MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Paramount Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 22, 2025

Something happened in between the last film and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, and it doesn't take long into this sequel to realize that whatever shift occurred in the making of this sequel was for the worse. The title is one giveaway, for sure, since this is meant to be a direct follow-up and conclusion to Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, and the way Erik Jendressen and director Christopher McQuarrie's screenplay immediately attempts to separate itself from the events and characters of that previous film is definitely another.

This one raises the stakes exponentially from the outset, informing us that the Entity, an advanced AI that served as the unseen villain of the last film, has come close to achieving whatever goal it has in mind. There's an apocalyptic tone to that prologue, as disinformation has spread across the internet, political instability has resulted, a doomsday cult that believes the Entity is the only means of saving humanity has emerged, and the nuclear weapons of certain countries have been overtaken by the digital foe.

Obviously, only Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) can save the day, but lucky for him, he has four days, counting down in a strategic U.S. base operating entirely on analog systems, to do so. One would imagine that the man would cut right to the chase, because we've seen him do that so many times, and that the movie itself would follow suit, since the previous film established exactly what Ethan needs to do in order to stop the Entity and gave him the tools he needed to do so.

Instead, the movie stalls and continues to delay forward movement of the plot and, for some unknowable reason for a series that has always prided itself on elaborate spycraft and action setpieces, any kind of action. Oh, Ethan runs a bit, to be sure, running toward a bomb, away from an explosion, and chasing after the Entity's now-former helper Gabriel (Esai Morales), who disappears for a lengthy stretch of this movie after, just one film prior, being such a solid antagonist—not to mention a key part of our hero's origin story, which is one of several threads the screenwriters drop entirely here. For a disappointing majority of the movie, though, the name of the game is exposition and nostalgia.

The series has earned that second part, at least. It began in 1996, after all, and, with this eighth installment, has continued with some regularity since. Ethan has hunted and taken down several villains, saving the world almost as many times over, while Cruise has defied death by performing stunts that no one else in the business seems willing, able, or lacking in self-preservation to replicate or top. The actor has two significant bits of stunt work in this entry: an underwater search that becomes more squirm-inducingly claustrophobic with each step and one involving a pair of biplanes that, while it feels a bit too much like the climax of the sixth film, might be the most obviously dangerous sequence in the entire series.

To be clear, however, those two scenes come near or at the very end of a movie that spins its wheels with assorted characters explaining the basics of the plot again and again, other characters coming up with reasons why Ethan's previous adventures are so significant to this one, and our heroes reduced to listening to those explanations or doing them themselves. Established characters—such as tech whizzes Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg)—are as overshadowed by this near-constant focus on plot as characters we recently met—such as pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell), semi-reformed assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff), and CIA agent Briggs (Shea Whigham), whose sudden connection to one of the previous films feels desperate.

To explain that plot in a review feels especially redundant, because it's fairly basic but covered repeatedly in this movie. Ethan has to find the sunken submarine that houses the Entity's source code before anyone else does, essentially taking on the unbridled power the AI could offer, or the sentient program fires every nuclear weapon in existence on the world's population. In the process, Ethan will eventually board a different submarine, his team will meet someone whose life their leader changed almost 30 years ago at a remote communications facility, and our hero's old boss Erika (Angela Bassett), now the President, and her advisors (including characters played by Nick Offerman, Janet McTeer, and Holt McCallany) will go over the stakes of this situation every time they're on screen.

The worry after the last film was that the filmmakers wouldn't be able to match or top the absurdly entertaining mix of spy intrigue, dynamic action, self-aware humor, and a novel idea for an antagonist in its sequel. Maybe they felt uncertain about themselves, too, because Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning doesn't even seem to try to approach any of that until the last act, and the self-serious tone of the exposition-heavy story up to that point is numbing. If this is—as the title suggests—a final go for this series or Cruise's presence in it, it's ending with an uncharacteristic, disheartening thud of a finale.

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