Action
Adventure
Review: ‘Mission: Impossible- The Final Reckoning’ Brings the Iconic Action Franchise to an Overly Long and Overly Hyped Conclusion
May 21, 2025Ben MK
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One of the high-water marks of the action genre, the Mission: Impossible films have always set the bar when it comes to adrenaline-fueled stunts and edge-of-your-seat thrills. And when you consider the fact that Tom Cruise has been leading the blockbuster franchise for nearly 30 years, that makes the achievement all the more impressive. From 1996's Mission: Impossible to 2023's Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Cruise's Ethan Hunt has wowed moviegoers not only with his prowess as an elite secret agent, but also his penchant for daredevil feats. And with Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, Cruise is back for one last globe-trotting, espionage adventure, as he and director Christopher McQuarrie set out to end the series with its most explosive — and longest — entry yet. Set in the wake of the earth-shattering events of Dead Reckoning, The Final Reckoning finds Ethan struggling to maintain the delicate balance between world peace and utter destruction. It's been two long months since he stopped his ruthless arch-nemesis, Gabriel (Esai Morales), from obtaining the only thing capable of stopping the all-knowing, all-powerful artificial intelligence known as the Entity — the Cruciform Key — and although the A.I.-induced apocalypse may have been temporarily averted, the threat of total planetary annihilation still remains very real. Refusing to come out of hiding and turn over the key to the U.S. government, Ethan has even been contacted directly by the President of the United States (Angela Bassett), who, along with her top military advisers, have been trying to strategize what to do now that the Entity has taken control of almost all of the world's nuclear arsenal. Fortunately for them, Ethan and the rest of his Impossible Missions Force team — Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg), and the newly recruited Grace (Hayley Atwell) — have a plan. But in order to make that plan work, they'll need an improbable combination of luck, timing and skill. Using a state-of-the-art piece of tech called the Poison Pill, which was specially developed by an ailing Luther, Ethan plans on infecting the Entity with a virus that will trick it into being captured and nullified. The only hitch in their plan, however, remains the location of the Entity's source code, which lies in a secured vault deep within the bowels of the Sevastopol — a top-of-the-line Russian submarine that sank to the bottom of the ocean floor some 13 years earlier, and whose location remains a mystery to this day. Embarking on a race-against-time mission to determine the coordinates of the sunken sub, Ethan and his team must divide and conquer, with him going after Gabriel — the only person on the planet who might know the sub's location — and them making their way to the Doomsday Vault, an impenetrable underground data facility where the Entity could potentially go to withstand a nuclear apocalypse. If their plan is to have any chance of succeeding, though, they'll also need a little help from Paris (Pom Klementieff), an elite assassin whose allegiances previously lay with Gabriel and the Entity. Written by McQuarrrie and Erik Jendresen, what follows aims to conclude the Dead Reckoning storyline and wrap up the entire franchise, tying together most of the previous movies and making it seem as if every installment was part of a master plan all along. In doing so, however, The Final Reckoning manages to go significantly overboard, retconning the earlier narratives far beyond even what moviegoers had to endure with Spider-Man 3. Factor in the copious amount of flashbacks, the eye-rolling levels of bombast, and the incredibly slow and deliberate way the film lurches from one key plot point to another, and not even the few-and-far-between action sequences — some of which are so ridiculously unbelievable that it makes Dwayne Johnson swatting away a missile in The Fate of the Furious look grounded — can save this sequel from falling victim to self-parody. For die-hard fans of the series, on the other hand, it'll take more than a weaker-than-usual narrative and a U-boatload of belief suspension to cause this over-the-top and over-hyped finale to self-destruct. Toss in a final-act climax that feels suspiciously similar to the final-act climax of Mission: Impossible - Fallout, and you have a franchise conclusion that falls noticeably short of being the be-all and end-all of Mission: Impossible cinematic experiences that it intends to be. Still, despite not living up to what McQuarrie and Cruise delivered in that sixth series entry, there's still just enough here to keep longtime fans entertained. Make no mistake, if you're in the mood for a stellar M:I adventure, you're better off with any of The Final Reckoning's predecessors. If you're looking for a nearly three-hour excuse for watching Cruise hang precariously off the outside of a biplane, though, it doesn't get much more self-indulgent and grandiose than this. Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning releases May 23rd, 2025 from Paramount Pictures. The film has an MPAA rating of PG-13 for sequences of strong violence and action, bloody images, and brief language. Its runtime is 2 hrs. 49 min. |
