Tom Cruise in a scene from Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.Paramount Pictures and Skydance/The Associated Press
- Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
- Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
- Written by Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen
- Starring Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg and Hayley Atwell
- Classification PG; 170 minutes
- Opens in theatres May 23
Midway through the very long, very exhausting, very everything extravaganza Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the President of the United States (played by Angela Bassett, last seen in the series as the head of the CIA) sends along a short note to Rear Admiral Neely (Hannah Waddingham), who is commanding an aircraft carrier in the Pacific Ocean. The message is designed to convince the naval chief to let Tom Cruise‘s superspy Ethan Hunt assume total control of her multi-billion-dollar warship. For the purposes of the M:I franchise, though, it is not the intent of the note that is important but rather its contents: a single date, May 22, 1996, scrawled in black ink.
We never find out exactly what significance that date has for either the President or Neely, as characters. But its magnitude in terms of the M:I series – and, really, of the life and legacy of Cruise – is hiding in plain sight for anyone paying obsessively close attention. May 22, 1996, is the day that the very first M:I movie was released in theatres.
If your first reaction to that reveal – something that nobody but Cruise and his closest confidantes could have immediately clocked while watching the film – was to roll your eyes so far back in your head that you pass out, then you have discovered the vibe of this eighth (and allegedly last) M:I movie. Nearly extinguishing all the goodwill the franchise has built up over the past three decades for its breathtaking action sequences – stunts that seem explicitly designed for Cruise to die over and over again, Groundhog Day (or perhaps Edge of Tomorrow) style – so much of The Final Reckoning is self-serving nostalgia. Or one big vainglorious victory lap that is more focused on congratulating itself than entertaining its audience.
For the first 75 minutes, Cruise and his long-time collaborator Christopher McQuarrie – here making their 11th film together – choke their supersized sequel with barely decipherable Easter eggs and other evidence pointing to their outstanding achievements in the field of excellence. Indeed, there is almost enough archival footage here of the previous M:I films – all included to underline just how freakin’ awesome a force Ethan/Cruise is – that The Final Reckoning nearly qualifies as an awards sizzle reel rather than a stand-alone feature film. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Yet once Cruise and McQuarrie expunge all the Ozymandias from their systems, The Final Reckoning manages to deliver the goods. Or at least make a decent case that Cruise has earned the right to become his own biggest champion, an immortal among men who, as he assures us onscreen, deserves your trust. Just “one more time.”
The film’s plot doesn’t much matter, given that it can be and should have been concentrated down to 20 minutes’ worth of jabbering instead of the hour-plus exposition dump that McQuarrie and his co-writer Erik Jendresen deliver. The short version: a few months after the events of the last M:I instalment (which carries the now-unfortunate title of Dead Reckoning: Part One, with no “Part Two” to ever officially materialize), the malevolent artificial intelligence known as the Entity has taken over most of the world’s nuclear arsenals. The AI has also acrimoniously split from its flesh-and-blood minder, Gabriel (Esai Morales), who has a nefarious plan or three all his own.
The only nation whose defences have yet to be penetrated by the Entity is, naturally, the United States, whose leader authorizes Hunt and his ragtag teammates (Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Hayley Atwell and eventually a half-dozen more) to retrieve a series of doohickeys that will connect with other whatsits and thingamabobs in order to avert a nuclear apocalypse.
Just how Ethan (really, how Cruise) accomplishes all that is what makes any M:I film such a draw. And, eventually, the film fulfills its implicit contract with the audience by putting its star through two stand-out action set pieces, each of which is in fact reworking stunts from previous franchise entries, only with a renewed and frankly insane sense of spectacle.
The first has Cruise diving to the bottom of the Pacific, where a grounded Russian submarine hides a valuable MacGuffin in its steel belly. In a nearly 20-minute, dialogue-free sequence, Cruise deftly swims inside the sub’s half-submerged hull, a feat that required the actor to wear a 45-kilogram dive suit while stuck inside a 8.5 million litre water tank that rotated on command. The heart-racing scene reportedly caused the star to briefly lose his sight, while also breathing in his own carbon dioxide – the kind of life-threatening daredevilry that transforms mere onscreen action into a kind of deranged cinematic poetry. (Even if the moment is, as already noted, a reworking of the extended dive that Cruise pulled off in 2015’s Rogue Nation.)
The second stunt is even trickier and more monstrously entertaining, with Cruise and McQuarrie reconfiguring another Rogue Nation moment – in which the star hangs off the side of a real-deal Airbus A400M – with older technology, but fresher thrills. This time, for narrative reasons that are too bloated to detail here, Ethan/Cruise must hang off of and eventually pilot an upside-down biplane.
As the actor navigates such midair manoeuvres, rolls, loops and hammerheads – the gravity-defying feats captured with all the drum-tight precision that McQuarrie apparently forgot he was capable of during the film’s first half – it becomes exceedingly easy to imagine Cruise as not just the world’s last action hero, but our cinematic titan. Prometheus, unbound and unhinged.
Mission: Impossible Movies, Ranked
The order of your missions, should you choose to accept them:
8. M:I-2 (2000): Too many doves, not enough fake-face masks.
7. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025): See above, sadly
6. Mission: Impossible III (2006): The resuscitation of a megafranchise, bigger and louder and Alias-er.
5. Mission: Impossible (1996): RIP Emilio Estevez’s character, but long live Cruise’s Ethan Hunt.
4. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011): Jeremy Renner could never wrest this franchise from Cruise’s hands.
3. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning: Part One (2023): No movie is worth dying for. But then again …
2. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015): In McQuarrie we trust. Plus: Rebecca Ferguson enters the scene.
1. Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018): The most Christopher Nolan-y of the bunch, which is a good thing. Plus: Henry Cavill’s reloading arms.
