As the potentially final film in Tom Cruise’s long run as super spy Ethan Hunt, Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning has the unenviable task of giving Ethan an appropriate send-off, just in case it IS the last time Cruise plays this character, and wrapping up the story begun in 2023’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning. That film has an unexpectedly strong thematic core for a franchise that has never been concerned with much beyond action and stunts, but unfortunately, Final Reckoning does not keep up the interesting strain of human vs. AI intelligence that Dead Reckoning introduces. Final Reckoning is much more concerned with tying up plot points from previous films, a thing literally no one asked for.
Final Reckoning falls into the same trap No Time to Die did, shoving a bunch of random plot threads together in a way meant to, I suppose, add meaning to the franchise as a whole now that we’re approaching the end. But more than any other action franchise, Mission: Impossible has never relied on plot continuity to hold together. It has always been about Ethan Hunt and his bonkers adventures in a world where people are constantly ripping their faces off to reveal other faces. Continuity has been so unimportant you can watch the films in any order, and it won’t affect your ability to understand the plot or the central character relationships (except for a late-breaking revival of Ethan’s ex-wife as the love he sacrificed for The Fate Of The World).
But Final Reckoning posits It Was All Connected and starts excavating plots from damn near 30 years ago to tie the whole franchise up in a neat bow no one needed. These movies work perfectly fine on their own, there is literally no reason to tie it all together, but Final Reckoning spends a fair chunk of its stupefying 170-minute run time telling us how it all connects. It is the single most boring part of this very long film, with one exception. There is one character from the 1996 Mission: Impossible who returns in a way that actually does add some meaningful depth to Ethan’s journey and a little thematic resilience to Final Reckoning.
There is a lot of stuff that works in Final Reckoning, don’t get me wrong. It’s a long-ass movie, there’s plenty of time for some good stuff, and there is a lot of good stuff. Pom Klementieff returns as the icy cool assassin, Paris; Hayley Atwell remains fantastic as now-former thief Grace; there is a sequence on a slowly plummeting submarine that is as breathless, tense, and ridiculous as anything in the M:I films, which is actually saying something with this franchise, given the high quality of the stunt work; Tramell Tillman shows up for about ten minutes and absolutely lights up the screen in a real “new movie star alert” kind of way. Final Reckoning isn’t as fun as Dead Reckoning—much less closeup magic, for one—but it definitely has some exciting moments.
But when it doesn’t work, it really doesn’t work. Beyond the insistence on continuity that never mattered, Final Reckoning is lacking a solid adversary. Ethan is still trying to stop “The Entity”, the all-knowing rogue AI that is wreaking havoc with the global socio-political climate, now pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. But fighting an amorphous software program is inherently stupid and uncinematic. Dead Reckoning knew this and made up for it with a fun series of increasingly complicated chase sequences as the spies lose the ability to trust their own eyes as the AI infects all their high-tech spy gadgets, forcing them to use older and older technology to survive.
Final Reckoning, once again directed by Christopher McQuarrie and co-written by McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen, deals less directly with The Entity, though, instead turning it into even more of a MacGuffin and pitting Ethan against Gabriel (Esai Morales), the bad guy introduced in Dead Reckoning, in a game of keep away in which the stakes are annihilation. Gabriel was more effective as a mystery guy pulling strings, but when forced to carry adversarial weight, the character buckles, and the film along with it. It’s a consistent problem for this franchise, the enemies are never as compelling as watching Tom Cruise/Ethan Hunt’s latest death-defying stunt.
The M:I franchise is at its best when Ethan’s adversary is his own limits, but while Final Reckoning contains multiple death-defying action sequences, it is more insistent than ever that Ethan’s human adversaries matter most. When the film is just about Ethan working to overcome impossible odds, or the spy team working together to solve the world-ending problem du jour, Final Reckoning is solidly entertaining. It’s not the best of the M:I franchise, but it’s hardly the worst. But its insistence on a continuity that never really mattered and a middling villain drags Final Reckoning down, sucking the fun out of what should be the thrilling swan song of cinema’s most insane spy.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is now playing exclusively in theaters.
Attached: More of Tom and Christopher McQuarrie in Mexico the other day.
