“You need to stay off the internet,” Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) says midway through beating the crap out of a red-pilled henchman. Seems the poor guy has watched one too many YouTube videos about the potential benefits of sentient artificial intelligence. Like its 2023 predecessor, Dead Reckoning Part One, Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning comes preprogrammed with plenty of technophobic paranoia about a world where governments and terrorists alike have become prisoners of their own devices.
The difference is that where last time Ethan merely contemplated the existential threat embodied by the self-aware “Anti-God” known as the Entity, here he melds with it. Secured within the stainless-steel sarcophagus that permits the Entity to interface with human visitors, our hero is shown a dire prophecy of things to come: doomsday clocks, nuclear fallout, and the end of biological life on earth as we know it. Helpfully, he’s also shown exactly what he needs to do to keep all of this from happening. Some heroes go on vision quests; Ethan Hunt has script rundowns.
There are a lot of self-reflexive montages in The Final Reckoning, which runs nearly three hours. In addition to his confab with the Entity, Ethan gets treated to a personalized super-cut of the previous Mission: Impossible movies, a highlight reel delivered via VHS cassette. The presence of this tape and the old-school VCR it’s played on ramps up the subtext of what comes billed, from its title on down, as the ultimate installment of the 21st century’s ranking blockbuster franchise. (For the record, we’ll count the original Mission: Impossible as a millennial movie, even though its Brit pop–heavy soundtrack has an I-Love-the-’90s vibe.) On the one hand, Dead Reckoning is primarily a movie about the necessity of flesh-and-blood heroism as an antidote to the tyranny of algorithms. On the other, it’s an extended victory lap over hallowed ground, strewn with reminders of the IMF’s glory days and haunted by the ghosts of its failures.
There’s a lot to keep track of in The Final Reckoning, and not everything works equally well. Suffice it to say that the script’s Luddite allegory, with its callbacks to analog spycraft in the form of Morse code broadcasts, floppy disk backups, and some makeshift, on-the-fly surgery, is more compelling than the stabs at fan service. All those clips and callbacks from previous installments wind up being double-edged. Sure, it’s fun to see footage of an almost impossibly young-looking Cruise dangling from the ceiling of a secret CIA vault in the original Mission: Impossible; the vitality of those images serves as a reminder that Brian De Palma’s movie was not just lean and mean (and filled with sexual energy) but also relatively modest in scope and scale. On the other hand, that reminder also makes one realize how far we’ve come. Of all the qualities displayed by M:I’s various sequels, modesty is not one of them.
Sadly, Final Reckoning’s montage does not include Alec Baldwin’s deep state power broker referring to Ethan Hunt in hushed tones as “the living manifestation of destiny” (probably the best monologue in the entire series). But it doesn’t have to because the notion of this particular secret agent as a kind of secular deity—a world-beating savior on par with Cruise himself—has become fully baked into every single plot point and character interaction. In a movie in which the world’s nuclear powers are all poised to launch simultaneously, the bulk of the discussion is about Ethan and how awesome he is. It’s not enough that his teammates—from old heads Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) to new recruits Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Paris (Pom Klementieff)—idolize and swear fidelity to their fearless leader, or even that Ethan’s old rival Kittredge (Henry Czerny) is willing to violate the chain of command to get his licks in. Ethan’s reputation precedes him to the point that the Entity, which has absorbed the sum total of human knowledge, respects and fears its adversary enough to see him as an equal. From the bottom of its Deep Blue CPU, it understands that in a world where everybody else is playing checkers, Ethan is playing chess.
Ethan’s quasi-psychedelic encounter with the Entity (and Cruise’s agonized close-up blinking as he goes all parallax view) is easily the most enjoyable part of The Final Reckoning’s first hour. But there isn’t much competition. Typically, M:I’s resident director and Cruise whisperer, Christopher McQuarrie, is adept at moving things along; what he lacks in visual style or personality, he makes up for in sheer momentum. This time out, though, the opening is so heavy on exposition and apocalyptic portent that it just sort of sits there on the screen, as if waiting for something to kick in. The announcement a couple of years back that Mission: Impossible would be splitting its finale across two movies was in line with the increasingly supersized nature of tentpole blockbusters, but there’s a difference between a story that feels genuinely epic and one that’s been stretched to the breaking point. Ethan’s determined pursuit of a bejeweled cruciform key that can potentially unlock a box containing the Entity’s source code—and thus reverse its across-the-board restructuring of international economics and missile defense systems—doesn’t have much juice as a MacGuffin, even after the revelation (tied to the increased emphasis on franchise mythology) that he’s actually responsible for letting the digital genie out of the bottle. Neither does the main human villain, Gabriel (Esai Morales), a well-dressed cipher whose menace remains mostly hypothetical. All it takes is one swift glimpse of Philip Seymour Hoffman as the arms dealer Owen Davian in M:I:III—the monster ruthless enough to kill off Felicity Porter—to remind us what it looks like when a bad guy is truly cooking with gas.
