Trigger Warning: The Final Reckoning contains two sequences involving flashing lights and light patterns that may be difficult for photosensitive viewers.
In 1996, director Brian de Palma’s spy thriller Mission: Impossible released into theaters, bringing the beloved television series created by Bruce Geller to the big screen. The film was a major departure from the tv show in several ways with the most notable being the introduction of Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), an Impossible Mission Force (IMF) member who would find himself at the center of a mole hunt and would serve the audience’s proxy. With the fourth entry in the series, subtitled Ghost Protocol (2011), the Mission: Impossible franchise would transition from individual entries into building a serial format which was continued through 2023’s seventh entry, Dead Reckoning, as Ethan is tasked with battling the Entity, an artificial intelligence with a nefarious plan yet to be revealed. With Christopher McQuarrie returning to direct his fourth straight M:I film and with a script by McQuarrie and Erik Jenresen (Dead Reckoning), Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is set to finish the story Cruise’s Ethan Hunt started in 1996, promising to bring all the practical thrills in the process. But can it stick the landing as a caper with so much narrative to clear from an eight-film franchise? It’s an impossible mission that audiences are going to have to accept in order to find out.
If, at minimum, you’ve yet to watch Dead Reckoning, screen that first. New characters and their motivations are critical to understanding the emotions coursing through The Final Reckoning. Due to the structure of this potentially final film in the series, plenty of reminders and recaps are provided to fill in any other gaps and provide forgotten information.
Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING from Paramount Pictures and Skydance. © 2025 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
Just two months ago, Ethan Hunt prevented Gabriel (Esai Morales) from obtaining both of the keys to sunken Russian submarine the Sevastopol, whose corpse contains the chamber housing of the rogue A.I. program the Entity. However, the threat remains as the tendrils of the Entity spread across the globe, requiring Ethan to track down the vessel before the Entity can execute its full plan. With the loss of Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) still heavy and the desire to put his team before himself, the battle against the Entity is going to require Ethan to face challenges necessitating all the skills and experiences that have brought him to this moment. In the last 29 years, Ethan has managed to save the few, as well as the many, but, this time, against a digital enemy with incredible processing power, this final reckoning may prove to be impossible to surmount.
Esai Morales plays Gabriel in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING from Paramount Pictures and Skydance. © 2025 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
The Final Reckoning is both a continuation of the narrative started in Dead Reckoning, but it’s also a cumulative experience, riding on the backs of nearly all the adventures that have come before it. The script by McQuarrie and Jenresen takes great pains to ensure a rewatch of the franchise is unnecessary, for good or for ill (more shortly), as all the loose threads (known and unknown) are sewn up. This choice, to expand outward and not just refer back to Dead Reckoning creates a larger thematic examination beyond the immediate threat of the Entity and the IMF’s goal of stopping it that explores the necessity of all humankind to learn to trust one another. As identified in Dead Reckoning, the Entity can rewrite reality by altering anything seen or heard via digital communication. In short, anything processed through the internet can be tainted. This proves to be a massive threat to humanity, which already contains volatile individuals itching for an excuse to dispose of “lesser” members of the global population. In Mission: Impossible III, upon their first meeting, Simon Pegg’s Benji told Ethan of “the Anti-God,” a technological apparatus that his professor believed would one day bring about the ruination of society as it’s known. How can humanity stand a chance against such an adversary when, in the modern era, society relies on digital technology for everything from docile tools like tracking mail to personally significant functions like processing medications to world-ending threats like securing nuclear facilities? The answer is trust. This small thing has proven, time and again, to what makes the difference between the success and failure of the IMF as much as what makes Ethan himself appear touched by Tyche, or the god of luck of your choice. In each of the seven films before, trust is what enabled Ethan’s plans to succeed, regardless of what obstacles came upon their way, “we’ll figure it out” becoming a motto that legacy team members Luthor (Ving Rhames) and Benji say with knowing awareness while everyone stands slack-jawed at the seeming insanity. Ethan has collected individuals who are great at their respective jobs and who trust each other to do their part to achieve their goals in the mission, and that’s why they, time and time again, despite such demonstrably impossible odds, get the job done. Then again, to quote Mission Commander Swanbeck (Anthony Hopkins) from Mission: Impossible II (2000), “Well, this is not mission difficult, Mr. Hunt, it’s mission impossible. “Difficult” should be a walk in the park for you.” The point, if you will, is that Final Reckoning leans hard into this in order to separate Ethan and his IMF team’s successes from those of the rest of the world in the film’s present moment: trust is paramount to surviving and without it no one does.
