Movie Review: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

By John Corrado

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is the eighth entry in the action franchise, and it’s fashioned as a sort of swan song for the series that began nearly thirty years ago in 1996.

Over the course of this franchise – especially in the last three directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who returns here – Mission: Impossible has settled into being a showcase for Tom Cruise to pull off increasingly insane stunts.

Which is also when this series is at its best, and The Final Reckoning is no different. If this nearly three-hour movie can get a bit bogged down with everything happening around Cruise doing his thing, the film still delivers in terms of these exciting set-pieces.

Narratively, The Final Reckoning directly follows 2023’s Dead Reckoning (which was initially released as Part One, with this film intended as Part Two, before the title was changed). That film was about the search for both halves of a cruciform key. This one is about finding what it opens.

A rogue AI system known as “the Entity” is trying to take over the world by gaining control of several country’s nuclear arsenals. Cruise’s IMF agent Ethan Hunt is trying to stop it, and take down Gabriel (Esai Morales), the man who controls it. Hunt and his Impossible Mission Force team – including stalwarts Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), and new recruits from last time around Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Paris (Pom Klementieff) – traverse the globe in their pursuit.

As a potential series finale, there is an element of this film that feels dangerously close to fan service, with The Final Reckoning featuring montages of clips from the previous seven films. The story also tries to tie all of them together by reintroducing certain elements and characters, with a lot of callbacks to the first and third movies in particular (so it will help to revisit those ones beforehand). It’s not entirely ineffective, but there is a grandiosity to it. The film runs long at 170 minutes (the longest in the series), and can feel bloated with everything it is trying to do.

It could’ve been a little tighter, and takes a bit too long to get going. But, if The Final Reckoning is not quite as strong as the last few entries, it’s still a solid blockbuster overall. The set-pieces continue to astound, and the film delivers a suspenseful final hour. It’s all skillfully assembled by McQuarrie and crew, with the film doing a good job of cutting back and forth between action that is happening simultaneously. Again, we watch these movies to see Tom Cruise do cool stunts, and he more than delivers with the exciting plane finale alone.

While the train sequence in Dead Reckoning was a direct homage to Buster Keaton’s The General, there is a silent movie element to this high flying set-piece as well (at one point, the score even swells with every stab of an enemy knife). It’s built on the pure visual thrill of seeing Cruise hanging on the wing of a biplane, and trying to climb into the cockpit. If this takes him up into the sky, the other big set-piece here is deep in the ocean involving a submarine, which allows for some cool visuals.

If the insane run of Rogue Nation, Fallout, and Dead Reckoning remain the high points for this series, there was somewhat of a feeling that McQuarrie and Cruise couldn’t possibly go any higher. As such, if Final Reckoning does end up being the last one, it feels a little sprawling. But they do deliver in the big moments when it matters most; you know, the moments when it feels like Cruise is risking his life to save cinema. See it for Cruise doing his movie star thing on the biggest screen possible.