14-05-2025
Tom Cruise hunts all the Mission pieces in The Final Reckoning
"I need you to trust me one last time..."
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.
