This is it. Tom Cruise and Ethan Hunt’s final ride with Mission: Impossible. There was Dead Reckoning – Part One before it and now we have The Final Reckoning. There’s a lot to this movie. It’s nearly 3 hours long and it’s the culmination of an entire eight-film saga dating back to 1996’s Mission: Impossible. For longtime fans, there’s plenty to sink your teeth into. You have callbacks galore with characters referencing events of the past and even some retcons to things that happened before. For a new fan diving in or someone who hasn’t watched the movies in a long time, this could be a bumpy ride. Let’s dive into the good, the bad, and even the ugly of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.
First, we’ll get you up to speed on this mission. Dead Reckoning – Part One ends with basically Ethan Hunt losing. Gabriel and The Entity are left unchecked and the world is plunged into chaos. The opening 5 minutes of the film gives a pretty nice summary of the events leading up to the film. It’s tied up in a nice voiceover from the President of the United States (played by Angela Bassett). The team is scattered all about the place, Luther is in medical hospice, Ethan is in hiding, and everyone else is praying he comes out. Ethan has the key to the submarine that holds the source code that can be used to stop The Entity though, and that’s the only hope for mankind against complete nuclear annihilation.
The Good Of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
There’s a lot to like here. Tom Cruise is insane and the stunts he’s performing at his age are garnering plenty of oohs and ahhs. Those stunts aren’t for nothing though. They help show that Ethan Hunt is about as desperate as it comes. The action and everything on display here are fantastic. The entire film feels like the third act of this entire saga, but the last 45 minutes are really where this kicks into gear. Besides the plane stunt that’s been all over marketing, Cruise is going through sunken submarines, battling knife-wielding dudes in his undies, and of course he’s trying to save the world from a rogue sentient computer program.
Hayley Atwell and the supporting cast here are also great. There are some big name actors that basically reside in single-scene cameos, but the highlight of all of these is Trammell Tillman as Captain Bledsoe. If I could write a character that was basically the audience personified as a submarine captain that meets Ethan Hunt for the first time, it would be Tillman’s performance here. He’s apprehensive at first but then quickly verges into heat check single-scene MVP. Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames have had plenty of movies to hone their characters and they’re both at the top of their game here. No notes.
Pom Klementieff is also fantastic and gets some of the most badass hand-to-hand fights/stunts here. She even gets a gargantuan moment in the third act that is necessary to the entire plot to stop The Entity.
The rest of the cast including Bassett, Nick Offerman, Mark Gatiss, Charles Parnell, Rolf Saxon, Shea Whigham, Greg Davis, Hannah Waddingham, Henry Czerny, Janet McTeer, and Holt McCallany do well, especially in the tight scenes near the end with the President having to make some tough decisions with her chain of advisors around her.
Christopher McQuarrie directs about as tightly as he can, considering this is the culmination of almost three decades of movies. It’s a lot to get through, but his tight direction and the excellent cinematography during some of the more exposition-heavy scenes help guide you through as an audience.
Finally, the score from Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey has some excellent tracks. The score gets your blood pumping through some of the most tense scenes, and near the en,d when you can faintly hear a softer version of the classic Mission: Impossible theme, it’s like a jolt to the heart.
The Bad Of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Like I was saying before, there’s a lot to get through in this movie. You’re wrapping up what amounts to the holy text of modern action spy thrillers that started in 1996. That’s going to be a titanic task for anyone. So when doing something that massive, the cracks start to show, particularly in the script. It’s hard to see anywhere where they could have made cuts for sure, so it just means the film feels a bit bloated between the big action scenes.
For fans of the series, these retcons that they make here, might be a bit groan-worthy. There’s also a subplot between Ethan Hunt and Shea Whigham’s character that kind of comes out of nowhere. Whigham’s character is also underused for how important he plays to the plot.
The denouement of the film also has a slightly confusing moment that is much talked about in the film leading up to it, but then it just doesn’t happen and nothing is explained. (Being vague as to not spoil things). It does leave things open for more adventures, but at this point, this is the biggest plot that Ethan Hunt has saved the world from, like Fast & The Furious, the only way to go bigger is space or something like that.
The Ugly Of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Yes, what completely doesn’t work in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. Going back to Dead Reckoning – Part One, Gabriel and The Entity are incredibly weak villains. Esai Morales is back as Gabriel and his performance is just as toothless here as in that film. He’s just not a match for Ethan in the slightest. It comes from the issue of having the real big bad be a computer program that is nameless and faceless. So the head henchmen is gonna have to do some heavy lifting. Previous villains have been at the very least completely menacing to Ethan, and the worst thing that Gabriel has done is a retconned moment where he kills Ethan’s first love.
Morales is woefully miscast in this role that should have been someone on par with Ethan. It’s not all his fault, his character is not written well and in almost every moment is seen running away. Not having something to actively root against, instead seeing maps of the world with their nuclear arsenals going under The Entity’s control. Even the most lethargic of villains in this series have felt like either equals to Ethan or menacing in some way.
The Verdict
Those bad and ugly moments of this film don’t drag it down to a worrying degree, though. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is gargantuan. It’s a leviathan of a film that expects a lot out of the audience, but it also provides some absolutely thrilling and tense moments. When Tom Cruise is in a pressure suit searching the bottom of the ocean in a sunken submarine, my hands were gripping the sides of the chair. When he’s diving and ducking around a moving bi-plane mid-air, that’s where the film is at its best. The Mission: Impossible series has always been like this. You get through the spy jargon and some slower, more methodical moments for the action scenes and especially in these later films, Tom Cruise doing some Buster Keaton-level stunts.
The cinematic magic and fun of watching a movie is still here with Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. If this is the last film in the series, it goes off with a bang, sending the world to a better place and Ethan Hunt and his team to a nice retirement. We’ll have to see if that’s truly the end or just a reset to less stakes later on. But for now, this is a thrilling conclusion to this saga that was started so many years ago.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning releases in theaters on May 23rd, 2025.
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