What started out as an exercise in 1990s IP renewal — audiences at the time, and even now, would be hard-pressed to name more than one character from the TV spy show Mission: Impossible (1966-1973) — has blossomed over the decades into the manifestation of Tom Cruise’s late-career star power. The young up-and-comer who once placed himself into the hands of Kubrick and Scorsese, among others, now plunges into the deepest waters and soars to the most vertiginous heights, seemingly sacrificing his body over and over again on the altar of popcorn cinema.
Nearly 30 years after that first Mission: Impossible movie (directed, lest we forget, by Brian De Palma), we arrive at the eighth and perhaps — if the title is telling the truth — last chapter of the saga, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. Any pretense that this series ever had about exploring the inner life of secret agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) has long since been abandoned; what matters now is hanging this resilient spy off the wing of a biplane or sending him to lung-crushing depths at the bottom of the ocean.
It’s a month after the events of Dead Reckoning: Part One, and the super-intelligent AI known as the Entity has succeeded at invading the internet, causing chaos by creating fake news and disrupting vital communications. Now it’s making its way into the world’s nuclear arsenals and Ethan and his team — Benji (Simon Pegg), Luther (Ving Rhames), Grace (Hayley Atwell), Paris (Pom Klementieff, nailing many of the film’s best punchlines, in French), and a few new additions — must go to the place and get the thing. For all its stabs at being about something — the threat of artificial intelligence and deepfakes, the ongoing struggles between nations and their nuclear stockpiles — The Final Reckoning is “go to the place and get the thing” cinema writ largest, with its super-spies traveling around the globe and placing themselves in excessive danger on the grandest scale possible.
Along the way, they’ll all discover plot twists that refer all the way back to the 1996 movie, threading together the entire series of films in a way that’s already dividing early audiences; some find this sort of retrofitting compelling, while others find its reliance upon established lore too clever by half. (The Final Reckoning even works in a shout-out to the original movie’s theatrical release date.) The larger-than-life action elements and the ouroboros plotting alike will play best with viewers who have not entered this chapter looking for thematic insight or depth of character.
There is, of course, no shortage of actual characters and speaking roles here; one of the great contradictions of the film is that Ethan would be nowhere without his skilled and devoted team, while at the same time the screenplay (by director Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen) repeatedly points out that the plot’s potentially earth-shattering crisis is entirely Ethan’s fault, and also Ethan is the only one who can fix it. That’s a Messiah complex as massive as the movie’s effects budget.
It’s to The Final Reckoning’s credit that Ethan’s exploits teeter on the verge of Mission: Ridiculous. The stunts are heart-in-your-throat thrilling (particularly in the IMAX format) and the close shaves involve milliseconds, but McQuarrie and company know how to stay within their lane, even if that lane is already fully exaggerated in scope.
For those of us who come to these movies wondering what Tom Cruise will be climbing, clinging onto, or falling off of, this sequel delivers the goods, rushing from one thrill to the next — so many, in fact, that editor Eddie Hamilton has to intercut two separate fight scenes taking place on two separate points on the globe with Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey’s score juicing up the adrenaline. (Their music is somewhat less successful at propping up the movie’s final monologue, which isn’t nearly as deep as McQuarrie and Cruise think it is.)
When he’s not seemingly taking his life into his own hands, Cruise gets saddled with a lot of faux-gravitas dialogue about the life that Ethan has chosen and his responsibility both to those he loves and to those he’ll never meet, but the actor does rise to the occasion during the all-too-rare moments of levity that come his way. As ever with the Mission: Impossible movies, there’s a vastly overqualified ensemble cast: the Joint Chiefs alone — Angela Bassett, Janet McTeer, Mark Gattis, Holt McCallany, and Nick Offerman — could mount a production of As You Like It that would knock your socks off.
Of the new personnel additions, the standouts are submarine crew-members Tramell Tillman (Severance) and Katy O’Brien (Love Lies Bleeding), who each draw something distinct out of the hard-working leading man. Captain Bledsoe (Tillman) and Ethan do a lot of hard-staring at each other while engaged in cryptic question-and-answer sessions, and their enigmatic back-and-forth provides the only moments here that could be considered sexy. As for O’Brien, she has a magnetic charisma and non-binary energy that calls to mind none other than a pre–Top Gun Tom Cruise, giving their moments together an air of baton-passing.
O’Brien isn’t the actor’s only Ghost of Christmas Past; the film opens with a supercut of Mission: Impossible moments that force us to acknowledge that the Cruise of 2025 is not the bright-eyed megastar of decades past. As executive producer, Cruise clearly wants us to take in the contrast and to reflect upon how the passage of time has impacted both the player and the character.
A film that is simultaneously about everything and nothing, about the depth and the disposability of its own legacy, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning gives its hero one last chance to save the world, in an era when the actual world feels increasingly beyond saving. Consider it the geopolitical version of summer escapism.
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Screenwriters: Christopher McQuarrie & Erik Jendresen, based on the television series created by Bruce Geller
Cast: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny, Holt McCallany, Janet McTeer, Nick Offerman, Hannah Waddingham, Tramell Tillman, Angela Bassett, Shea Whigham, Greg Tarzan Davis, Charles Parnell, Mark Gatiss, Rolf Saxon, Lucy Tulugarjuk
Producers: Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie
Executive producers: David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger, Chris Brock
Cinematographer: Fraser Taggart
Production design: Gary Freeman
Editing: Eddie Hamilton
Music: Max Aruj, Alfie Godfrey
Sound design: James Mather, supervising sound editor
Production companies: Paramount Pictures, Skydance
In English
169 minutes
