Acceptable — Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning
The act of splitting a movie’s narrative into multiple parts can be pretty tricky. I’m not talking about series like Lord of the Rings that adapted source material with natural breaking points, I’m more referring to The Hobbit, which was a singular story that was planned to be two movies before getting bloated to three. These projects can be VERY hit and miss depending on how they’re formatted and executed. More mainstream fare like Breaking Dawn and Mockingjay came off as cynical cash grabs designed to make you pay twice for the same film, while something like Kill Bill was a critical success because each of the two halves felt like distinct units, each one having their own individual tone and pacing.
It’s a rare feat when both flicks end up working well, thus making the overall story feel like a cohesive whole. Hell, sometimes the first part does so poorly that we don’t even bother with the second. This happened with a different LOTR adaptation from Ralph Bakshi which ended, like Peter Jackson’s Two Towers, with the battle at Helm’s Deep (Jackson himself stated that Bakshi’s film was the inspiration for that cutoff point), but was received so poorly that the second half was never made. In more recent years, we have massive cautionary tale examples in the form of Rebel Moon and An American Saga. In the former’s case, the second installment was released, but both films are considered worse than some forms of genocide. In the latter, Kevin Costner somehow intends and insists on four movies, but the second one’s release has already been delayed (by almost a year so far with no end in sight) because part one was so underwhelming and misguided.
The biggest triumph in this regard is probably Avengers: Infinity War/Endgame. Both films have their flaws, chief among them the conceit that somehow all our favorite heroes would stay dead after the Snap, but there were solid character moments and motivations, a fairly well-paced plot to justify the extended runtime, and the built-in stakes of a decade of properties converging in the leadup. It did suffer in some areas, as these efforts are wont to do, in that one half is markedly superior in terms of quality than the other, but enough was done in the first film to grab and keep the audience’s attention, and enough was paid off in the finale to make it worth the wait. It is damn near miraculous when that happens.
So after Dead Reckoning Part One, you could be forgiven for a degree of unease. We’d have to wait two years for the resolution to the very strong setup, and along the way we were given hints and whispers of something being amiss, particularly changing the subtitle of the film, as well as the implication that this would be the last entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise. As The Final Reckoning grew closer, there was a legitimate question about whether the film would wrap up the story, the entire series, or both, to say nothing about maintaining the dramatic momentum and poignant commentary on artificial intelligence versus free will.
I’m happy to say that the picture mostly sticks the landing. It’s not as good as Dead Reckoning. In fact there are some pretty obvious faults. But, as these cinematic splits tend to go, this is decidedly on the better side of things, and if this really is the end (I’ll believe it when I see it in legally-binding writing), it’s a fitting one.
I will say that things start off pretty rough. Two months after Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) secured the pieces of the cruciform key that would grant him access to “The Entity,” a malevolent AI bent on destroying humanity through misinformation, he gets a personal plea from the former CIA Director now serving as President, Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett, a somewhat less effective head of state than she was in Wakanda Forever) to come back into the government’s fold and turn over the key so that the United States can attempt to control the Entity before it’s too late. Meanwhile, Hunt’s team is scattered, evading the pursuit of Gabriel (Esai Morales), who has been excommunicated by his digital master after his failure in the last film. Luther (Ving Rhames, the only actor apart from Cruise to appear in every M:I film, I think) has created a “Poison Pill” malware attachment that, when joined with the Entity’s source code drive, will finally destroy it. The Entity itself, using its predictive algorithms, shows Hunt how it will cause a nuclear Armageddon within days unless he helps it relocate to a secure server bay in South Africa.
Now, this should have worked out just fine, except that these opening 20 minutes before we get to the title card and intro montage are basically just a full-screen stroking of Cruise’s ego. Nearly every line of dialogue falls over itself to praise Hunt as the sole savior of the entire world, while also sticking him with the noble responsibility of being the last hope for every human soul on Earth. The Entity, which didn’t take a physical form in the last movie outside the Russian submarine where the source code was housed, but did at least have cool screens when it hacked into places, is just one lighting effect superimposed over Cruise’s eye while he’s talking to it inside a box. With Gabriel outcast, it doesn’t even have an avatar through which to speak, meaning there’s a vacuum of menace and back-and-forth communication that has to be filled, and the film provides that with just more laudatory mythologizing of Hunt, all set to current footage juxtaposed with clips from the rest of the series in an attempt to retcon the entire eight film franchise as being one long, interconnected narrative. In a movie whose two-part arc is about the human variable, this opening ironically feels like it was AI-generated, as if someone typed into ChatGPT, “Create a recap segment that makes all the Mission: Impossible movies part of some grand scheme that was planned from the start and makes Tom Cruise look like Superman, but leave out Anthony Hopkins and Thandiwe Newton, for obvious reasons.” Even the sacrifice of a member of Hunt’s team is treated more like a bullet point on Hunt’s godlike résumé than the death of an actual person.
