Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning Review
Theatrical Movie Review - Action/Spy
I have never been a completionist when it comes to movies. I will happily dip in and out of franchises to watch what appeals to me. But since 1996, I have watched every Mission: Impossible movie. Director Christopher McQuarrie is back for the final (?) installment, Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning. While this eighth installment has some issues, it feels like an excellent capper for the series.
The Final Reckoning picks up two months after the events of Dead Reckoning. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is in hiding, trying to keep The Entity, a world-destroying AI, from gaining control of all of the nuclear warheads. President Erika Sloan (Angela Bassett) is begging him to come forward and save everyone. As it becomes clear that The Entity, aided by the mysterious Gabriel (Esai Morales), is going to take over all of the nukes, Ethan goes looking for Benji (Simon Pegg), Luther (Ving Rhames), Grace (Hayley Atwell), and Paris (Pom Klementieff) to end the threat once and for all. It will just take one last almost impossible mission.
The weakest part of The Final Reckoning is in the first hour, primarily because it tries, to dubious success, to tie the first seven films together. This was never the intention of the early films, so hacking together some kind of thirty-year through-line was always going to be grasping at straws. But grasp they do, and when the somewhat convoluted storyline is set up, the real fun can begin.
And this movie is fun. Cruise’s passion for movie-making is on clear display, and even at 62, he is able to master stunts that actors half his age would likely be unwilling or unable to pull off. The airplane stunt is just as thrilling as you would hope, and there is a whole underwater sequence that also had me on the edge of my seat. When so many films are shot on a sound stage with a green screen, watching a movie where the star is out there risking his life is riveting.
The core team remains excellent. Both Rhames and Pegg get some really nice moments that round out their characters beautifully. It was also fun to see Henry Czerny reprise his role as Kittridge, and there is one character from the first film that gets a great arc in The Final Reckoning. Morales continues to make a solid villain, though he could have stood some more screen time. There were a ton of additional new characters with some big names, all of whom were good, but if the goal was to tie this to the previous films, it might have been better to stick with more performers from earlier films.
Mission: Impossible has always been my favorite spy series, and Cruise as Ethan Hunt has been part of that for nearly 30 years. Between the masks, the gadgets, and the crazy plans, it always manages to entertain. Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning isn’t a perfect film, but it feels like the perfect send-off for this series.
Rating: 4/5
This review originally appeared in The Dominion Post on May 25, 2025.
So fun! I was fully entertained.