Writer’s note: The second paragraph of this article (just below the first image) contains a basic outline of the film’s premise. There are no spoilers that weren’t already inferred in the film’s own trailer. However, if you want to completely avoid potential spoilers, skip over the second paragraph.
Whenever audiences have enjoyed their time at the cinema, you often hear them say “they don’t make them like that anymore”. People have been making this statement for almost as long as there have been movies. Despite this, most films are just made in exactly the same way as every other, making the statement completely meaningless. However, when it comes to Tom Cruise films, it’s true. Movies used to be vehicles for the moviestar, yet Tom Cruise is the only moviestar for which this is still the case. Movies used to deliver death defying action set pieces and stunt work without the aid of green screen, yet Tom Cruise is the only remaining actor willing to put his life on the line. Tom Cruise is the American Jackie Chan and the modern day Buster Keaton rolled into one, and he’s made it his mission to keep old fashioned, thrilling and practical filmmaking alive. Ironic then, that his cinematic counterpart Ethan Hunt is fighting to keep the world safe from a deadly A.I. in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025).
Set two months after Mission : Impossible – Dead Reckoning (2023), IMF agent Ethan Hunt still has the mysterious key designed to open the source code of the deadly A.I., known as the Entity. In the time since his confrontation with the terrorist Gabriel (Esai Morales), Ethan has refused to deliver the key to his superiors, fearing that the government’s intentions for the Entity to be as impure as Gabriel’s, or every other government for that matter. Ethan believes that the Entity must be destroyed, and that no one should be allowed to wield its awesome power. Power which the Entity itself is using to wreak havoc across the world. The A.I. intends to wipe out all of humanity, by creating intense division through uncontrolled misinformation, and by causing political tension between nuclear armed countries. Before long, the Entity will take control of the entire world’s nuclear arsenal. To stop an all out war from consuming the entire planet, Ethan must re-team with Benji (Simon Pegg), Luther (Ving Rhames) and Grace (Hayley Atwell) in order to find the Entity’s source code and retrieve it before all hope is lost. The location: a destroyed Russian Submarine at the bottom of the ocean floor.
As soon as Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning ended on its exciting cliffhanger, we all braced ourselves for what fresh hell Cruise and his team would cook up to conclude this saga. From climbing the Burj Khalifa, to hanging off the side of a plane, to breaking his own ankle leaping from a building, Cruise has never failed to deliver groundbreaking and unrivalled stunt work. His insistence to maintain in-camera action is not only fun to watch, but it enhances the storytelling, character development and thematics of the Mission: Impossible films. If it seems as though the heroes on screen are in real danger when saving the world, we are more likely to care about them, and by extension, puts us further towards the edge of our seats. This has been the secret sauce of the Mission: Impossible films ever since Ghost Protocol (2011), and it continues to ring true in The Final Reckoning.
With this entry, we are given two of the most tense action set pieces the series has ever delivered, both of which completely live up to the grandeur and scope needed for a concluding spectacle. This extends to the film’s tone, which is far more bleak than Mission: Impossible films have generally been. This works in its favour, as it truly does feel like the world will end if Ethan and his team fail. We constantly see films where the world is at stake, but how often do those films actually make you feel like everything is on the line? Very rarely. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning completely succeeds in conveying the sheer terror of impending doom on a global scale. If this does indeed end up being the final film in the series (at least as far as Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is concerned), then we can happily say it’s ended on a high note.
That being said, this doesn’t preclude The Final Reckoning from having its fair share of problems. For every staggeringly high achievement, there is a disappointingly low blunder. For one, the film’s epic scope results in an almost unjustifiably long runtime. “Almost”, because the 170 minute length is needed to appropriately convey all of the story’s doomsday circumstances. However, it’s not a clean 170 minutes, as the pacing is simultaneously too fast, and too slow. There is an abundance of important information to digest, but a miscalculation on when to gloss over details, and when to flesh them out. Additionally, the dizzying length is inflated by near constant flashbacks, to scenes from earlier films as well as this very film. It’s almost as though Cruise, Director/Writer Christopher McQuarrie, and the editing team, all know there’s too much information, and think the viewers need extra help to keep it all together.
Again, this is both a negative, and a positive, as the flashbacks to previous moments does help The Final Reckoning feel like an epic conclusion that the entire series has built towards. Granted, we know that there hasn’t been a grand design since the original film, given that the films only started investing effort into the character arcs from the fifth film onward. Regardless, it is enjoyable to see how organically this series has developed an arc, and The Final Reckoning makes use of whatever leftover story threads it can find. If we didn’t know any better, we’d have to assume that Cruise and his team have had both hands on the wheel since 1996. This isn’t an easy feat to pull off, but Cruise and company are so confident with their storytelling despite making it up as they go. A lesser team wouldn’t be able to get away with this, but Cruise and McQuarrie are experienced enough to make (some) sense out of this mess.
If there’s anything that is an outright drawback with no silver lining, it’s the absence of Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust. Ever since her introduction in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015), Ilsa has been the highest light of the entire series, as she is its most interesting, well performed and compelling character. Her death in the previous film was a major shock, and we can now see that it was potentially the wrong decision. The Final Reckoning‘s team of heroes feels incomplete without her, and the fact that her death isn’t acknowledged or lingered upon by the surviving players seems like a missed opportunity. This isn’t to take away from any of the characters who make it to the end of The Final Reckoning, it’s just to say that Ilsa deserved greater recognition for her contribution to the series.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning does indeed further Cruise’s desire to preserve traditional thrills of traditional big budget spectacle. Cruise’s intention should be clear: that the villainous Entity represents the real life threat of A.I. taking away manual creativity, in favour of soulless automation. Cruise (and by extension Ethan Hunt) won’t allow that to happen, and will stop at nothing to ‘save the world’ from this threat. If Cruise feels that the best way to do that is to actually hang off the side of a plane instead of doing it in a studio, who are we to stop him?
7/10
Best way to watch it: With cliffs-notes of the previous films.
