MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING (2025)

After 29 years and eight films, the Mission: Impossible franchise has seemingly come to an end. What started as a competent nineties remake of the television series of the same name became one of the greatest action series this century and a love letter to the big screen. With Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise and co. send us off with another visual spectacle that is at times overly long and cliché, but overall, a very worthy send-off for Ethan Hunt’s most high-stakes mission yet.

At the end of Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning (2023), Ethan Hunt (Cruise) had recovered two keys that can provide Ethan and the IMF with control over a dangerous, self-learning artificial intelligence known as ‘The Entity.’ In Final Reckoning, directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who returns for the fourth time at the helm of the franchise, Hunt and his IMF team, including Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg), and Grace (Hayley Atwell), are searching for the hiding place of The Entity and its source code.

In the two months or so since we left off, The Entity’s been causing chaos and death all over the globe. Now, upset that its human counterpart, Gabriel (Esai Morales), had lost the keys, The Entity has disavowed him and tasked Ethan with finding the source code and placing it inside a secure vault in South Africa before launching all of the world’s nuclear missiles. The only problem is the source code is at the bottom of the ocean after The Entity sank a Russian submarine thirteen years ago. Impossible? We’ve had seven entries showing us that nothing is truly impossible for Ethan Hunt.

Just like its predecessor, Final Reckoning is interested in reflecting the fears of our day and age. Except where the films of the 1960s, like Fail Safe (1964) and Dr. Strangelove (1964), were more concerned with a Cold War at the hands of the U.S. and Russia, the eighth entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise is worried about the power we’re giving to A.I. It’s a fairly straightforward metaphor for art itself, with generative A.I. making its way to the big screen and large corporations leveraging its financial savings over the people who work hard to make the craft. And Tom Cruise is at it again to show that practical stunts, limited VFX, and the hardworking craftsmen in production are the old-fashioned recipe for success in cinema, and no AI is ever taking its place.

Final Reckoning has two incredibly grand set pieces that are a treat to witness. The first is a deep-sea dive to the wreckage of the submarine holding The Entity. The entire sequence is approximately twenty minutes of dialogue-less action, minus two words that Ethan utters. And it is definitely one of, if not the best, sequences in the entire franchise. Like Ethan, we’re holding our breath as he dives 500 feet into the darkness of the Arctic Ocean. The tension and practical stunts are perfect. Even with the unwavering confidence that Ethan Hunt can do anything, we’re stuck in our seats gasping and wincing at each moment. It is the culmination of filmmaking that has made McQuarrie’s M:I films, including Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation (2015) and Mission: Impossible—Fallout (2018), so good. Having Tom Cruise perform his own stunts already gives directors more freedom to frame action so effectively. It also helps having production design, cinematography, and sound designers operating at high levels.

The second big stunt sequence in Final Reckoning is the one heavily featured in marketing materials and trailers: Tom hanging off the side of a single-passenger plane. We’ve seen him hang off the door of a military-grade aircraft at take-off in Rogue Nation, but we’ve upped the danger here for a climactic showdown that holds that same tension and heart-pounding action that the underwater sequence has. Viewers know that Mission: Impossible features some of the coolest and most “impossible” stunts ever put on film. The newest entry does not disappoint.

At two hours and 49 minutes, Final Reckoning is the longest M:I film so far, and its biggest flaw is that it does feel that long. The first 45 minutes to an hour are quite a slog. Montages to the first seven films and generic world-ending stakes dialogue spoken by dozens of characters get exhausting. It’s almost like every actor had a word count clause in their contract and the editors had to get them all to speak. It’s not until over an hour into the film that we get the real first action scene. The filmmakers had our attention with this franchise, but they could’ve let it go a little quicker and edited down the expositional first act.

However, as the action sequences highlight, once the film does catch its stride, it never slows down. From the submarine dive until the final moment, Final Reckoning is exactly the big-screen summer blockbuster that beckons us to the theatre.

Even as the film series is coming to its conclusion, we do have a fairly bloated cast to work with. Some new characters come in, even for smaller roles. Hannah Waddingham (Ted Lasso) plays an American admiral who helps Ethan’s mission on the way. And the best addition may be Tramell Tillman (Severance) as Captain Bledsoe, a very patriotic American submarine captain who I don’t believe ever learns Ethan’s name as he keeps referring to him as “Mister.”

Series regulars are still there, namely Benji and Luther, whose technical wizardry is just as important as Ethan’s death-defying stunts. Ethan’s newest love interest, Grace, is there to use her pickpocketing skills with even higher stakes. I still think the franchise swapping Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) for Grace was a mistake, but Hayley Atwell (What If…?) is still operating with the passion and incompetence of someone not trained for international espionage.

Angela Bassett (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) returns as Erika Sloane. However, she’s been promoted from the head of the CIA to the President of the U.S. I’m sure Ethan’s heroics in stopping a nuclear genocide in Fallout helped promote her public opinion that got her elevated to the office. CIA operatives Briggs (Shea Whigham) and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) are back, albeit on very different paths. Briggs believes Hunt is a force putting everyone at risk, while Degas believes that Ethan is the only one who can save the world. Kittridge (Henry Czerny) is also the President’s Ethan Hunt expert and even after 29 years of service, still thinks Ethan is a threat to U.S. interests. In a way, he’s right, since Ethan is more interested in saving everyone instead of keeping the imperialistic status quo.

Final Reckoning’s greatest expanded role in the cast is Paris (Pom Klementieff). In Dead Reckoning, she was Gabriel’s sadistic henchwoman. However, here she has the chance to prove she’s more than that. Klementieff (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3) commands the screen with only the occasional line, showing a very different demeanour than the previous film. Giving side characters their own moments to shine has always been a strength of the series and Klementieff is the standout star of this one.

Adding to the long list of characters and bloated runtime, Final Reckoning contains as many callbacks to the previous films as possible. While some don’t work as well (I think the film retroactively undermines the mysterious Anti-God from Mission: Impossible III), others really feel earned. Namely the reintroduction of Rolf Saxon as William Donloe, the unfortunate worker who couldn’t stop Ethan’s CIA black vault break-in in the first Mission: Impossible (1996). His role in the film doesn’t feel forced. He earns his role in aiding the IMF. Also, it greatly adds to Ethan’s ability to limit collateral during his escapades.

While there are too many characters, Final Reckoning still gives everyone enough to work with. Some moments don’t feel earned when we don’t have much time to spend with these side characters, but others work in this nearly three-hour epic.

Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie have given us a thrilling conclusion to the M:I series. Their dedication to filmmaking is so important to the uncertain future of this industry. However, there’s so much credit to give out. “The world still needs you. Of course, they’ll never know it, but we did it. We, who live and die in the shadows,” Luther tells Ethan. For the hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who worked on this film, those who will be in the shadows for so many who see the film, they deserve our thanks. Like Ethan Hunt and Tom Cruise, it takes a team to achieve what they’re after. And Mission: Impossible—Final Reckoning is just another win for those who work so hard to bring us films.

UK USA | 2025 | 169 MINUTES | 1.90:1 • 2.20:1 • 2.39:1| COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Christopher McQuarrie
writer: Christopher McQuarrie & Erik Jendresen (based on the TV Series created by Bruce Geller).
starring: Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Hayley Atwell, Angela Bassett, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny, Holt McCallany, Nick Offerman, Janet McTeer, Hannah Waddingham, Tramell Tillman, Charles Parnell, Shea Whigham, Greg Tarzan Davis, Mark Gatiss, Rolf Saxon, Lucy Tulugarjuk & Katy O’Brian.