Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (Christopher McQuarrie, 2025)
Perhaps the easiest way into discussing the merits of Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning, is through its title. Mercifully updated from Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two, this latest installment diverts its attention from the narrative and emotional throughlines of its predecessor and instead focuses on operatically concluding (at least for now) the long-running franchise. Going even further than ditching Ethan Hunt’s possible romantic connection with IMF newcomer, Grace, and practically retconning the death of Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust, The Final Reckoning marks a welcome shift in perspective away from the failure of Dead Reckoning’s subtler, more narrative-driven approach (seemingly anxious about upping the ante, McQuarrie and Cruise aimed for musicality and screwball) back to pure blockbuster spectacle.
The Final Reckoning is all the better for being a bloated monstrosity, achieving the impossibility of its title through sheer force of will. This is apparent in the opening hour or so, which remolds Dead Reckoning’s asinine AI plot for the purposes of connecting all of the different entries in the franchise. After retrieving the cruciform key which unlocks the source code of an AI program known as The Entity, Hunt is on a new quest to retrieve the drive containing the code and connect a “poison pill USB”. McQuarrie fully commits to a parodic self-seriousness that continues through the rest of the three-hour runtime, presenting dialogue as “yes and” improv as the improbable stakes are re-iterated and compounded. Aside from functioning as ridiculous comedy, the blustering charm and knowing convolution facilitates the web spun between Dead Reckoning’s story and the rest of the series. The ultimate value comes of this pre-amble comes in the re-enactment of minor stunts, obvious callbacks that don’t call attention to themselves. There’s a substantive nostalgia to the redos of the Ghost Protocol prison break and the Rogue Nation torture-chamber brawl. They’re a reminder that Cruise can’t do this forever, and as he repeatedly says during The Final Reckoning, to trust him one last time.
Hunt’s final mission is also his biggest, its scale taking him from the sky to the bottom of the ocean. The measure of a Mission: Impossible film is inordinately dependent on the strength of its flagship set-pieces, and The Final Reckoning features two inspired sequences set on planet Earth’s most extreme environments. The first, a heist which takes place under the Bering Sea, accrues suspense as Hunt silently navigates a submarine wreck moments away from rolling down a sandbar. It’s a gripping puzzle stunt with effective emphasis on Cruise’s diminutive stature in comparison to the tumbling missiles that threaten to crush his body. The latter, which sees Hunt hanging off of two acrobatic biplanes in remote South Africa, is a vertiginous tour-de-force. A celebratory capstone to Mission: Impossible’s cinema-of-attractions appeal, The Final Reckoning sends off the IMF with an affirmation that through a commitment to physical stunt work and goofy sincerity, mainstream franchise cinema still has the power to suspend disbelief.
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is distributed by Paramount and is in theaters now.