PG-13 | starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Simon Pegg, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Ving Rhames, Henry Czerney, Shea Whigham, Angela Bassett | directed by Christopher McQuarrie | 2h 49 mins | 3 1/2 out of 5 stars |
Season 9 Premiere
2025 Sequelfest # 1
Mission: Impossible is without a doubt my favorite action franchise of the last 2 decades. Not Fast and the Furious, not the MCU or the DCU. Not even John Wick. The variety in these movies, the sheer maximalist efforts to entertain the audience without any irony or cynicism is almost unmatched by any other studio production. In Mission: Impossible the beautifully choreographed fight scenes of John Wick are replaced with desperate struggles to reach for a gun the hero may not get. The CGI beat-em-ups of Marvel movies where superhumans pound on each other are replaced with tactile, visceral, sensory nerve-shredders of gunning motorcycle engines and bruised, bloody, exhausted heroes. It’s the high-tech nerdier, American James Bond where the gadgets almost never work and the heroes never get the girl. Yes, most of the villains are generic (save for Phillips Seymore Hoffman’s series high performance in MI-3) and lead Ethan Hunt is little more than unstoppable Action Man, but the stakes are high and creativity abounds. Watching this franchise top itself with each new installment (for a period), so aggressively and infectiously driven just to entertain the audience – and that audience greeting it with a shrug every time to go to the latest remake has been a baffling movie experience.
Back in 1996 Mission: Impossible launched with Brian DePalma’s tense espionage film and a plot Roger Ebert famously couldn’t follow. Like Alien before it, the Tom Cruise-produced franchise admirably found new directors to provide new styles to each stand-alone installment. That certainly was the case with the 2nd film, Mission:Impossible 2 the very John Woo take that fell pretty flat. It roared back with the up-and-coming director J.J. Abram’s take on the fantastic Missions: Impossible 3 (4 1/2 stars), delivering an entry that was both the most intimate (Ethan has a wife) and the most sci-fi (the Anti-God) of the series. The movie went largely unseen because Tom Cruise made the unforgivable sin of jumping on Oprah’s couch and the public turned on him for the next 5 years. It would continue to top itself with Brad Bird’s fantastic Ghost Protocol (4 1/2 stars), returning the franchise back to a Teamwork film with Bird’s trademark eye for detail and humor injected into the franchise.
Eventually the experiments ended and Cruise settled with his director of choice, Christopher McQuarrie for the final lap of the series with the return-to-espionage Rogue Nation (3 1/2 stars), the series high Fallout (5 stars, possibly the best action movie of its decade) and the classically, old Hollywood cheer-the-heroes entertainment of Dead Reckoning (4 1/2 stars). Which brings us to the present, Dead Reckoning Part 2 or The Final Reckoning. After the events of Dead Reckoning, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) remains in exile with the key to unlock the source code of The Entity, a rogue computer AI that has now taken over the world, using video manipulation to prompt people into waging war with each other over inflammatory fake news. The AI surrogate Gabriel (Esai Morales) is also on the run, cut off from the Entity after failing it and desperate to get back in its good graces. Ethan is drawn back out of exile by two things: old pal hacker Luther (Ving Rhames) has created a poison pill virus that will finally kill the Entity and the President of the United States (Angela Bassett) calls Ethan in with the Entity’s latest threat, cracking the firewalls of every nation’s nuclear arsenal and launching a global nuclear holocaust. Now it’s up to Hunt to re-assemble his team, thief Grace (Haley Atwell), computer wiz Benji (Simon Pegg) and ex-Entity fighter Paris (Pom Klementieff) to retrieve the source code from a sunken Russian submarine and save the world from annihilation.
Final Reckoning starts off very shaky and gets better as it goes. The film’s normal knock-out pre-credit action scene is a dud that labors on flashbacks to previous movies. We get flashbacks, flashforwards, hypothetical flashforwards and retcons to previous films. If you were still itching over what The Rabbits Foot was in 3, we have an answer for you. If you were still wondering what happened to the poor CIA analyst that Ethan stole the NOC list from in part 1, we have an answer for you. The film is overloaded with exposition, audience-insulting flashbacks to things we just saw and running victory laps for its own past achievements. The opening montage is a well-put together “Previously On” that serves to set the table well. That’s all we needed. Eventually we start to get past that and the film sores into high-stakes, pre-apocalyptic fun. The set-up of Dead Reckoning was a brilliant one: put this unstoppable man up against and unstoppable computer AI that cannot be bargained with or negotiated with. But the Entity’s presence makes up very little of Final Reckoning, the action turned over to random characters revealed to be followers of it that attack when is most inconvenient to the plot (the strength of Mission movies vs other franchises is all of the contrivances makes things harder for our heroes and not easier).
Along the journey to Defcon 1, the movie splits in half with Ethan alone and his team separately racing across the world to find the sunken sub. Along the way, the movie peppers in a host of cameos from the president’s cabinet (Nick Offerman, Holt MacCallany, Mark Gattis and Henry Czerny, who is always fun to see return) to each high-level military official Hunt must convince to go along with him along the way (Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddingham, Severance’s Tramell Tillman). The film is bloated to the nth degree, but McQuarrie does keep it moving, not feeling a strain in its nearly 3 hour running time. All that exposition pays off in 3 marquee action scenes worth the price of admission: a battle with Russians in an arctic cabin and the surprisingly effective cameo of Rolf Saxon, a nail-biting, high anxiety submarine infiltration that pays off on the seemingly impossible set-up from Dead Reckoning and an aerial, zero-G chase in two bi-planes. The final does its best to recreate the 3-pronged climax of Fallout and is mostly still effective. As always, the endless determination and optimism of Cruise’s portrayal of Ethan Hunt remains the brick on the gas pedal that keeps it all going. Tom Cruise really is the last action star.
If this review was overly critical, it’s one done out of affection. It can do better because it has done better. If you like this franchise as much as I do, Final Reckoning is a flawed but not entirely disappointing ending. It doesn’t hit the high of Fallout or the first Dead Reckoning. It lacks the humor, and the epic feel the franchise usually goes for, it is mostly shot in close-ups and tight quarters making it feel oddly claustrophobic. It’s darker and more serious and also unintentionally campy, dare I say, a call-back to the franchise openers that sought a different tone with each entry. Final Reckoning takes a lot of unnecessary detours, labored plot points and endless tips down Mission memory lane. This movie could probably shave off a full 30 minutes of flashbacks alone and be a tighter thriller without missing a beat. I would love to see a cut of this movie. Still, when this movie has to, it does deliver in a big way. Even a lesser Mission: Impossible film delivers more genuine thrills and nail-biting tension than most other studio movies.