"Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning" review — It's a slow race to the end for Tom Cruise
“I need you to trust me. One last time.”
For most of their careers, Ethan Hunt and the Impossible Mission Force have contented themselves to work in the background of geopolitics. Sure, moments of his daring escapades make it into the public consciousness, like the infamous bombing of the Kremlin, but if Hunt and his fellow covert operatives were working today, you and I would be none the wiser. This time around, things are different. The threat, a malevolent parasitic AI called “The Entity,” that has been stewing in the background of the previous film, is very publicly after total global domination. It’s breaking into nuclear control systems worldwide, taking down international security systems one by one. The world is gripped by martial law as Earth’s citizens prepare for the end of the world. Hunt, disavowed by his government and hanging out with a ragtag group of former intelligence operatives, pickpockets, and less-than-savoury mercenaries, is now faced with more than just espionage. He’s now humanity’s last line of defence against a machine that would destroy the planet. But here’s the catch: Hunt might just be at fault for unleashing the Entity in the first place. “Our lives are the sum of our choices,” says just about every character at some point over the last two installments. And this film never stops driving that home. Hunt is up against not only his toughest battle yet, but against the demons that have plagued the last thirty years of his IMF career.
If the subtitle of “The Final Reckoning” doesn’t make it obvious enough, this impossible mission — the eighth in the series since 1996 — serves more or less as a finale to the entire franchise. Pulling in narrative threads, leftover characters, and the occasional clip from almost every previous entry, The Final Reckoning does its damndest to feel like an ending. Series star Tom Cruise, who greets the viewer directly with a pre-recorded welcome message, a la Top Gun: Maverick, might be into his 60s, but he isn’t letting his age stop him from pulling off some of the franchise’s most ridiculous stunts yet, which is saying something. If this is the end for Ethan Hunt, then Cruise, director Christopher McQuarrie, and the rest of the company are certainly pulling out all of the stops. Unfortunately, while it excels when it’s at its peak, The Final Reckoning isn’t quite the high note that would fully satisfy what has been a very solid action franchise. Trading in usually tight espionage narratives for an epic about the end of the world, the film ends up getting bogged down by a few too many characters and tonal aspirations unusually weighty for an otherwise zippy, fast-paced series. While there is still plenty of gas in the tank to make a worthwhile final entry, it’s clear that Mission: Impossible is certainly starting to wear out.
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| Photo via Paramount Pictures. |
In the immediate aftermath of 2023’s Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning (given the further subtitle of “Part One” upon initial release, as reflected in by original review, but that has since been dropped), Ethan Hunt (played by Cruise) and the remainder of his team is stranded in a make-shift base in an abandoned tunnel in the London Underground. Franchise mainstays Luther (played by Ving Rhames) and Benji (played by Simon Pegg) are still around, although very few of their other former allies are. The film opens with Hunt slotting a classic IMF mission briefing tape — one with the whole “should you choose to accept it” spiel — except the voice giving him the mission is not just a CIA stooge, it’s Erika Sloane, the former director of the CIA and now President of the United States (played by Angela Bassett, reprising her role from 2018’s Fallout). After a nostalgic monologue, played over a compilation of the series’ finest stunts and action set pieces, the President gives Ethan one last mission: surrender. But with the Entity’s grip on the world’s nuclear supply tightening and the vengeful Gabriel (played by Esai Morales) closing in on the IMF, Ethan launches his most daring plan yet to destroy the AI and save the human race.
With this film, most of my significant complaints can be found in the first half, which strikes me as unusual, given that many blockbusters lose themselves in the second half. This is quite the opposite. Running at a staggering 170 minutes, the viewer certainly feels the three-hour commitment, especially in the first half. The pacing at the start is glacial, as the film trudges through mounds of exposition delivered by characters with far too little to do as the screenplay waxes poetic about Hunt and his life’s decisions. It’s certainly a little self-indulgent and starts the film off on the wrong foot. There’s a sense of dramatic weight that McQuarrie is reaching for that this series simply isn’t built for. Where Dead Reckoning moved through its 163-minute runtime with relative ease, thanks to bountiful setpieces, moments of action, and some satisfying character work, The Final Reckoning struggles to get through it all. The film plods through reintroducing all of its main players through halfhearted action sequences (if we can call them that) and a few too many sombre, “the world is going to end” conversations. The sheer volume of characters here is overwhelming, with the film unable to balance its competing faces. When performers as talented as Nick Offerman are relegated to personalityless government stooges, the narrative is officially overcrowded. But once the film is done setting up its new status quo, it gets back to a much more well-paced clip.
