Hail the Messiah: “Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning”

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025, dir. Christopher McQuarrie):

“We’ll figure it out.” During Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, a tense moment is punctured by this line, which could also serve as a mantra and mission statement for the entire M:I franchise. Whether it’s Tom Cruise clinging to a plane for dear life or improvising a last-minute plan to avert nuclear holocaust, these movies get high on the adrenaline rush of figuring things out on the fly. It wasn’t always this way. The original Mission: Impossible TV series was defined by the coolness (and coldness) of its approach; the pleasure of watching the show was akin to witnessing a checkmate unfold in real time, with each member of the cast taking turns playing knight, rook or queen as the situation demanded. The first Mission: Impossible movie paid homage to the TV show’s clockwork-precise gambits via a gravity-defying infiltration of the Pentagon, with Cruise’s gung-ho acrobatics the extra spice on top. Ever since then, the series has quietly been at war with itself: every stratagem that relies on a mask or a complicated switcheroo has been counterbalanced by the sight of a sweaty Cruise chucking caution to the winds and throwing himself into crazy stunts, as each successive M:I movie has downplayed intricate plotting in favor of more baroque and sinewy set-pieces.

With The Final Reckoning, all pretense has been dropped (the mask has come off, you might say). If there was ever a doubt that M:I is supposed to be about anything other than Cruise’s hot-dog heroics, that doubt is curb-stomped within the film’s first few minutes, as we’re thrown a dozen quick-flash flashbacks to Cruise doing insane Cruise-like things from the previous seven M:I movies. “You were always the best of men,” President Sloane (Angela Bassett) reassures him (and us) in a tape-recorded message, and nothing less than the best of men will do in these scary times, as the sentient AI known as The Entity, like a false messiah, has amassed a cult of fanatics and acolytes as it has assumed control of all information on the globe (not to mention a ton of nukes). The only one who can stop the Entity is Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, who’s gained some hefty messiah-like powers himself, including the ability to cripple the world in a cyber-apocalypse. It’s a scenario that would flatter any ego-fueled movie star: who else can defeat the most omnipotent super-villain in the history of humankind but our leading man? Even the Entity refers to Hunt as “The Chosen One,” foreshadowing a conflict of Biblical proportions. And if that weren’t enough, The Final Reckoning hints that this may be Cruise’s last go-round in the M:I universe, the closing chapter in an epic legend, the kind of movie tailor-made for the tag line “It’s all been leading up to this.”

On a meta-textual level, this clash of man and machine messiahs reflects Cruise’s oft-stated crusade to save cinema—or at least, the kind of cinema that generates $1 billion in box office and reminds the world that Tinseltown is still A-numero-uno for mass entertainment—with human ingenuity, sweat and tears privileged over AI-generated algorithms. And if The Final Reckoning‘s immediate predecessor Dead Reckoning was weighed down with exposition and a portentous tone, one couldn’t be blamed for thinking and hoping that Final Reckoning would be a more robust affair, given the fate-of-the-world stakes as well as the story’s elegiac underpinnings. Surely with all the heavy lifting out of the way, Cruise and writer/director Christopher McQuarrie could put pedal to metal and recapture some of the fleet-footed, brawny fun of previous installments.

It’s thus disappointing that The Final Reckoning is even more of a slog coming out of the gates than Dead Reckoning. Cruise and McQuarrie are known for fashioning the M:I movies around action beats, with scripts constructed on the fly, and like a jerry-rigged vehicle shedding parts as it putters down the road, The Final Reckoning is rickety and rushed in presentation. The film’s front half is loaded with exposition that says much but matters little, with even basic motivations and stakes as clear as mud. Often the movie flashes ahead to “what-if” scenarios, suggesting that whole segments were shot, then abandoned in favor of the jumbled mess we’re left with. For all the repeated incantations about cruciform keys and “podkovas” and “poison pills” and how one must reach point A to perform action B to get result C, the laborious set-up can’t disguise the fact that the plot boils down to joining two doodads together like puzzle pieces. To maintain the illusion of breadth if not depth, a host of new characters played by the likes of Nick Offerman, Janet McTeer, Holt McCallany and Hannah Waddingham are introduced, only to be given little to do.