L-R: Charles Parnell plays Richards, Janet McTeer plays Walters, Mark Gatiss plays Angstrom, Angela Bassett plays President Erika Sloane, Holt McCallany plays Serling, and Nick Offerman plays General Sydney in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING from Paramount Pictures and Skydance. © 2025 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
There’s more on this aspect and the way in which this film, more than Fallout or Dead Reckoning, solidifies that Ethan’s IMF is the Anti-Syndicate, the terrorist group run by Sean Harris’s Lane comprised of believed-dead spies and covert agents who operated with the belief that “There cannot be peace without first, a great suffering. The greater the suffering, the greater the peace.” A world in terror is what haunts Ethan, along with all of his perceived failures, causing him to push harder in the present to preserve as much as he can. This has resulted in Ethan being called the “living manifestation of destiny” by Rogue Nation’s C.I.A. director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin), which could be read as making Ethan messianic when the reality is far more human. But all of this will be saved for a review which can delve into The Final Reckoning without concern for spoilers. Suffice it to say that Cruise offers his most emotional performance in the series, though the narrative rarely allows the frequently solo-in-a-scene actor to demonstrate that beyond physical performance. One cannot look away from Ethan and that’s a testament to the performer amid a great deal of cascading chaos.
Ving Rhames plays Luther in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING from Paramount Pictures and Skydance. © 2025 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
Instead, let’s talk about the stunts and how some not only harken back to aspects of previous films but are also each a proper marvel. It’s important to compliment the stunt team for leaning hard on practical stunt work and using the CG to tighten what’s within the frame vs. using CG to create it entirely to create these highlight elements of the M:I series. Not only does this reliance on practical stunts make the films more immersive due to the lack of reality breaking, they cause the tension to rise dramatically in the moment, regardless of what point of the narrative we’re in, whether it’s the first 30 minutes or the final beats. One early sequence that pits Ethan against Gabriel is staged almost exactly the way Ethan first meets Ilsa in Rogue Nation, but it’s given a spin to solidify how in-tune with the other’s psychology Ethan and Gabriel are. Conversational dialogue turns to threats turns to action and the fisticuffs feel like punctuation to better articulate emotion, rather than a hard stop on character arcs. Later, an extended underwater sequence once more harkens back to Rogue Nation, requiring Ethan to do extensive underwater work in extreme temps, and the blending of CG and practical enhances the drama at every step, an aspect that doesn’t change once Ethan reaches his destination and tries to achieve his immediate task. With zero dialogue, this stunt conveys Ethan’s conviction, his determination, and ability to problem-solve under impossible pressure. The final main stunt, teased throughout the marketing, feels reminiscent of Fallout, though better paced so that the exhaustion one feels after is from realizing how tightly one has clenched versus a recognition of length.
L-R: Hayley Atwell plays Grace, Simon Pegg plays Benji, Pom Klementieff plays Paris, and Greg Tarzan Davis plays Degas in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING from Paramount Pictures and Skydance. © 2025 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
The establishment of stunts in a more practical sense does something else within these films, something beyond creating a carnival around whether “this stunt is the one that kills Cruise,” and it’s the humanity of its heroes. The IMF team, from De Palma’s first cinematic outing, may rely on technology to get the job done, but it’s always been about the people to generate success out of difficulty, to see a path forward when all others would quit. There is, of course, an argument to be made about the larger concept of the McQuarrie/Cruise partnership as a dying breed of blockbuster cinema in which the reliance on practical stunts versus digital (an aspect some critics honed in on since Dead Reckoning) is a metaphor for filmmaking; however, my take is that it aligns more with maintaining the tangible nature of humanity that drives Ethan to constantly do the right thing, to strive to protect his team regardless of potential outcomes, and to maintain hope and trust in the face of massive odds. “We’ll figure it out,” remember? With all of the background planning by McQuarrie, Cruise, and the stunt team to maintain Cruise’s and the other actors’ safety, each stunt comes off as spontaneous and exciting, as though we’re watching it live, bringing with it the weight of such danger, rather than expectation.
Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING from Paramount Pictures and Skydance. © 2025 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
The biggest issue with a film like The Final Reckoning is that it opts to serve too many masters. Rather than focus on the narrative established by the end of Dead Reckoning, itself a fairly large ticking clock, the 170-minute film spends an inordinate amount of time exploring the past. Now, a certain amount of rumination on prior events makes sense as a significant aspect of Ethan’s character is how he lingers on past mistakes and perceived failures, the weight of his conscience heavy and the reason he strives so hard to keep his team safe, even if it means trading (albeit briefly) the security of the world — a big part of Fallout (2018) (the film that introduces Angela Bassett’s then-CIA director Erika Sloane) and Dead Reckoning. Unfortunately, the way that the film goes about revisiting past narratives implies a distrust of the audience to know the story as it relates to the characters now eight-films deep into a franchise. No M:I film has ever distrusted the audience before; rather, they’ve kept them at a reasonable distance in order to pull off some of the better switches, deceptions, and reveals, never underestimating the audience’s ability to follow along. For instance, as noted in the trailer for the film, Henry Czerny’s Kittridge leads a meeting before the President (established in Dead Reckoning to be Sloane) in which all of Ethan’s history is laid out. This makes sense within the context of the situation, getting these characters up to speed on Ethan’s credentials and exploits as an IMF agent, and beautifully threads the needle between narrative momentum and exposition. Except this is, perhaps, the third time that most of this information has been, in one way or another, explored by the script. Speaking as someone who mainlined the seven films prior to The Final Reckoning, the cold open rewards audiences who’ve been within the series since 1996 and the script should’ve left it there until necessary because the frequency with which the script has information about the past come up turns a subtle nudge toward recollection and meaning to more of a blunt hammer we’re being cudgeled by. The intent is likely to underscore Ethan’s exploits, using the cutaways to past moments in M:I history as a way to remind audiences of how extraordinary these adventures are, as well as the extremes Ethan has gone to prevent national secrets, like the NOC list, from getting into enemy hands. Speaking of the NOC list, the return of the original Mission: Impossible’s Willaim Donloe (Rolf Saxon) is an absolute joy to see and it’s a treat that the marketing even provides the former Langley-based CIA agent his own poster; yet the inclusion of him is diminished by the number of times, ahead of the character’s involvement in the narrative proper, Donloe’s 1996 appearance is shown on-screen. All of this constant remembrance would make sense in a slower, drama-filled bow of any other series, but, with Mission: Impossible, it comes off as hand-holding, signifying a distrust of the audience to know who people are in proper context and resulting in a reduction of the momentum on the whole by forcing connection instead of allowing them to arrive naturally. With luck, in a later spoiler-filled review, I’ll have the chance to explore this aspect and the included backstory of a newly-introduced character as the inclusion of the latter frustrates by the lack of necessity and the time spent trying to make it mean something.
Rolf Saxon plays William Donloe in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING from Paramount Pictures and Skydance. © 2025 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
A film like The Final Reckoning was always going to please some and underwhelm others by sheer virtue of the differences in response to each franchise entry. This film contains several well-earned character beats, a satisfying conclusion for what may be the last Mission, and a series of delightful comedic beats that have been peppered throughout. One cannot entirely fault the film for spending time on its crowning film to remind people just how often Ethan has saved the day via repeat walks down memory lane, especially when some of these said walks are (a) detrimental to a few twists that occur and (b) go to highlight why Sloane’s advisors may be reluctant to trust Ethan given his history of “a wing and a prayer” methods. When The Final Reckoning stops trying to remind the audience of the last 29 years, it locks the audience in and we’re off on an adventure unlike anything M:I has explored with a performance by Cruise where it’s obvious he’s given it everything he had.
In theaters May 23rd, 2025.
For more information, head to the official Paramount Pictures Mission: Impossible website.
Final Score: 3.5 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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