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The time has come for Tom Cruise and his merry crew to band together for one last mission in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.
It has taken seven films over the course of 29 years to get here, so of course returning writer-director Christopher McQuarrie goes out with the series’ longest running instalment to date. Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Henry Czerny, Pom Klementieff, Shea Whigham, Greg Tarzan Davis, Esai Morales, Rolf Saxon and Angela Bassett return to reprise their roles alongside Cruise with new faces Holt McCallany, Janet McTeer, Nick Offerman, Hannah Waddingham, Charles Parnell, Tramell Tillman and more joining the cast.
With such a big ensemble of new and returning characters, Final Reckoning is bound to feel bloated and evidently so as McQuarrie struggles to piece together every puzzle he’s broken down to feature everyone on the call sheet, resulting in a fragmented film relying on Cruise running around the globe for a chance at cohesion.
Following the events of Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (2023), Final Reckoning sees Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and team (Atwell, Rhames, Pegg, Klementieff, and Davis) continue his mission to stop Gabriel (Morales) from obtaining "the Entity”, an advanced, self-aware rogue AI capable of penetrating cyber-security and predicting probable futures. Should he fail, it may be the end of the world as we know it.
Final Reckoning may not require its audience to have knowledge on the prior films in the series but it would serve you well if you do because it goes all the way back to when it first started back in 1996, down to the very moment when Hunt stole from C.I.A. Analyst William Donloe (hence, the return of Saxon), basically signifying there wouldn’t have been these impossible missions if Hunt hadn’t done that in the first place. If anything is clear about the M:I series is that it is the Tom Cruise Ethan Hunt show, so naturally it goes full circle back to him. The film surprisingly doesn’t play on sentimentality in the way you’d assume it would but where it lacks emotional depth, it’s made up for with the many thrilling action sequences.
The whopping 169-minute action spy film takes its time drawing out each action sequence that at its best, showcases Cruise’s capabilities and unfaltering commitment to his craft. While this may seem the obvious choice for what is probably Hunt’s final mission, the film’s pacing suffers from the extension and the rest of the cast mere pawns in the Cruise game.
If Final Reckoning was meant to be for Ethan Hunt what No Time To Die (2021) was for James Bond, it’s lacking. The stakes are always going to be high for Hunt and he always manages to save the day. And there will always be stakes. The short of clear finality is misleading if factoring in the way the film is marketed.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is sitting through long extended takes of Tom Cruise showing off his devotion to being his own stuntman. Is this really the end? Guess you’ll have to see for yourself to find out.
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