Once that’s out of the way and the stakes are firmly established — the Entity is taking over the nuclear weapons programs of all eight nations who have them, conveniently saving China, Russia, and the U.S. for last — things do thankfully get a lot more interesting and fun. After appointing Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) as the team leader, Hunt uses government channels to secure passage to the North Pacific, where the submersible containing the source code is secured, sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Meanwhile, Benji leads Grace (Hayley Atwell), Paris (Pom Klementieff), and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) on a different path to Alaska, where the plan is to meet and extract Ethan from under the near-Arctic ice once he’s secured the drive.
These divergent plots demonstrate the highs and lows of this installment. There’s genuine comedy in the fact that this adventure can go pear-shaped in any number of ways, and Ethan is actually counting on that, because the sheer insanity of the attempt would be dismissed by the Entity as not being a real possibility. That is some clever commentary that sort of continues the more nuanced take of the first half of this story. It also beggars belief when Russian soldiers magically turn up at the same location, and there’s a double agent on an American sub despite it traveling below radar depth and thus being impervious to the Entity’s disinformation protocols, meaning they would have no motive to betray our hero. The inclusion of William Donloe (Rolf Saxon) is an intriguing callback to the first Mission: Impossible flick from nearly 30 years ago, while the reveal of Jasper Briggs (Shea Whigham) as actually being the son of Jon Voight’s Jim Phelps from that same entry is pointless and lame, so much so that I have no qualms about “spoiling” that one, as it has no bearing on anything. Pom Klementieff, being a French actress playing a French character, speaks almost exclusively in French throughout the picture, which grants more credibility to Paris as a member of the team, especially because Ethan and Benji know enough to properly communicate. At the same time, Grace clumsily trying to translate gestures from Donloe’s Inuit wife (Lucy Tulugarjuk) just comes off as lazy slapstick.
If there’s one all-encompassing flaw, it’s the fact that, unlike his action hero contemporaries (James Bond, John Wick, etc.) Hunt is essentially invincible, so it never feels like he’s truly risking anything, no matter how many practical stunts Cruise himself performs. Other protagonists in the genre demonstrate exceptional skill, but you always know they could conceivably die. Not Hunt. Even if you go in thinking that the title implies an end to the character at the climax, that still leaves over two hours of him being untouchable despite all logic. He runs a distance seemingly over a mile in 40 seconds to escape an explosion. He survives multiple car crashes with nary a scratch. Hell, when he goes down to the Russian sub, he’s given an experimental wetsuit that’s supposed to stave off hypothermia and the effects of deep oceanic water pressure, but when things start to go awry, he just cuts the thing off and swims hundreds of feet to the surface in just his skivvies, in freezing water. I’m not saying he should be instantly killed the first time he’s attacked, but the film should at least follow its own rules about how to keep him alive. Otherwise, the scenes are robbed of their inherent tension, and in a way that almost feels accidental, it makes Cruise/Hunt into a biological version of the technological foe he’s facing. The Entity has redundancies and contingencies for almost any conceivable scenario based on what it calls “trillions” of calculations and projections, while Cruise/Hunt has unbreakable plot armor and a bunch of brainwashed alien souls to perpetuate his existence.
If you’re able to set that aside as just suspension of disbelief or the camp value of the series (which I’d argue was one of its weaker points, which is why the likes of Brad Bird and Christopher McQuarrie largely abandoned them in the later editions), then more power to you. It was a bit much for me at times. That said, the final showdown is all worth it, as we’re given something genuinely suspenseful as all relevant parties converge in South Africa and Sloane struggles with the moral quandary of how and when to proceed with the most drastic of measures back in D.C. There are certainly points to nitpick, like countdown clocks on bombs that would go off multiple times at least 10 minutes in advance of when they actually do if the film was edited properly, or the fact that a conflict (and series writ large) premised on people’s ability to make a choice waits until the absolute last minute to present the most obvious option, but at that point you’re far too caught up in the moment to really care. The stunts are great, the effects believable, there’s some unexpected instances of fantastic humor, and everything is appropriately thrilling. You can certainly cry, “BULLSHIT!” once it’s done, but as it’s going on, you’re hopelessly locked in.
This isn’t an all-timer of a denouement, but as chopped up films go, The Final Reckoning definitely gets the job done. Like most of its forebears, you can tell that this ending runs out of steam in places where the first half didn’t, and some of the scripting doesn’t quite measure up, especially in the meta sense it did two years ago. But if this really is meant to put a bow on a 30-year property, I’d say it goes out on a relatively high note. Mission: Impossible has always been about whether one chooses to accept the task put before them, meaning, strictly speaking, you can walk away at any point. I certainly did after the second movie, not returning until Fallout. However, when I chose to accept, I never felt the need to disavow my involvement. And if you do the same, I think you’ll be satisfied.
Grade: B+
Join the conversation in the comments below! What film should I review next? Do you want the franchise to keep going? Have you accepted your lord and savior Tom Cruise into your heart? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) as well as Bluesky, and subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!
Originally published at http://actuallypaid.com on May 29, 2025.
