Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (3 ½ stars out of 4)
There’s an interesting way to note the passage of time between the first “Mission: Impossible” film from 1996 and the eighth and final installment in 2025. At one point in the first film, Tom Cruise’s protagonist Ethan Hunt uses some primitive email technology to contact an arms dealer named Max. 20 years later, the film’s main villain is a sentient Artificial Intelligence that is trying to take control of world’s nuclear arsenals.
And yet strangely the movie ends with a biplane chase.
“Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” is the second part of a story that started with 2023’s “Dead Reckoning,” which introduced the an AI called The Entity as the ultimate antagonist against Hunt and his team of super-spies. The first film followed the team as they tracked down a special key that would grant access to The Entity. “Final Reckoning” is the story of Hunt using that key before The Entity can complete its own objective: use the world’s nukes to rid the planet of all those pesky humans.
Since “Final Reckoning” is the second half of a two-parter, as well as the finale for the franchise, director Christopher McQuarrie doesn’t go through the usual motions to set up the characters and the story. While most of the M:I tropes are in place, the standard narrative beats are set aside for some recap summary and a tone that implies it’s time to get down to business. With the key in hand, Hunt has to find the Entity’s source code, which is embedded in the sunken wreckage of a submarine somewhere in the North Atlantic. From there, Ethan will pair the code with a special virus designed by tech wiz Luther (Ving Rhames) that should terminate the AI.
As has become standard, especially in the more recent “Mission: Impossible” films, the cast has a lot of moving parts. Ethan and Luther are joined by Benji (Simon Pegg), new agency recruit Grace (Haley Atwell), and Paris (Pom Klementieff), the assassin who switched sides at the end of the last film. Paris’s old boss Gabriel (Esai Morales) is the primary human antagonist, estranged from The Entity but still determined to play a role in the upcoming Armageddon, and Ethan’s old boss Kittridge (Henry Czerny) is also in pursuit of his rogue agent. In the meantime, former CIA head Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) is now the US president, and she offers the audience a political perspective of The Entity’s exploits as she tries to keep a group of panicked nations from doing The Entity’s job for it.
Along with the return of Czerny, the political intrigue nods to the franchise’s more suspense-heavy beginnings under the hand of ’96 director Brian de Palma, and fans of the first film will appreciate an unexpected character callback that feels like the best kind of fan service. But the movie ultimately comes down to a sequence of action set pieces that have become the signature element of the franchise, and true to form, Cruise dazzles us with some mind-blowing third act stunt work.
Altogether, “Final Reckoning” adds up to a satisfying finale for one of the few longtime franchises that doesn’t feel like it’s lost a step or twelve in the last ten years. McQuarrie’s film isn’t perfect—the more-heavy-handed-than-usual dialogue has a way of “telling” the audience how important everything is rather than letting the story “show” it, and you can’t help but feel like the Atwell character is a replacement for what Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust would have been doing had she not decided to leave the franchise. But “Dead Reckoning” is still a thrilling film and a worthy capstone to the franchise, and barring the release of any unexpected “Barbenheimers” in the next few weeks, Cruise and co. should be sitting on one of the summer’s biggest hits.
Now we just have to hope someone comes up with something that can fill the hole these movies are going to leave behind.
“Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” is rated PG-13 for sequences of action violence and mayhem.