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| Photo via Paramount Pictures. |
Emerging from the depths of the Department of Defence’s secret blacksite base with the hesitant backing of the President and just 72 hours to save the world, Ethan and the IMF are headed towards the Bering Sea, where this story began. The Entity was born out of an experimental device kept on board a Russian nuclear submarine, the Sevastopol, which sank somewhere in the waters of the Alaska-Russian border a decade ago, as we saw in Dead Reckoning. If Hunt has put the clues together right, the Entity’s source code can be found on the sub, which might just be the key to shutting it down once and for all. Two problems remain. First, no one knows where the Sevastopol sank, and with a stretch of ocean that large, the search is going to rely on some sketchy data from an old CIA outpost. Second, the collapse of the Entity, now stretching its limbs throughout cyberspace, might just bring down the entire global infrastructure of trade and commerce, sending the world into famine and war. Is Ethan ready to gamble the lives of eight billion people on a floppy disk and a chance of global economic collapse? Does he have any other choice? Was there ever a choice?
While the film might be a step down from some of the other franchise installments, and is far outclassed by its immediate predecessors, Fallout (the series’ best) or Dead Reckoning, when the film finally finds its footing, it rockets into the stratosphere. The much-marketed arctic submarine break-in and biplane chase set pieces are up to franchise standard for action sequences, and even surpass the already ridiculous expectations set by Cruise and the rest of the M: I team. With heart-bounding ferocity and a beautiful ticking clock set-up, the final half of this film moves at a breathtaking clip, making the IMF’s precision-crafted but highly risky schemes all the more precarious and terrifying. Cruise’s eternal commitment to doing the stunts himself pays off time and time again, with set pieces that feel incredibly tactile and precarious, which add the perfect mixture of practical adrenaline to an already well-set-up action sequence. The rollercoaster of self-serious yet always confidently ridiculous action spectacle that has forever dominated the series is just as present here, and it’s all the better for it. These missions are, after all, allegedly impossible, and in the last moments of the series, Cruise won’t let you forget the earnest, practical ridiculousness in its DNA.
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| Photo via Paramount Pictures. |
The ensemble is a little hit and miss. Tom Cruise is fabulous in his, presumably, last turn as Ethan Hunt, a part he’s been playing since his mid-thirties. Esai Morales plays the enigmatic “Gabriel,” an assassin formerly in league with the Entity, who now finds himself up against both the machines and Ethan. Where the vagueness of the Entity as a character can leave its antagonistic presence a little empty — this isn’t Avengers or Terminator, where the evil AIs have legs and can physically confront our protagonists — Gabriel serves as the necessary human counterpart, and Morales certainly delivers in menace, even if not quite as sharp as some of the series’ better antagonists. The series’ long-standing supporting figures, Ving Rhames’s Luther, who’s been around since the first film, and Simon Pegg’s Benji, who’s been around since the third, are as stalwart and welcome here as ever. Hayley Atwell’s Grace, who came on board in Dead Reckoning, holds her own here as well, with a performance that’s confident and charming. The sheer bloat of the film means that many terrific performers stumble in and out of The Final Reckoning without leaving much of an impression. Hannah Waddingham, Tramell Tillman, Katy O’Brian, Cary Elwes, Holt McCallany, and Shea Whigham all float through the film without ever leaving much of an impression. Even some of the main ensemble find themselves twiddling their thumbs by the end. In the finale, one character even admits that there’s “not much for [him] to do,” which isn’t exactly a positive indicator for how many characters you have bounding around your film.
The Final Reckoning can’t quite stop itself from trying to be as “final” as possible, with aforementioned plot elements and characters brought in from past entries in droves. For the most part, these are welcome returns. There is one particular surprise returning character — a cut so deep that the film has to use a flashback to remind most — that makes the sections in the Arctic a total treat, while making the character meaningfully involved in the plot, so it never feels like a purposeless return. But burdened with the ending of Hunt’s story, McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen reach for a level of self-mythologization that only ever harms the film. When it rises from the low points of the first half, like Ethan onboard the biplane rising from the valleys of South Africa, The Final Reckoning is a reminder of what has made these films so special in the action genre. As a fan of the IMF’s cinematic exploits, I can’t deny that a farewell to the franchise comes with a sense of nostalgia, although the slow race to the end here makes the reminiscence feel like a drag, rather than a celebration or culmination. The film isn’t quite the finale that Mission: Impossible deserves after thirty years of upping the calibre for practical action stunts time and time again, but when it soars, it is stunning.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is now playing in theatres.
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