Mission: Impossible–The Final Reckoning

Rated PG-13 • Theaters

Mission: Impossible, with its blending of the espionage and heist genres, has been delighting audiences ever since the first film gave us the iconic image of Tom Cruise suspended mere inches above a glowing floor. The second and third installments were of uneven quality, but the franchise hit its stride with the fourth, fifth, and sixth films. The seventh film, Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), ended on a cliffhanger with super spy Ethan Hunt only completing the first step of his mission to destroy a dangerous artificial intelligence. The Final Reckoning completes that story, while serving as a capstone for the entire franchise.

Since the last movie, the rogue AI, known as the Entity, has become increasingly powerful. It’s corrupted all digital information, and humanity has lost confidence in the notion of truth. Angry crowds protest in the streets, and misinformation has exacerbated political tensions. The situation becomes more dire when the Entity takes control of various countries’ nuclear arsenals.

With Armageddon just days away, Ethan and teammates Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) enact a desperate plan. Luther creates an algorithm to disable the AI, and Ethan and Benji must track down the Entity’s source code so they can upload the “poison pill.” Their quest leads to a Russian submarine lost at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. Benji, aided by a thief (Hayley Atwell) and an assassin (Pom Klementieff), must track down the sub’s coordinates, while Ethan gets help from the American military.

The M:I films follow a pattern. Ethan gets in trouble with bad guys, he steals something for the bad guys, and then he gives the bad guys what they want as part of a complex plan for stopping them. They also include incredible stunt work and multiple scenes of Ethan sprinting. The Final Reckoning possesses all these elements, but its overall approach to storytelling is different.

Previous installments were discrete films, each a self-contained mission. Watching the films in order allowed viewers to understand the evolution of Ethan’s team, but prior knowledge wasn’t necessary for enjoying the story.

Dead Reckoning, being just the first half of a two-part story, naturally changed this approach, and Cruise’s longtime creative partner, writer/director Christopher McQuarrie, doubles down on the interconnectedness of the M:I universe with this new film. He doesn’t merely finish the story he started in 2023. He creates a complicated narrative that encompasses plot points and characters from the entire franchise. This interconnectedness turns The Final Reckoning into a tribute to M:I’s 30-year history (the film even offers a nod to Cruise’s Top Gun movies).

This tribute contains some nice moments, but it fails as an M:I movie. The heist element is completely absent, and the plot doesn’t have the stunning twist in which Ethan rips off a lifelike mask proving that he was one step ahead of both the bad guys and the audience. Ethan’s no longer a super spy; he’s become a cookie-cutter action hero.

I appreciate Cruise and McQuarrie’s dedication to using practical effects rather than computer-generated imagery, but in their desire to craft insanely difficult stunt work, they let the action sequences eclipse the script’s human element. Underwater sequences might be technically difficult to film, but technical difficulty doesn’t make a scene interesting. And we’ve seen Cruise hang from the side of a plane before.

The Final Reckoning is a bloated adventure with too many plotlines and characters, but despite its nearly three-hour runtime, it feels incomplete. Toward the beginning, the narrative is choppy and hard to follow, as if scenes were cut because the film was overly long. Most disappointingly, the mysterious relationship between Ethan and his shadowy nemesis Gabriel (Esai Morales) doesn’t get a proper resolution.

Given its name and the desire to pay homage to M:I’s 30-year legacy, you might think this movie is the end of the road for Ethan Hunt and the Impossible Mission Force, but McQuarrie hasn’t ruled out another installment. I, for one, would welcome M:I 9, but I hope future sequels would recapture the franchise’s distinctive spirit.