Title: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Starring: Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Hayley Atwell, Simon Pegg

Director: Christopher McQuarrie Year: 2025 Runtime: 2h 50m Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is a sequel to 2023’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, and marks the fourth consecutive Mission: Impossible film from director Christopher McQuarrie.

The producers are keen to emphasise that this is the final movie of the current Mission: Impossible series, bringing an end to Tom Cruise’s 29-year run leading the franchise.

Superspy Ethan Hunt is back and after decades of duels against megalomaniacs and madmen, he now has to square off against his most evil opponent yet.

Yes, that’s right, he’s got to take down a shitty AI.

Living, as we all are, on the eve of World War Three, with fear, stupidity and misinformation at its highest level in all of human history, this movie is timely.

It certainly taps the zeitgeist and has its fair share of impressive stunts and set pieces.

It’s also very, very… very long.

But is it any good?

Answering that question is proving far more difficult than it ought to be…

Admission Impossible

As an aside, just getting into the movie was problematic enough.

I already had the original Lalo Schifrin theme playing on loop in my brain for hours beforehand, in anticipation of seeing this film.

The movie was certainly popular, the foyer was busy and all the automatic kiosks were malfunctioning. A seemingly irrelevant detail but I want you to remember it as I’ll come back to this point later.

As a result of the malfunction the queue to buy tickets and food was longer than usual and full of people who prompted the Mission: Impossible theme to play ever louder in my brain.

One buffoon struggled for a full minute trying to get the lid to fit on his XL drink and still managed to spill half of it as he walked off.

This was beginning to feel like a bit of a mission already.

Mission Predictable

Ok, so you might have heard that this movie differs a lot from the other Mission: Impossible movies and that’s true.

It’s dramatically different to the tight action movies which preceded it, though it nonetheless ticks off all those key Mission: Impossible boxes:

• Man that’s really clever!
• Man that’s really fucking stupid!
• Predictable latex face mask reveal
• Prolonged dialogue during a bomb defusing scene
• Two-dimensional baddie with no apparent motivation
• Tom Cruise runs really fast
• Tom Cruise runs really fast again
• Tom Cruise does a batshit stunt
• Tom Cruise almost drowns (when any normal person would have drowned 5 minutes ago)
• Tom Cruise does another batshit crazy stunt
• Tom Cruise’s face billows like a Jeremy Clarkson gif

None of the above should be considered spoilers to anyone who’s ever seen a Mission: Impossible movie. So yeah, it’s all there, plus a ton of other stuff none of us asked for…

Mission Considerable

The biggest issue with Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is that we have to wait a full two hours and 20 minutes before we get any proper Mission Impossibling.

Tom Cruise’s one-man crusade to save cinema is laudable, but his execution, of late, has been lacking.

The previous Mission: Impossible movie, Dead Reckoning Part One, had serious issues at the box office.

It cost a lot to make but wasn’t as popular as previous instalments.

The fact that it was a Part One, rather than a standalone, may have had something to do with it, as did the fact that it was released in a busy summer slot where it had to compete against “Barbenheimer”.

It’s a shame, too, because Dead Reckoning was a decent movie, posessing the one ingredient which Final Reckoning severely lacks, an abundance of set-piece stunts, including a kick-ass car chase.

And that’s my main criticism of Final Reckoning, it’s not so much that the tone is different or that it’s a long movie (both are true) – all would be forgiven if there were more action set pieces dotted throughout.

Instead, Final Reckoning seems to forget it’s meant to be a dumb action movie and instead tries to be everything except a Mission: Impossible movie.

At any given moment the movie is trying to be The Hunt For Red October, War Games, Doctor Strangelove and The Matrix, all while beating us over the head with religious metaphors and bullshit about fate, faith, family and all that other Hollywood bollocks.

The only time it remembers to be a Mission: Impossible movie is when it clusterbombs us with references to previous Mission: Impossible movies – because it’s all connected! 

Don’t get me wrong, the stunts that are in the movie are jaw-dropping, particularly the finale, but Final Reckoning doesn’t want us to focus on the stunts, instead, we’re meant to be more engaged with the story.

And herein lies the problem.

Final Reckoning positions itself as the highest stakes MI movie yet but finds itself groaning under the weight of its clunky dialogue, expansive cast and excessive backstory elements.

Which is a problem considering 75% of it is exposition – when all we really want is to see Tom “The Mad Stuntman” Cruise risking his life for our amusement.

But there’s no time for that because everyone gets a backstory and every new scene change gets its own cast of characters, so we get more backstories.

Most frustrating of all, though, is that we get backstories for everything and everyone except the main baddie Gabriel.

Seriously, there are husky dogs in this movie with more character development.

If you’re waiting on an expansion on his motivation or backstory related to his past with Ethan, as already established in the previous movie, forget about it, you get squat.

Because every single other person in Final Reckoning already has a backstory with Ethan and we need to learn about that instead. Especially if there’s an opportunity to flashback to a previous movie.

