Howdy everyone. So I caught Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning in theaters last week, and I thought it would be fun to talk about it for a bit. Ya know, to some of those questions that a lot of people might have going into it and maybe provide something of an epilogue to my extended Mission: Impossible video essay. Which you should totally watch if you haven’t already, bt dubs. It’s all about the series as a whole and how it reflects American (and world) history from the time each of them got made.

Anyway, here are some fun alternate titles I thought up for The Final Reckoning to help us ease into things:

Mission: Impossible – Endgame

M:I and the Dial of Destiny

Mission: Impossible Presents: MI’s greatest hits (and a few originals)

And my personal favorite:

Mission: Impossible – Hey Tom, this is Paramount. You get one more. You get one more movie, Tom. 

So The Final Reckoning was directed by Christopher Mcquarie and stars Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt for the 8th and presumably final time in his career. As far as anyone can tell, this flick marks the end of Cruise’s tenure leading the half century old franchise and has been released just shy of one year before the 30th anniversary of the 1996 film. In fact, just almost to the day. It’s the second part of the storyline that began in 2023’s Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning and also continues the series’ shift toward telling more interconnected stories. 

This one picks up a few months after the end of Dead Reckoning and finds Ethan squaring off against the rogue AI known as the Entity, as well as the mysterious Gabriel—a villain that loves to fuck with Ethan and kinda maybe sorta looks like George Clooney. 

Anyway, that’s all I want to share as far as plot stuff goes. From here on out, I’ll be giving you a simple thumbs up or down on the movie as a whole, then explore a few details about it that I think are worth tackling. If you wanna hear my spoiler thoughts on the movie, feel free to stalk my Letterboxd as I dropped them on the bottom of my review there.

So when it comes to whether or not I would recommend watching The Final Reckoning; the answer is that I would. If you’re a fan of these films and have any stake or personal investment in the series, this is a hundred percent worth your time, if even only for the closure. Especially since it looks like it’ll be the last one starring Cruise, and the last one in general for at least a few years.

I do, however, want to flag that statement because you should probably go into it knowing that the movie does a lot to help newcomers or more casual fans follow along. If you’ve watched the other movies recently or know them like the back of your hand, you might have a bone to pick with the amount of hand holding here. You may also not like some of the decisions they make and fomd that it does ideas from previous installments dirty or makes no sense in the grander scheme of things, and you’d probably be right.

At times like those, I’ve found it helpful to remind myself that it’s a franchise about guys in latex masks that hang off of airplanes and cock their fists like they’re firearms. A little suspension of disbelief and remembering that the series has always taken wild swings—with the villain of the first movie being one of them—is a part of why they’re so fun. Basically, approach these movies like Austin Powers approaches time travel.

Now, if you’re new to the franchise or are only a casual viewer, I think you’ll do just fine. I saw it with my Dad, who isn’t a huge movie guy, isn’t the best at paying attention, and has only seen the other films once, and he was able to follow along without any problems. It also helps that The Final Reckoning is fairly light on story, all things considered, and that it’s like a lot of movies in the spy genre where it often feels like it’s more about the vibes than anything else.

Okay? Okay. So now I wanna focus on whether or not the movie is “good.”

When it comes to a Mission movie, I’m usually looking for a few things.

• I want to see a couple of insane stunts.

• I want to see the ensemble cast that the series has been developing over the years come together and trade a couple of quips.

• And last, especially after that video essay I put out on the subject, I want to see how McQuarrie, Cruise and company tackle a real world point of interest.

And this movie did all of those things. There’s obviously the two big stunts in this movie that have been all over the marketing, the ensemble is there and there’s some great interplay between them, and this movie’s first act is more or less all about current events as far as the dangers of AI go. On that rubric alone, this movie sticks the landing. Or rather doesn’t because of the plane stunt.

However, I won’t pretend that there aren’t some pretty big asterisks attached to each of those points. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, here are some vague examples for you:

The stunts are insane, yes, but the marketing took a lot of the wow factor away from them for me. Maybe it’s because the marketing absolutely blitzed my feed for the past two months on account of me researching the series for that aforementioned video essay, but I personally found myself surprised by how much of those stunts we saw in the trailers and clips online. 

They’re still an absolute blast in the final film and are the highlight for me, but it almost makes me wish I could’ve seen them without knowing they were coming, you know? There’s a literal moment in the movie where a character says what they’re about to do, and it was kinda hard for me not to immediately think “oh, so that’s absolutely going to lead to the plane stunt.” At which point the movie became more about the buildup to that stunt, than it did the story.

As far as the cast goes—they’re great in this and I adored seeing this iteration of the IMF riff off of each other. Yet that was also pretty sparse in comparison to the other movies. Because this film had just under three hours to develop and tie up a ton of loose threads from the previous entry, while also being a marketable film to people who may not remember that movie or didn’t see it, the first half of The Final Reckoning hits the ground running and comes across as very scattershot. 

It’s never boring, and I personally found the exposition dumps that many are complaining about to be well juxtaposed against bursts of action, but it does lead to the supporting cast not having much to do for the first 45 minutes to an hour. It felt like they kept getting written out of the movie for thirty minutes at a time to me, a problem that even extends to its two main villains—the Entity and Gabriel, a guy that’s somehow even more of a nothingburger in this movie than he was in the last one. Thankfully, the back half of the flick makes up for that to an extent. I mean it totally shafts several characters and does nothing for their arcs other than having them appear, but whatever.