Dead Reckoning suffered from similar issues, but at least it had some fun with its premise of an AI overlord, as the Entity infiltrated our heroes’ laptops and cameras to warp perceptions of reality, looming on displays like the most malevolent screen-saver ever. In Final Reckoning, the Entity is all but MIA, reduced to making a few doom-laden statements (“The end is coming, Ethan”) and humming away in the background, stealing codes for nuclear missiles—something any standard-issue bad guy from previous M:I installments could have done in their sleep. Couple the Entity’s non-presence with Esai Morales’ cackling Gabriel (an epicurean foe in Dead Reckoning but wasted here) and you get a sub-par set of villains. In stark contrast, Cruise’s Hunt is puffed up to mythological proportions. “Every risk you’ve taken, every personal sacrifice you made, has brought this world another sunrise,” Sloane tells him. Try as he might to look self-deprecating in the face of these grand statements, Cruise can’t help but revel in his importance, but unlike Top Gun: Maverick, where he injected grace notes of melancholy into his character, Final Reckoning finds him in full messianic glory, soldiering on with a permanent grimace, the weight of all our sunrises on his shoulders. Even his returning teammates (Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames), whom one can usually count on for a wisecrack or three, carry the burden of their mission-ing. “We live and die in the shadows for those we hold close and for those we never meet,” Rhames intones with the solemnity of an Old Testament passage. (He should have added: “And we wear masks. Lots of masks.”)

Final Reckoning takes over an hour to waddle up to its first show-stopping moment, and the whole affair clocks in at nearly three hours (pretty ironic for a film series obsessed with accelerated countdowns and completing missions in compressed time frames). One of the joys of the early M:I movies compared to other recent spy franchises (like the Jason Bourne movies or Daniel Craig’s Bond cycle) was their disposability: light as soufflés, they were unconcerned with continuity, or presenting a coherent unifying narrative. But over the past four entries, Cruise and McQuarrie have strained to give the enterprise a deeper meaning, and Final Reckoning is the culmination of this approach, as references to previous movies and characters come fast and furious, as if the series had some grand overarching design behind its storytelling to begin with. Some of these references are entertaining (Rolf Saxon’s Donloe, last seen puking his guts out in the very first M:I movie three decades ago, makes a touching reappearance), some are inconsequential (Shea Whigham’s spec ops commando turns out to be the son of a past IMF member, resulting in a manufactured bit of tension that barely registers), and some are plain mystifying, such as a ham-fisted attempt to tie in the Entity’s origins with a MacGuffin that was pilfered in M:I 3. All of this comes off as dithering around when what we really want is the good stuff: the latest death-defying stunt, the final countdown to Armageddon.

When the big set-pieces finally arrive, they come as a relief, even if they crib from other properties: a sub standoff with the Russians plays like a subplot from The Hunt for Red October, while a perilous deep ocean dive recalls The Abyss. The sight of Cruise ping-ponging inside a sunken sub as it does a barrel roll down the side of an underwater ridge is an undeniable thrill, while a seat-of-the-pants finale finds him clinging to an in-flight biplane like a modern-day Buster Keaton, reminding us that these films come alive when he risks life and limb. Even if the script is fixated on Hunt, some of the supporting actors get moments to shine: as a sardonic sub captain, Tramell Tillman (Severance) is one of the only actors who seems to realize that this all should be treated as a lark, while on the other end of the spectrum, Pom Klementieff gives good deadpan as an assassin-turned-good-guy who can’t help telling it like it is. (When asked if she has medical expertise, she replies with puzzlement: “I kill people.”) A close-quarters fight between Cruise and an Entity acolyte also contains the film’s best one-liner, as Cruise elbows his assailant in the face: “You’re…spending…too much time…on…the Internet!” Such moments of actual human interaction are few and far between, and when it’s not indulging in a big-time stunt, most of the film’s running time is devoted to rushed explanations and speechifying.

It all adds up to a lesson in diminishing returns, where the fleeting moments of fun can’t outweigh the bagginess of the rest of the production. There’s little doubt that Cruise and McQuarrie are creating the types of movies they want to create, but the fugitive flashbacks to Brian DePalma’s first M:I movie in this film remind us that all that’s required for good entertainment are simple elements and crisp execution: some sleight of hand, the sight of Cruise dangling from a height, a shot of a tactical knife tumbling through the air, with the fate of our heroes resting on where it lands. Bloated with its own grandness, bearing the weight of an entire franchise like Sisyphus, Final Reckoning is a universe away from such simplicity, and suffers for it. The movie ends with a lingering shot of Cruise literally holding the power of a God in his hand, his wry smile offering the possibility, however slim, that Ethan Hunt may yet return after all. We’re left with the grim assurance that even as the missions grow ever more convoluted and the mood ever drearier, Tom Cruise will prevail über alles, as messiahs always must. ■