I’m reminded of Hugh Laurie’s character Prince Ludwig in Blackadder 2, the so-called master of disguise.

As a villain, Gabriel’s motivations are so nebulous he’d get kicked out the MCU for being too shallow.

Ditto the Entity. It’s like Skynet with severe schizophrenia.

There’s a sequence where Ethan interfaces with it to try and gain insights but instead we get a bizarre VR premonition sequence which is essentially an excuse to show us more old footage, previously-on recaps and obligatory mushroom clouding. 

The entity – I think – wants to wipe us out Terminator style while the world’s governments are in a race to capture its source code to try and control it.

The only problem is the code is buried at the bottom of the sea in the bowels of a Russian sub.

So, the fate of humanity rests on extracting some of that original code from a Russian computer in a sunken submarine – at the bottom of the sea.  

The alternative is either nuclear war (not ideal) or a world without the internet where  financial markets crash.

I was personally rooting for that last one. (I still live in hope.)

To be fair, the submarine sequence is impressive, especially on a big IMAX screen.

It’s got all the hold-your-breath tension we’ve come to expect from the franchise complete with Ethan Hunt’s famous magical lungs, but on a much grander scale.

Thing is, I found myself thinking of the broken cinema kiosks from earlier, located right here on the surface. They’re not working yet somehow the electronics in the rusty ole Russian sub at the bottom of are still operational.

Also, the evil AI also wants to go live in an underground bunker in South Africa. Yeah ok that makes sense, because where else would an evil AI want to go, right?

(So the Entity is Grok perhaps? Might explain why it can’t get it shit together.)

You know it’s funny, although the movie was shot in 2022, it seems more relevant in 2025 as many of the themes the story raises have only become more relevant.

The rise of the evil AI, the difficulty in telling truth from fake news, the brainless nihilism of the “Apostles” who want the Entity to nuke everyone while believing they’ll be spared because they drank the AI Kool-Aid.

It captures the zeitgeist alright. AI is making us more stupid by the second until we end up with leaders so thick they’ll nuke us all over a deepfake video.  

And while watching it there was a collective sense in the cinema of, “yeah probably”.

Which is as good a time as any to mention the cheesy sequence which repeats several times throughout the movie. We see missiles in their silos, with rack shot closeups of their various flags.

It’s reminiscent of the type of stock footage scenes in movies from decades past, but then you realise that most of those countries are currently engaged in hot military operations. (Fair play North Korea for keeping your cool.)

Every time this scene repeated, I couldn’t help thinking, “wouldn’t it be ironic if we were all nuked right now in this cinema while sitting through another ten-minute exposition dump about the looming nuclear threat?”

Which is not what you’re supposed to be thinking about while paying through the nose for cinematic escapism.

The question then is less about whether or not this really is the last Mission: Impossible movie and whether or not we’ll see Tom Cruise return to the role.

But whether our species endures long enough for the inevitable reboot to happen.

The Good:

Stunts: Look, it’s a Mission: Impossible movie, and though there’s nowhere near as many stunts as the other movies in this franchise, they’re at least up to the same insanely high standard.

Tom Cruise is one of a kind and I doubt we’ll ever see a movie star who can match his intensity, insanity and dedication to the craft.

The submarine set piece is one of the best underwater sequences I’ve ever seen and the final plane sequence involves the kind of next level stuntsmanship that would make Buster Keaton and Jackie Chan both shout, “are you fucking nuts Tom?!”

The Bad:

The Music: doing the score for a Mission: Impossible movie should be the easiest job in the world, because all the hard work’s already done for you by the great Lalo Schifrin.

The rest can just be orchestral flourishes to punctuate the action or tension while we wait for the chance to hear that infamous theme.

Maybe we might have felt the stakes of this movie more had the music sounded better but I found it quite grating.

Finishing Each Other’s Sentences: This is a common trope in heist movies but generally happens maybe once per movie in the scene where they discuss how the heist will go down.

In Final Reckoning, it happens in every second or third scene and it’s so jarring I can’t focus on what they’re talking about. …Wait, what was that? Seems like an important detail but it doesn’t matter, it’s not like Tom Cruise is going to drown anyway.

Mission Expositional: In those rare scenes where characters are not Soderberging their sentences, we’re invariably introduced to a new set of extraneous characters who all have to have some connection to Ethan Hunt. 

Remember that bit character in the first movie which came out when half the people in the cinema weren’t even born yet?

Don’t worry, here’s an elongated flashback sequence and, since it’s been 15 minutes since we last showed it, here’s the nuclear missile countdown montage again to remind you of the stakes.

Spectre McMuffins: Remember how 2015’s Spectre attempted to tie all the various frayed plot elements from the Daniel Craig movies together? Like literally with bits of string?

Le Chiffre, Silva, that pointless French guy who just kinda stood there because of the writers’ strike? Haha! It was Blofeld with an elaborate scheme all along! …Yeah, bollocks it was.

