Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, the eighth and (likely) final entry in the storied Tom Cruise-anchored action-thriller franchise that has improbably stretched across nearly three decades, opens with a lot of exposition. A lot. There is a rush to get down to business, which is perhaps why the opening Paramount logo feels sped up, as if those swirling stars couldn’t wait to get into place. Director Christopher McQuarrie, who helmed the previous three entries, co-wrote The Final Reckoning with Erik Jendresen; it was intended to be the second half of a two-part grand finale, following 2023’s Dead Reckoning: Part One, but the subsequent title change and dropping of Part Two suggests it is now meant to stand largely on its own.

The story commences with returning hero, IMF special agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise), listening to a recorded message from the President of the United States (Angela Bassett) pleading with him to turn himself in after he went rogue in a desperate bid to stop a word-ravaging artificial intelligence system ominously known as the Entity from destroying humanity. As part of this message, the President helpfully recounts all that Ethan has done over past 30 years, which offers amply opportunity for the film to play what is essentially a greatest hits cut reel of every exciting moment from the previous seven Mission: Impossible films. It acts as both a primer for what is to come and a reminder of what it has to live up to.

And there is a lot for it to live up to, which is perhaps why The Final Reckoning has been criticized for being “bloated.” I would tend to agree, given the fact that it clocks in at 169 minutes, making it the longest film in the series (Dead Reckoning formerly held that title at 163 minutes). But, despite its epic length, it still plays in the same fast, lean manner as the previous films. It is not in any way the kind of sluggish, lumbering production one would assume when hearing something described as bloated, and I can’t think of a moment that felt overlong or unnecessary. I am sure it could have been trimmed down here and there, but McQuarrie and Cruise clearly wanted to leave it all on the table in their final outing, and I can’t fault them for their efforts or their ambitions, especially when it comes to retconning elements of the earlier movies that were clearly never intended to have a life after the closing credits (major props given to McQuarrie and Jendresen for unexpectedly bringing back a peripheral character from the very first film and making him a major player here in a way that feels organic and not just a sop to long-time fans of the series).

The narrative transpires over three days, during which time Hunt is tasked with retrieving from a sunken Russian submarine the original source code for the Entity, which he can then use in combination with a special program—a “poison pill”—designed by his long-time hacker associate and friend Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) to kill it. This sounds all well and good, except for the fact that, by this point, the Entity has so infiltrated cyberspace and the world’s computer systems that killing it would effectively kill cyberspace itself, which would throw the world into economic and political turmoil. Of course, the Entity is busy taking over the world’s nuclear arsenals, which is but one of many ticking clocks Hunt and his team must beat. Hunt is once again working with Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), his determined and loyal all-around tech expert who has been around since Mission: Impossible III (2006), as well as Grace (Hayley Atwell), the British pickpocket who was his nemesis and partner in the previous entry. Speaking of nemeses, the vicious assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff) is brought into the fold, mainly because she is intent on getting vengeance on Gabriel (Esai Morales), the globe-trotting villain who unleashed the Entity and now wants to find a way to control it at all costs. Hunt is still battling his own government, particularly Agents Kittridge (Henry Czerny) and Briggs (Shea Whigham), who still distrust him despite all he has done.

As with the previous films, The Final Reckoning is structured largely around a series of impossible missions, each of which manages to seem more impossible than the previous. The two standout sequences are also object lessons in the power of cross-cutting, as each one features at least two, if not three, clock-beating actions unfolding at the same time, each one reliant on the other to work. One of the best involves Hunt inside the unstable Russian submarine 500 feet beneath the frozen surface of the Arctic trying to retrieve the Entity’s source code while the rest of his team battles Russian soldiers in an isolated house on a remote island in order to rescue him once he makes it to the surface. The other stand-out sequence is the most widely promoted: Hunt trying to get a crucial piece of technology from Gabriel while they are both flying above Africa in old-fashioned propeller-driven biplanes. It is the biggest of the film’s IMAX-ready, Cruise-did-this-crazy-thing-for-real scenarios, and the more you know about how it was done, the more impressive it feels in retrospect. In the immediate moment, it works as pure adrenaline-driven action cinema, the realities of physical weight and gravity and the laws of physics lending it an enveloping sense of immersion that has become the hallmark of the Mission: Impossible series. You can’t write off as a gimmick something that works this well and requires so much investment to pull off.

If there is a weakness in the film, it is that too much weight is put on the idea of Ethan Hunt being the only person in the world who can take on the responsibility of saving it from the Entity. Granted, the towering stature of unique heroes in Western culture is long and deep, but there are just a few too many statements by various characters attesting to Hunt’s singularity as a savior—not just in terms of strength and intelligence and cleverness, but also nobility and honesty. Hunt is, of course, all of those things, which is part of what has made him such a compelling hero for so many years, but it also tends to take away from the importance of the other members of the IMF team, who each have vital roles to play in saving the day. McQuarrie might have been better off trusting the audience to implicitly understand Hunt’s uniqueness, rather than underlining it at every turn. As with all the action in The Final Reckoning, Hunt’s speak for themselves.

Copyright © 2025 James Kendrick

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