Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning opens in theaters Friday, May 23.
For nearly 30 years, the stunts and action sequences of Mission: Impossible have been synonymous with big-screen spectacle. And as expected, the franchise’s newest entry finds Tom Cruise’s alter ego Ethan Hunt risking life, limb, and the fates of millions, this time in pursuit of stopping The Entity, the evil A.I. introduced in 2023’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. But the way I see it, the sequel – which stopped being Dead Reckoning Part Two sometime in the last two years – might be trying a little too hard to top the IMF’s greatest hits.
First thing you should know about me is that I’ve always been a huge mark for James Bond movies. I’ve got a lot of formative movie memories from growing up with those films. So I was, frankly, thrilled to see all the things I loved about Bond captured perfectly in 2016’s Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, the first of now four Ethan Hunt adventures written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie.
Rogue Nation nails the combination of go-for-broke practical stunts, grinning self-awareness, and just the right touch of believability that make up the most important parameters for a successful IMF mission – Fallout nails it slightly less, and I think Dead Reckoning misses by a wider margin. The Final Reckoning, unfortunately, has gone farther afield.
My biggest takeaway from the eighth and very evidently not final film starring Cruise as fate’s chosen lucky boy is that it’s extremely sober. The Final Reckoning veers into melodrama whenever there is story to be told. The cast, which is an assembling of familiar franchise faces and newcomer cameos, whisper-talk their way through soap-opera levels of tension. Nearly every scrap of dialogue is invested in no less than the end of all life on the planet.
But my first litmus test for these movies is how serious they treat Ethan Hunt getting the mission. Rogue Nation was a flirty encounter at a record shop, Fallout’s knock on the door woke him up from a dream where a nuclear blast interrupted his wedding, and Dead Reckoning was some kind of dramatic poetry slam with the IMF Oath and a new recruit. The Final Reckoning features a lo-fi delivery method thanks to the Entity’s infiltration of all things digital – and it’s honestly kinda fun. But the message is the most dire and serious thing. This is a story point introduced by Dead Reckoning: The Entity as a villain capable of literally every bad thing imaginable, like a laundry list of vague shorthand threats – any one of which could’ve been enough to carry a movie. Instead, they’ve all been lumped together in the form of a nebulous digital boogeyman, and reiterating that in the “this message will self destruct” section of the movie sets a very somber tone for everything that follows. Save for a few bits of humor here and there, it’s never shaken (or stirred).
Absurdly astronomical stakes are one of the biggest issues with The Final Reckoning. A good-old fashioned nuke or biological weapon – those live in Mission: Impossible’s sweet spot: life-and-death at a massive scale, while also real enough to be relatably scary. But all life on planet Earth is just too much to plausibly wrap your head around, particularly with how seriously everyone takes everything else compared to say, Rogue Nation or Fallout.
I know I keep swerving away from The Final Reckoning and back into the rest of the franchise but, for better and worse, this is a part eight that’s very aware that it’s a part eight. You can’t call a movie The Final Reckoning without delivering some degree of, well, finality, and oh boy does this one try.
It’s not merely planting Easter eggs from the earlier films so much as picking entire story points – largely unnecessary ones, I would argue. It’s a nice nod to the diehards, but when you consider the nearly three-hour run time and the relative lack of importance these moments have to the overall movie, I’m not sure what McQuarrie and Cruise were trying to accomplish. This is all to say, The Final Reckoning is impossible to review out of the context of the other seven Missions: Impossible, which is why I keep recapping my feelings for the franchise as a whole.
One of the callbacks that I really did enjoy, though, is a guy we’ve seen in the trailers for The Final Reckoning: William Donloe (Rolf Saxon), the poor bastard working in the CIA black vault whose nose Ethan stole the NOC list out from under way back in the ’90s. His part in The Final Reckoning is spot on. He’s a meaningful character for Ethan and the IMF to encounter who also speaks to the themes of the movie: Our lives are the sum of our choices. He’s fun, which is short supply here, and I would’ve loved it if he’d have been the only bit of retconning this movie tried to do.
But I’ve been talking a lot about the things I didn’t like – it’s important to note that there are some things The Final Reckoning very much did right. The action is predictably excellent, with the highlight being Ethan’s infiltration of the Sevastopol, the MacGuffin of a submarine that sank at the start of Dead Reckoning. It is incredibly tense and intricate and claustrophobic and all the other nail-biting things you want from a thriller. More than that, there’s clearly a huge chunk of the reported $400 million budget on screen, and Christopher McQuarrie is getting all the nautical miles he can out of it. The set is equal parts Avatar and the hallway fight from Inception.
The fight choreography is also elevated from previous entries, as other countries send their most special forces after the same prize Ethan is after. The fights are a little more brutal and legitimately feel like the IMF could lose. At this point in the franchise, that’s a difficult tightrope to walk, and McQuarrie and Cruise deserve a lot of credit for that.
They also deserve a fair bit of credit bringing the team together again. I felt that was one part of the Mission: Impossible formula that was a little absent from the last film. The climax of The Final Reckoning gives every team member a job – it’s reminiscent of Fallout in that respect, and very important for the IMF. Because it’s less fun when Ethan is running around doing everything himself. An abiding trust in his team is part of Ethan’s allure – in addition to being, as Shea Whigham’s Jasper Briggs puts it in Dead Reckoning, a mind-reading, shape-shifting incarnation of chaos.
The climactic biplane sequence is great, too. It’s thrilling in parts, funny in others, and most importantly, all the effort and planning that goes into a stunt like that is apparent. The only question I have about it is, would The Final Reckoning be worse if it were a stunt double walking out on the wing of that plane instead of Tom Cruise? Or would it just have one less interesting thing going for it?
A lot of how I feel about this movie, though, comes down to that subtitle. The Final Reckoning can’t be officially final with the way it ends, and I don’t think there are any of us who believe Tom Cruise is done risking his life for our entertainment. So it’s either the best subtitle for this movie, or the worst. Maybe they completely missed the mark on the “Final” part of the equation, and it’s not a representative title at all. Maybe its not-entirely-successful attempt at tying a neat and all-encompassing bow is the Final Reckoning for the franchise and the path it laid out across 8 movies. From a real world perspective, maybe a messy and self-serious capstone to an otherwise iconic franchise is exactly what they deserve and it’s a perfect subtitle.
For my part, because again, I’m a big fan of this kind of movie, I’m rooting for the latter. Threads have been picked up and tugged on in different directions throughout the course of these eight films. That’s just the cost of doing business with a 30-year juggernaut of a franchise. Their mission now, should they choose to accept, is to take the clean slate they’ve created with all those threads tied up, however clumsily, and get back to what Mission: Impossible does best: not take itself so seriously.
