Review Roundup: Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
Over the course of 30 years, the Mission: Impossible films have transformed from a TV remake into Hollywood’s best blockbuster action movie franchise, thanks in large part to Tom Cruise’s insistence on bigger and bigger stunt sequences — which he performs himself.
The question, of course, is how long can Cruise keep defying death for our entertainment? As it turns out, at least long enough for an eighth — and, if its title is any indication, final — time. The Final Reckoning picks up where 2023’s Dead Reckoning Part One left off, with Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his IMF cohorts racing around the globe to stop an AI from destroying the human race. (How relevant!)
Does Cruise’s (presumably) final outing for the IMF deliver yet another cinematic thrill ride? Or have even his elaborate stunts become rote and routine? Read on for a selection of critics’ reviews and reactions.
Final Reckoning is a new and ultimate challenge (actually the second half of the challenge from the previous film) which takes Cruise’s buff and resourceful IMF leader Ethan Hunt on one last maverick, deniable mission to exasperate and yet overawe his stuffed-shirt superiors at Washington and Langley. And what might that be? To save the world of course, like all the other missions.
I can’t overstate how frustrating and redundant it feels to watch some random people we don’t care about — namely, President Angela Bassett and her beefy cabinet of flop-sweating character actors — equivocate over (and over) the lesser of two evils at the tail end of a franchise whose hero continues to disproves that logic with every mind-boggling setpiece. And the setpieces are still mind-boggling, even if this movie desperately needed more of them.
[A]n element of the film’s power is that it’s genuinely saying goodbye to these characters, to that reconfigured 1960s chicanery, to Ethan’s more-Bond-than-Bond mojo. Besides, what’s Tom Cruise going to do for an encore? In The Final Reckoning, he’s more than just the top gun of danger junkies. He has turned the spectacle of doing his own stunts into a popcorn art form.
The pressure and expectations surrounding The Final Reckoning are at an all-time high, and even a seasoned team like Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie aren’t immune. Every Mission: Impossible is packed, but The Final Reckoning bursts at the seams, trying to cram in every possible tug on our heartstrings. A nostalgic victory lap for Cruise that might be his most ambitious star vehicle yet, The Final Reckoning is sometimes too ambitious in its globe-trotting adventure, flagging a little at the start. However, once we get to the meat of the plot, there’s no stopping the film.
With apologies to Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames, this has never been a franchise powered by our emotional connections to its characters, much less any sort of overarching, thematically resonant narrative. The Final Reckoning belatedly attempts to conjure up such qualities, while skimping on what has always mattered most in the series: scintillating stunt work.
Trust in the Mission: Impossible series that, when it does cave fully into self-indulgence, it does so with the fatalistic pomp of Wagner’s Ring cycle. It’s hard to say, in an industry where money decides, whether The Final Reckoning will be the last time we see Tom Cruise’s IMF operative Ethan Hunt. But if this is our final farewell, we’ve at least gone out with demonstrable proof that he is, as Alec Baldwin’s character once described in 2015’s Rogue Nation, “the living manifestation of destiny.”
The Final Reckoning ends up being a more successful movie than Dead Reckoning because while Dead Reckoning did have some set pieces that were genuinely fun (such as the car chase through Rome, or the final train sequence), Final Reckoning actually has an ending as opposed to a vague cliffhanger. It even feels just a bit like a swan song for the franchise thanks to how deeply it dives into the past: Without getting into spoilers, the M:I movies you might make a point of rewatching before seeing the eighth film are the first and third installments.
Dead Reckoning was satisfying, in a classic M:I way, but it needed a coda to wrap up all its open-ended plots. What was initially planned as Dead Reckoning Part Two became The Final Reckoning, which, after watching the movie, feels like an apt title for what is likely the duo’s last swing at the property. Either way, when the credits roll, Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible series feels like it’s over for good, whether more sequels are on the way or not.
And yet, still, as faulty and janky as it is at times, overburdened by all the franchise legacy elements it decides to take on and the extra McGuffin keys it forces everyone to unlock, creating a whole additional mess of exposition to grapple with, Final Reckoning is still a largely thrilling and compelling edition to the ‘Mission Impossible’ canon. Because overflowing with overly complex plot and escalating complication upon complication, there’s still intense edge-of-your-seat action, nerve-wracking anxiety and moving emotion to be found within.
If Dead Reckoning risked overkill with its barrage of spectacular set-pieces — that car chase around Rome and down the Spanish Steps with Ethan and Grace in a Fiat Bambino was an all-timer — Final Reckoning spends a disproportionate amount of time trudging through recaps, reams of exposition and mind-numbing cyber-speak. There are so many round-robin conversations about the gravity of the situation, it feels like being trapped in an endless committee debriefing. At times, it borders on self-parody.
Ethan Hunt isn’t a superhero; he’s the guy who gets the job done, the one who chooses to accept the assignment, and the mythologizing right from jump in Final Reckoning feels a bit overcooked. Even if we all agree that Hunt/Cruise have earned this victory lap, did they have to take 12 of them? The “M:I” films have so commonly opened with explosive sequences in their first acts from blowing up the Kremlin to hanging from a plane to even the fun infiltration of the last chapter that it’s truly impactful to not have that sense of a runaway train building steam to start this one. It’s stuck at the station for an incredibly long time.
Over and over, Ethan Hunt keeps asking for one more chance, a little more time, a little faith, like an addict whose fix is saving the world. Sure, it gets repetitive, and as one of the most expensive productions in history (the reported budget was around $400 million), it inevitably smacks of an imperial industry in decadent decline. But somewhere into the nearly three-hour runtime, the movie passes that crucial point where a critic stops taking notes and decides to simply enjoy themselves. The end is nigh, and it’s mostly a good time.
Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning arrives in theaters on May 23, 2025. Watch the trailer below.
