Tom Cruise returns to risk life, limb, and logic in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the explosive final chapter.
You know that feeling you get when you bite into a jalapeño popper and realize someone stuffed it with C4? That’s Mission: Impossible –The Final Reckoning, which completes the loop of the sinfully named Dead Reckoning Part 1. It’s spicy, it’s volatile, it’s maybe a little overly convoluted, and yes it explodes in your face in glorious IMAX.
Tom Cruise, Aliens bless his Scientology-soaked soul, treats every one of these flicks like it’s the last movie humanity will ever see. And this time who knows, he might be right. The eighth (EIGHTH!) entry in this cinematic suicide pact is so unhinged, so turbo-charged with cinema juice, it makes the Fast & Furious franchise look like a Prius ad.
Warning: this review will self-destruct.
Let’s get this out of the way: the first act is a bit of a mess. Like a drunk magician doing sleight of hand, it’s flashy, but you’re not quite sure what the hell you’re watching. There’s exposition, a little globe-trotting, more exposition, protests, the same exposition again but restated, and a cast list longer than the Snyder Cut credits. It’s all just foreplay, though, because at one point Cruise jumps on the wing of a biplane at 10,000 feet and you suddenly forget your own name.
McQuarrie—who by now is basically Cruise’s directorial soulmate—cooks this stew low and slow. You seriously get the feeling he and Cruise built this movie with welding torches and protein shakes. The underwater sequence is essentially The Abyss meets Titanic but with oxygen deprivation. And at a certain point it’s like someone challenged Tom to out-act God 40 years ago and he’s still going for it.
But all right, what’s the actual plot such that there is one? As usual, Ethan Hunt and his team are racing against time and technology. Kicking off as “Part 2” to the last film, Dead Reckoning, the world’s most powerful AI, known only as The Entity, has gone rogue after being buried deep inside a sunken Russian submarine. Designed to infiltrate and manipulate digital systems, it’s now rewriting reality from the shadows, turning governments, weapons, and even people into puppets. The only way to stop it? Find the submarine, retrieve a mysterious two-part key, and hope Ethan doesn’t die doing something wildly cinematic along the way.
A rogue nation’s gallery.
Every returning face is a wink at longtime fans. Henry Czerny’s back and crankier than a boomer with no Wi-Fi. Ving Rhames and Simon Pegg return as Ethan Hunt’s emotional support spy daddies. Angela Bassett (My American President) blesses the movie with 40 seconds of gravitas that could melt the hull of a submarine. And yes Hayley Atwell spends most of the film playing “When Will They or Why Won’t They Yet” with Ethan while dodging bullets and swiping badges. It’s like Cruise and McQuarrie watched Before Sunrise and wondered why it doesn’t have more grenades.
You’ve also got Holt McCallany growling orders like he’s trying to out-gravel a canyon, Hannah Waddingham smuggling HBO prestige into a spy caper, and Nick Offerman looking like he wandered in from a season of Fargo, and plenty more. The movie tosses them all into the blender with returning icons like Kittridge and Paris, then smashes the “purée” button.
At one point, the film literally flashes through key moments from earlier entries like it’s running its own Greatest Hits reel—but instead of feeling like a cheap YouTube edit, it somehow works to make all this feel like something more than it really is. You don’t need to binge all seven films beforehand (though it helps if you want the full emotional wallop). What makes it detonate is the writing, which—while operatically bonkers—is tuned to the same high-pressure wavelength as the action.
The spy who loved stunts.
Unlike previous entries that sometimes fumble the handoff between plot and peril (looking at you #2), this script actually earns its climaxes. It’s got the emotional torque of M:I3, the dread-drenched pacing of Fallout, and the gall to say, “What if we wrote the script while figuring out the stunts?” They probably didn’t, granted, but it’s not as painfully obvious this time. No hate to Esai Morales, but it’s a shame we didn’t get a PCH-level villain this time around or even a Henry Cavill. But I suppose not all missions can be possible.
This film is a love letter (obligatory phrasing) to 30 terrific years of mostly terrific action filmmaking, and that’s obviously not counting the 1966 TV series. Cruise isn’t just saying goodbye to Ethan Hunt, though. No, no, he’s saying goodbye to gravity, subtlety, and the insurance premiums of anyone within a 10-mile radius. This man hangs off a plane, fights on a plane, flies a plane, and makes love to the idea of planes. The whole final act is so aeronautically horny, you half expect a jet engine to get a Best Supporting Actor nom.
Sure, the plot’s got more turns than a French roundabout and about as much logic as a dream you forget mid-sentence. But that’s not why you’re here. You’re here for tension so thick you could butter toast with it. You’re here for camera angles that scream “we strapped this to an actual missile and fired it.” You’re here for the cinema of madness, the religion of practical stunts, the Church of Cruise.
It’s not called Mission: Sensible.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, if you choose to accept it, burns away your cynicism with every shot of Cruise grinning into death’s abyss and saying, “It’s just pain.” It’s a blockbuster that knows it’s a blockbuster, but also acts like it’s the last one on Earth.
In the end, does it matter if it wraps up Ethan Hunt’s arc in a neat little bow? Uh, no, not even close. This movie is the bow, the wrapping paper, the box, and the whole damn Christmas tree. It’s 2 hours and 49 minutes of pure, reckless, sweaty, self-aware bliss. And I wouldn’t accept it any other way.
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