‘MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - THE FINAL RECKONING’ Sees One Last Sunrise

Allegedly, the mission is over. You can see it in the weathered map that is Tom Cruise’s face. Feel it in his and frequent collaborator Christopher McQuarrie’s willingness to get a little saccharine and sentimental with this nearly 30-year-old property. It lingers in the final acknowledgments exchanged across the ragtag team—the old, the new, and the totally WTF. This is the end. And yet, after The Final Reckoning, I wish that Mission: Impossible—much like Cruise himself—could run forever.

This, despite the fact that this eighth entry is the longest in the series, the most overtly nostalgia-baiting, the most narratively excessive, loosely edited, and sloppily scripted. The first act ranks among the worst material in the franchise: obsessively paying lip service to its own history, awkwardly retconning in new details to conjure up some unnecessary in-universe serendipity, and relying on excessive flashbacks to remind us who did what and when. The magic is that even though it starts by digging itself into a treacherous hole, Cruise and McQuarrie still somehow manage to land the plane and deliver a satisfying conclusion. There’s something odd about how McQuarrie seems to have unlearned the lessons of Fallout—a film that was universally acclaimed, critically adored, and a box office juggernaut. That movie was pure momentum: all gas, no brakes, start to finish. Yet, for some reason, with the last two installments, he’s backed away from trusting the audience. Instead, he leans into spoon-feeding, delivering bloated, often incoherent exposition dumps that grind the pacing to a halt. Scenes stop dead so characters can deliver overwrought monologues explaining what might happen, what could happen, or how the inevitable triple-cross is actually the ace up someone’s sleeve. It’s both silly and kind of insulting—especially for an audience that’s spent years riding shotgun with characters who routinely peel off their own faces to reveal someone else underneath. IMF devotees simply don’t need that much handholding.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning picks up after the hit-and-miss seventh installment, Dead Reckoning, where IMF agent Ethan Hunt and his mission-critical crew—Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg), and newcomer Grace (Hayley Atwell)—are tasked with stopping a malevolent A.I. known as The Entity and its slick, shadowy human handler Gabriel (Esai Morales). Last we saw, Hunt had snagged the cruciform key, a MacGuffin capable of controlling the Entity and thus bestowing godlike power. Every superpower on the planet wants it. Only Hunt and co. want to destroy it—lest it fall into literally anyone else’s hands.

Cue a jaunt to the Bering Sea and a highly pressurized dive to a sunken submarine containing the Entity’s source code—a dive Hunt eventually performs shirtless, because of course he does. The globetrotting continues in search of Gabriel, who holds a crucial piece of the puzzle. While The Final Reckoning can’t match the relentless stunt barrage of Fallout, it still delivers when it counts. Cruise and McQuarrie craft at least one jaw-dropping sequence: Cruise dangling from the wing of a vintage biplane, grappling mid-air at over 140 mph, all done in-camera, no CGI. Their obsession with practical effects reaches a fever pitch, and for once, you’re not entirely sure Hunt’s going to make it out alive—something rarely felt in this franchise.

Maximalist in every way, The Final Reckoning leans hard into the silliest aspects of M:I iconography. Somehow, it manages to feature both the most Tom Cruise sprinting and the most shirtless Tom Cruise, who clearly remains very impressed with his own carved-Adonis physique at the sprightly age of 62. And honestly, fair enough. The would-be grandpa is fitter than most 20-somethings at your local gym, and unquestionably more capable of executing stunt work at vertigo-inducing heights. But it’s the sheer weight of plot exposition that’s the most bulked-up here. The Final Reckoning stretches to nearly three hours, a runtime so swollen it suggests the editorial call to action self-destructed before anyone could read it.

The girthy runtime allows for McQuarrie to enlist a whole new swath of recruits from some of TV’s most beloved corners, including a scene-stealing Trammel Tillman (Severance), Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreations), Holt McCallany (Mindhunter), Katy M. O’Brian (The Mandolorian), and Hannah Waddington (Ted Lasso). And while The Final Reckoning is driving forward, it never takes its eye off the rearview, mobilizing OG franchise players like Henry Czerny (Mission Impossible) and Rolf Saxon (Mission Impossible). Do they all get their moment to shine and justify the film’s extended ticking wick? Not quite, but it’s hard to begrudge McQuarrie and co. for trying to slip as much everything into this grand finale as possible. After all, if this really is the final mission, they’re going out like Ethan Hunt: at full sprint.

So although it’s goodbye for now, I still hope Ethan Hunt gets the call again—and for Tom Cruise, that it remains impossible not to answer.

CONCLUSION: A fitting sendoff, ‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’ represents everything the mega-franchise has come to represent in its nearly thirty-year run. The over-the-top plotting and loose editorial prowess keeps its from scraping the best that the series had to offer but the towering practical stunts and genuine team camaraderie make this a mission well worth accepting.