Of course, trying to kill Tom Cruise is a thankless task—one that’s probably best handled at this point by Cruise himself. It’s a shame that the actor’s proposed Harry Houdini biopic never worked out; at this point, the real question is who will play Cruise in the movie about his own life and whether they’ll do their own stunts in the process. The comparisons to Houdini, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin stick in terms of both choreography and psychology. As a movie star, Cruise is a great dictator. And his fanatical commitment to showmanship—defined specifically by the consistent risk to his own life and limb—has grown from an endearing trait into a legitimately kamikaze pathology. It’s a fine line between giving an audience its money’s worth and exercising a death wish, and Cruise’s insistence on tap-dancing all over it at the age of 62—about the age when Clint Eastwood sent himself toppling off a horse in Unforgiven as a joke about his own encroaching obsolescence—is more enthralling than anything pertaining to Gabriel and the Entity. I myself had been hoping for a deeply symbolic, mano a mano showdown between two Cruises: one real, one a doppelgänger in one of those bespoke IMF masks. Sadly, it was not meant to be.
What’s funny is that after so many years of literal publicity stunts, Final Reckoning’s money shots feel weirdly routine. It’s cool that it took “years of development” to create the sequence in which Ethan plunges hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the Bering Strait to explore a sunken submarine; the sequence is a silent, drawn-out immersion into pure suspense. It’s meant to generate terror as well, however, but what it really conjures up is awe. That’s not a bad trade-off, but so much awe can get boring after a while. It’s telling that The Final Reckoning has fewer jokes than its predecessors, a certain grayscale grimness being a by-product of when a franchise Really Means It This Time. (See also: No Time to Die, which seemed to place a moratorium on one-liners.) The problem isn’t that we’re being asked to take Ethan’s quest to save the world seriously so much as that the ostensibly serious moments blend, sometimes haplessly, into comic relief, like when a bedraggled, barely resurrected Ethan and Grace roll around together half naked in a portable decompression chamber.
This is the closest The Final Reckoning comes to anything sexy, and it isn’t really that close. All Grace wants Ethan to know is that she has faith in him to wield the absolute power of the Entity, if and when the time comes for him to do so. He can’t wait to get dressed and back into the field. The first Mission: Impossible was a De Palma movie in every way; it pivoted on themes of adultery and illicit desire and made them count. When Rebecca Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust made eyes at Ethan back in Rogue Nation, she seemed turned on by being a spy (Ferguson is missed here, as is Vanessa Kirby, the comic MVP of Dead Reckoning). Atwell is a charming performer, but after making a winning impression in her debut, she gives the sensation here of an actress shanghaied and hypnotized. She’s happy to be there, and that’s about it.
As for Cruise: His acting has reached a place where self-awareness and obliviousness intersect on a molecular level. He’s somehow both in total control of his screen persona and helpless in its thrall. The result is a performance that evokes some odd precedents. Maybe it’s the slightly shaggier haircut, maybe it’s the sheer outrageousness of the narrative material, but he’s starting to resemble none other than Neil Breen—another micromanager who likes to double down on his own delusions of grandeur.
The only real gravitas in The Final Reckoning comes courtesy of Rhames, who makes a meal of his final scene as “cyber-ops” specialist Luther Stickell, channeling what seems like authentic gratitude into an exchange styled as a long goodbye. Actually, the movie’s best joke comes here, too, when Luther, who’s saying his farewells in the midst of dismantling a bomb with a big blast radius, reminds Ethan that at some point he’d better start running.
It’s a show of respect that Rhames, rather than Cruise, also gets the movie’s last word, a voice-over about world peace and the need for people to look past their differences and realize that [extreme Larry Gopnik voice] we are all one, or something. Cruise is, surely, a Serious Man, but he’s also a savvy operator, speaking through others like a skilled ventriloquist or an Old Testament God. If our Maverick’s oft-repeated belief in the unifying power of cinema—a religious experience experienced with, at minimum, two extra-large bags of popcorn—is what sustains him and what makes him the closest thing we have to an A-list Dorian Gray, then more power to him. (Actually, maybe no more power to him. He has exactly enough power.) But these big-picture platitudes—and the wholly disingenuous self-effacement of the last shot, with our star humbly receding into the shadows—are easier to take when the movies are up to a certain standard. For all the vertiginous excitement of its final aerial set piece, The Final Reckoning comes in under that bar.
