Almost three hours of Tom Cruise running around and hanging off things, doing stunts a man in his mid-60s probably shouldn’t do. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is madly over-indulgent and yet, after playing a blinder in seven straight movies, can’t we allow Cruise and co a victory lap?
It is a greatest-hits package in many respects, a Dad Rock arena tour of the highlights. As Cruise’s Ethan Hunt (though aren’t they really the same person?) and his M:I team embark on a mission to stop AI taking over the whole world, we are fed reminders of past glories in little “previously on M:I” flashbacks. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jon Voight and Léa Seydoux loom out of memory, and the face of the blameless Michelle Monaghan reminds us that the franchise once almost ground to a halt, before Christopher McQuarrie picked it up.
This, along with Cruise’s insane dedication to the Mission, has been the story behind the M:I brand. After no less than Brian De Palma, John Woo and JJ Abrams had directed numbers one, two and three (the Monaghan one) – good stunts but a bit blah was the general verdict – McQuarrie’s rewrite of number four, Ghost Protocol, decisively separated out the explication from the action and gave director Brad Bird room to lay on visual entertainment that was even more purely escapist. Ethan Hunt hanging off the Burj Khalifa in Dubai in M:I 4 is the franchise’s turning point.
Since then McQuarrie has written and directed numbers five to this eighth one and has stuck with that formula – explication followed by action. Absurd amounts of explication sometimes, especially here. Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Hayley Atwell are little more than Sesame Street adults patiently and cheerily telling us all what’s about to go down, before we settle down to watch Ethan Hunt doing what’s already been verbally trailled – Tom running like Tom Cruise over Westminster Bridge, Tom on the bottom of the sea in a flooded submarine. In an underground mine. Clinging to a biplane for the standout stunt of this movie, so realistic you can see Cruise’s ageing skin flapping like wet cardboard as he hangs on for dear life.
It’s thrilling, brilliantly done – as you might expect with a budget of, can it really be $400 million? The military buy-in is obvious – so many choppers, so much military hardware. Less obvious but more decisive is stuff like the editing, superbly done by Eddie Hamilton, the dark, directional lighting of DP Fraser Taggart and big surging score of Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey.
The cast are game. The paychecks must help. If Rhames (apart from Cruise the only survivor from the first movie), Atwell, Pegg and co are jibing at the ancillary functionality of their roles, they never let on. The addition of Pom Klementieff as a team member who utters barely a word is clearly a McQuarrie joke.
Another one is the false ending, a hugely satisfying and desperately exciting action sequence that surely marks the end of the movie. Nope, still another hour to go. Just time to set in train another build up – more explication. And yet another joke, the final final final sequence in which, while Tom does his thing up in the air, there’s a glorified unexploded bomb subplot down on the ground – red wire or blue wire, are you kidding?
Under it all a Cold War thriller with a Doctor Strangelove overtone and a plot detail for the nerds that links everything to something that happened in M:I 3.
Lalo Schifrin, whose iconic theme music other franchises would sell their souls for, died in June 2025 and so never heard it used in this bombastic finale. But on receiving his lifetime achievement Oscar in 2018, he said the statuette signalled “Mission Accomplished”. You could say much the same for The Final Reckoning, which achieves entirely what it set out to do, its unhinged self-indulgence all part of the package.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