Last, there’s looking at how the filmmakers tackled AI and current events. So this one is basically the inverse of the point I just made about the ensemble. The opening half of this movie is all about the ways that the entity has been wreaking havoc since the end of the Dead Reckoning and how it has done the exact thing everyone said it would. And for me, that stuff was genuinely brilliant. It’s impossible not to watch the first ten minutes of this movie and not think about 2025. 

Even the return of a specific character from a previous entry kinda nails this idea that Final Reckoning takes place in a bizarro version of reality—one where the threats the world is facing aren’t that different from our own, but the response to it is. It’s just a shame that this mostly falls by the wayside by the back half of the movie. I mean, it’s still there and makes for nice pace breakers (or cues to hit the bathroom if you aren’t interested in them), but yeah. It definitely loses its focus over time, and the ultimate “fix” for the problems we see reflected in our own reality aren’t quite there for me.

In a way, that’s probably my biggest complaint about The Final Reckoning. At two hours and fifty minutes long, The Final Reckoning has a lot going on and a lot of conflicting tones because of it. Granted, it’s one of the fastest three hour long movies I’ve seen in a while—to a fault at points—but it does often come across as unfocused.

It wouldn’t shock me if there’s a three and a half to four hour long cut of this that you need a cruciform key to access because it really does feel like the theatrical version is missing chunks of its story. There are a lot of actors you’ll recognize from movies or television that basically crop up for three or four minutes, get one setup and one payoff for their appearance, then immediately fall to the wayside. And while their appearances “work” insofar that they do something meaningful for the story, I constantly got the sense that there was more for them to do or that they would come back later. To which only one of them did.

It’s not the biggest deal since this is ultimately Ethan’s story, but I do wish that the film either found a way to have more existing characters within the Mission: Impossible world fulfill these rolls, or have set them up in Dead Reckoning so that they would’ve had more time to breath on this. Especially since so much of Dead Reckoning was all about setting up new characters that would’ve presumably been the future of the IMF.

Now there is one other thing I wanted to address in this review, and that’s the idea of whether or not this is a good ending for the franchise. Again, without spoiling anything, I think it’s about as good of an ending for Ethan Hunt’s story, and for the series as a whole as we’re ever going to get.

One thing I touched on but didn’t get to elaborate on for in M:I Video essay was this idea that the series had several strong outs for Ethan’s arc in the endings to Mission: Impossible 3 and Ghost Protocol. Both of those movies were great opportunities for the character to be written out of the series and get some semblance of closure that, for a number of reasons, he never got.

With that in mind, The Final Reckoning’s ending is fine. It ties his story up as well as it can after all these years and about as well as Cruise’s ego would likely allow for. In a lot of ways, it’s a bit like the ending to No Time to Die in that way, as Craig’s run as Bond was also filled with false endings. 

The actual ending sequence itself feels rushed and very de facto about how this is the end of this particular movie, but it does work and I do think that the monologue that segues into it was a nice way to wrap things up for Hunt. There’s a repeated phrase in the first act that comes back during that monologue that really hammers things home and is a thinly veiled metaphor for Cruise’s presence in the franchise and how it might continue.

I dunno, at least that’s what I got from it. So much of The Final Reckoning circled around this idea that individuals can stop evil, and that justice and right or wrong are dedicated by those of us who remember to protect individual people, as opposed to thinking about large groups or sovereign bodies, and I felt that this ending mostly stuck the landing there. The film got a little heavy handed in recycling old footage to help get us to that ending, but I’m personally a fan of that sort of thing, and I felt that it added some nice visual variety to the story for longtime fans. In my opinion, it’s not that far off from what something like Avengers Endgame did with its constant callbacks to the past as far as the execution goes.

And on a total side note, that message is also super Scientologist. Like, good lord, is the idea that “you alone and only you alone can help someone in need” Scientology 101. It’s not a bad message, but I couldn’t help but pick up on that in the theater.

At the end of the day, I liked this movie. Parts of it played like a metaphor for Cruise and McQuarie telling Paramount to frick off and let them—skilled craftsmen who have delivered for the studio time and time again—make the big decisions, and that kind of stuff is right up my alley. I think a major thing on the minds of creatives is getting some of their autonomy back as artists when it comes to work, and I loved how that manifested itself here since two of the forces that Ethan had to contend with in this film was a literal boardroom of politicians and AI.

Is this movie perfect and does it stand among the best the franchise has to offer? No, far from it and, if anything, I think it shows the signs of overcorrecting for Dead Reckoning being too silly for some people. But it’s still a solid Mission: Impossible and that does put it among the best of the best when it comes to blockbuster filmmaking. If I could change one thing about this movie, I probably would’ve split it up into two parts, turning the Dead Reckoning story into three films as opposed to two. The first film would mostly stay the same, but I would’ve had the two halves of this movie stand on their own. There’s a strong stopping point right in the middle of this one, and I think that taking advantage of that would’ve allowed for this movie to breathe in a way that the final product desperately needed to. It would’ve also given the filmmakers more time to flesh out Gabriel, give the supporting cast more to do, and help balance the conflicting tones a bit. 

I’m also just a sucker for these movies.