Final Reckoning plays the same game but worse. Remember that McGuffin you stole back from… was that the one with Phillip Seymour Hoffman?

Doesn’t matter. It was the Entity all along! Because you see…

Everything Happens For A Reason: Oh, Christ, seriously? I want to punch this script. Look, I know Tom Cruise has a massive ego, even by Hollywood standards.

But Final Reckoning doesn’t half bash you over the head with the whole Chosen One plot device and now suddenly Tom Cruise isn’t just Ethan Hunt, he’s also John Connor, Neo Anderson and Paul Atreides all rolled into one.

The Impossible:

Tick Tock: despite its voluminous runtime, extended flashback sequences and the thick morass of exposition to wade through, Final Reckoning still finds time to add in the longest countdown sequences of any Mission: Impossible movie to date.

Pissing Impossible: All the while we’re waiting for action sequences which get set up only to be replaced by more dialogue – the action movie equivalent of edging.

When the much-marketed biplane sequence finally arrived, spectacular though it was, I was giving serious consideration to relieving myself into my big coca cola cup. It’s a dark cinema, everyone’s looking at the screen, nobody would notice, right? …Ahhh that’s better!

A Dirty Plothole: My friend had a lingering question once the movie ended, “So what? They just set off a dirty bomb in London and never mention it again?”

Which is a fair point. Surely there’d be some repercussions from such a disaster.  Some gentle scolding from Keir Starmer for starters. 

Standout Scenes

• The submarine sequence is spectacular and done on such a scale that it makes The Abyss feel like that time James Cameron dropped his iPhone in the toilet.

• It’s topped only by the biplane finale. Watching this reminded me of how a Bond final baddie fight felt back when I was a kid. Except this was more intense because, unlike those, where they would cut back and forth from actor to stuntman, Tom Cruise was doing it all for real.

Nuke Em!

Also want to give an additional shoutout to the nuclear powers ready their missiles montage. I’m not sure how many times this sequence repeated but it felt as though it was repeated every 15 minutes or so.

After a while, you could sense this “yay! Here we go again” vibe from the cinema as a whole as we relished in the impending annihilation of our species.

By the end I was more entertained by the various tuts and boos for each of the world’s nuclear powers – some more than others I must say. (Spoiler alert: genocidal skyfairy-worshipping nutjobs won the prize.)

Mission Unsustainable

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning cost $400 million to make, and apparently needs to make over $700 million to break even, which makes it the most insane Tom Cruise stunt to date.

Given that its predecessor was also an expensive flop you gotta wonder why the hell they decided to make an even more expensive movie with a bloated 170-minute runtime. 

Because Tom Cruise That’s why.

At the ripe old age of 63, the venerable movie maverick could just as easily retire from the movie business.

Instead he’s dangling from airplanes, literally risking his life to get your ass in the cinema.

Granted we gotta sit through a shitload of schlock to finally reach that point. But is it worth it?

Aaaahhh…

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning may well be the most difficult movie I’ll ever have to review.

By almost every measure it’s an absolutely terrible movie.

But it’s also an unmissable cinematic experience.

I saw it on IMAX and it was intense.

And given the risks involved in making Mission: Impossible movies, financial and otherwise, not to mention the state of Hollywood in general, it’s fair to say we’ll never see the likes of this again.

The actual script is pure garbage. Yet the sheer audacity of the stunts and production design prevent this from being a two-star shitshow, forcing me to doubt the validity of the entire star-based rating system.

Does it really deserve to get the same rating as Alto Knights which has a far superior script but zero visual flair?

Absolutely not. But with five-star spectacle and two-star dialogue, I decided to split the difference and that’s how we got three.

Overall I enjoyed it because I left the cinema satisfied.

In fact I’m so glad I went to see it in the cinema because it means I never have to watch this movie again.

My review is getting almost as long as the movie itself, so I’m going to skip the “also watch” section at the end and just recommend you watch the other franchise entries instead.

Admittedly, I can’t tell one Mission: Impossible movie from the next (I kinda remember the first one, then there’s one with Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and the Burj Khalifa one… But don’t ask me the names).

I’ll never forget this one though.

I have a test, I call it the Predator test. I switch on the TV at random and Predator is on – no matter what my original plans were, I can’t leave, I always need to sit down and watch the movie to the end.

We all have movies like that. If there’s a Mission: Impossible movie on, I might do the same, maybe not the entire movie but I’ll wait and watch one of the big stunt scenes first.

“We’re late for the funeral!”

“Yeah I know but Tom’s just about to go sprinting down the Burj Khalifa!”

I mean you gotta stay and watch, right?

Not so with Final Reckoning. I never want to endure that dialogue again.

But you gotta see it on the big screen. You really do.

I know, that sounds completely fucking weird. But just do it, and you’ll soon understand.

I’m reminded of that episode of Father Ted where Graham Norton describes The English Patient, “it was very long and far-fetched and very, very boring but…”