TMS Movie Review: Mission Impossible—The Final Reckoning

(Skydance Media / Paramount Pictures)

The joke’s on me for suggesting last week that I was getting through the junk of May movie releases until we reach ‘real cinema’ later in the month, starting with Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning. I wasn’t going to compare this to J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: Episode IX—The Rise of Skywalker (2019), because I don’t think the final product is that disastrous technically speaking. But the more I think about it…it’s not really that far behind structurally. A lot of buzz and discourse on the latest M:I movie has been on how it’s being branded a farewell to the successful film series, and Tom Cruise as the protagonist. But when you watch the movie, it actually doesn’t feel like that by the end. A lot of the complaints are about the shoddy exposition dumps, unnatural dialogue and sloppy editing. I didn’t mind these problems with the previous installment, Dead Reckoning (2023), and have championed M:I as an ode to on-screen action, stunts and fight choreography. This time around I felt legitimately bored for quite a bit of the nearly 3-hour runtime.

Rather than trust that the dedicated fanbase of Mission: Impossible for the last thirty years would be the core audience for the new release, the filmmakers spend the whole first hour recapping not only Dead Reckoning, but feature flashbacks and montages of all the M:I movies to remind viewers of its own lore and history. Instead of coming across genuine, Final Reckoning feels more like a high-budget, good looking clip show episode from a late 1990s TV program. We then follow Ethan Hunt (Cruise) as he once again speeds to save the world from the super-powerful AI known as The Entity and its liaison/Ethan’s old nemesis, Gabriel (Esai Morales).

(Skydance Media / Paramount Pictures)

This time his team is made up of technician Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), expert pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell), deadly assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff), intelligence agent Theo Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), retired CIA analyst William Donloe (Rolf Saxon), and Donloe’s wife Tapeesa (Lucy Tulugarjuk).

Longtime M:I co-star Ving Rhames appears in the first act, while Angela Bassett, Nick Offerman, Hannah Waddingham, Janet McTeer, Henry Czerny, Shea Whigham and Katy O’Brian make up some of the recognizable supporting cast. The Final Reckoning is McQuarrie’s fourth film in the series as director and is co-written by Erik Jendresen like with Dead Reckoning. I won’t turn this review into a legitimate rant because I’m both tired of complaining about bad movies and most of the issues here were already with Dead Reckoning. The difference is that at least there we got the expected fight scenes to make up for the mediocre story, while there isn’t even any exciting action in Final Reckoning for the whole first two hours. Former female lead Rebecca Ferguson is especially missed. Even though Atwell and Klementieff do well enough, both their roles feel like Ferguson’s Ilsa Faust split into two. But most disappointing is how this could have been a real, proper send-off to a great action franchise, and instead concludes with another open ending. Whether Cruise will return as Hunt somewhere down the line, or with the brand rebooting with a new cast and characters, we’re most likely not seeing the official end of Mission: Impossible. Yay.