later moved to New York, where she met her husband, Justin Kuritzkes – screenwriter of Challengers and Queer – and made a splash with the experimental-theatre production Endlings and a 2020 adaptation of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, constructed live within the video game The Sims 4. 'What I love about theatre is that the writer is the most important person,' she says. 'The writer is the author. And I really got to enjoy being the author.' Song's transition from theatre to film with Past Lives, a story of childhood pals from Korea reuniting decades later in New York City, brought her to an international audience, including at Galway Film Fleadh , where it received its Irish premiere. [ Galway Film Fleadh 2025: The big winners at the hottest festival in memory, including Gerry Adams basking in adulatory sunshine Opens in new window ] 'I've always believed love is universal – everyone is obsessed with it,' she says. 'Past Lives isn't only about romance. It's also about friendship and connections that last decades. Those things matter. When a big, burly man in Galway cried and told me it reminded him of his sweetheart in Dublin, I felt it again. 'If you speak honestly about love, people open up. They want to share their own stories. That belief carried into Materialists. If I'm honest about relationships, dating and marriage, audiences will be honest back. We're all curious about love because it's at the core of what makes us human.' Materialists is on general release
