Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning Review

For nearly 30 years, the stunts and action sequences of Mission Impossible have been synonymous with big-screen spectacle, and, as expected, the franchise's newest entry finds Tom Cruise's alter ego, Ethan Hunt, risking life, limb, and the fates of millions, this time in pursuit of stopping the Entity, the evil AI introduced in 2023's Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part 1. But, the way I see it, its sequel, which stopped being Dead Reckoning Part 2 sometime in the last couple of years, it might be trying a little too hard to top the IMF's greatest hits. I'm Clint Gage, and this is my review of Mission Impossible The Final Reckoning. I think it's the first thing you should know about me is that I've always been a huge mark for James Bond movies. I've got a lot of formative movie memories growing up with those films, so I was, frankly, thrilled to see all the things that I love about Bond captured perfectly in 2016's Mission Impossible Rogue Nation, the first of now four Ethan Hunt adventures written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie. There's a lightness to that film that lets Tom Cruise wink and nod at us while also hanging off the side of an airplane. At the same time, it's smoothed off some of the more cartoonish edges that Brad Bird's admittedly super-fun Ghost Protocol played with, and left behind a more grounded approach if there is such a thing when you're dealing with an underwater computer turbine heist. The Rogue Nation nails that combination of go-for-bro practical stunts, grinning self-awareness, and just the right touch of believability that make up the most important parameters for a successful IMF mission. Fallout nails it just slightly less, and I think Dead Reckoning misses by a wider margin, but The Final Reckoning, unfortunately, has gone a little farther afield. My biggest takeaway from the eighth and very evidently not final film starring Cruise as fate's chosen lucky boy is that it's extremely sober. The Final Reckoning veers into melodrama like a rookie helicopter pilot whenever there is story to be told. The cast, which is an assembling of familiar franchise faces and newcomer cameos, whisper talk their way through soap opera levels of tension. Nearly every scrap of dialogue is invested in no less than the end of all life on the planet. If memory serves, I think that's pretty close to a line verbatim from the movie. One of my scribbled, in-the-dark notes says, The fate of every living thing on the planet Jesus Christ. Apparently it got a little exhausting. But my first litmus test for these movies is how serious they treat Ethan Hunt getting the mission. Rogue Nation was a flirty encounter at a record shop. Fallout's knock on the door woke him up from a dream where a nuclear blast interrupted his wedding. And Dead Reckoning was some kind of dramatic poetry slam with the IMF oath and a new recruit. The Final Reckoning features a lo-fi delivery method thanks to the entity's infiltration of all things digital, and it's honestly kind of fun. But the message is just the most dire and serious thing. This is a story point introduced by Dead Reckoning. The entity as a villain capable of literally every bad thing imaginable. Like a laundry list of vague, shorthand threats that any one of which could have been enough to carry a movie. Instead, they've all been lumped together in the form of this nebulous digital boogeyman. And reiterating that in the this message will self-destruct section of the movie sets a very somber tone for everything that follows, save for a few bits of humor here and there. The Kremlin bombing. In fairness, the bomb was actually meant to kill him. This explains the handcuffs. It's still not clear why he's here. It's never shaken, or stirred for that matter, if I can close out that James Bond thread. I'll also say that absurdly astronomical stakes are one of the biggest issues with The Final Reckoning, weirdly enough. A good old-fashioned nuke or biological weapons, those live in Mission Impossible's sweet spot, life and death at a massive scale, while also real enough to be relatably scary for us out here in the audience. But all life on planet Earth is just too much to plausibly wrap your head around, particularly with how serious everyone takes everything else compared to, say, Rogue Nation or Fallout. Now, I know I keep veering away from The Final Reckoning and back into the rest of the franchise, but for better or worse, this is a part eight that's very aware that it's a part eight. You can't call a movie The Final Reckoning without delivering some degree of, well, finality, and oh boy does this one try. This movie's determination to tie every piece of the last thirty years' worth of missions into one neat bow is, it's really something. And it's not merely planting Easter eggs from earlier films so much as it is picking entire story points. Largely unnecessary story points, I would argue. It's a nice nod to the diehards, but when you consider the nearly three-hour runtime and the relative lack of importance these moments have to the overall movie, I'm really not sure what McQuarrie and crews were trying to accomplish. This is all to say The Final Reckoning is impossible to review out of the context of the other seven missions impossible, which is why I keep recapping my feelings for the whole franchise. And you really think we can do this? We're going to do it. One of the callbacks that I really did enjoy, though, is a guy that we've seen in the trailers for The Final Reckoning, William Donloe, the poor bastard working in the CIA black vault whose nose Ethan stole the knock list out from underway back in the 90s. His part in The Final Reckoning is spot on. He's a meaningful character for Ethan and the IMF to encounter who also speaks to the themes of the movie, that our lives are the sum of our choices. He's fun, which is in short supply here, and I would have loved it if he'd have been the only little bit of retconning this movie tried to do. The knife thing, which is another bit that we've seen in the trailer, it got a legitimate pop in my theater, a little bit of applause, and it kind of snapped me out of it. It had me rethink my whole feeling about why Donloe was there in the first place. But I've been talking a lot about things I didn't like about the movie, and it's important to note that there are some things The Final Reckoning very much does right. The action is predictably excellent, with the highlight being Ethan's infiltration of the Sevastopol, the MacGuffin of a submarine that sank at the start of Dead Reckoning. It's an incredibly tense and intricate, claustrophobic sequence, and all the other nail-biting things you want from a thriller. And more than that, there is clearly a huge chunk of the reported $400 million budget on screen. Christopher McQuarrie is getting all the nautical mileage he can out of it. That set is equal parts Avatar and the hallway fight from Inception. It's legit very cool. And the fight choreography is also elevated from previous entries, I think. As other countries are sending their most special forces after the same prize Ethan is after, they start running into more highly skilled combatants. The fights are a little more brutal and legitimately feel like the IMF could lose. And at this point in the franchise, that is a difficult tightrope to walk, and McQuarrie and Cruz deserve a lot of credit for walking it. They also deserve a fair bit of credit for bringing the team together again. I felt that was one part of the Mission Impossible formula that was a little absent from the last film. But the climax of The Final Reckoning gives every team member a job. It's reminiscent of Fallout in that respect, and very important for the IMF because it's just less fun when Ethan is running around doing everything himself. Saw them in the hallway a few minutes ago. You could have said something sooner. Well, they were chasing you, not me. An abiding trust in his team is part of Ethan's allure, in addition to being, as Shea Wiggum's Jasper Briggs puts in Dead Reckoning. A mind-reading, shape-shifting incarnation of chaos. But also, in regards to the film's final act, one thing that the filmmakers and the studio should get credit for is avoiding the big marketing blitz around the movie's signature stunt. As of this review's publishing, there is no extended feature at breaking down in gory detail the logistics of the biplane sequence. With Dead Reckoning, I was so familiar with that motorcycle jump, it really didn't have much of an impact on me two hours and change into the runtime of the movie. If anything, it made the CGI part of the cliff look even faker because I knew that it was a ramp, and I knew what the ramp looked like, the spectacle of it. The entire purpose of shooting it in IMAX was frankly wasted on YouTube before the movie even came out, and they did not do that here. So the climactic biplane sequence is great. It's thrilling in parts, funny in others, and most importantly, all the effort and planning that goes into that stunt, you can just enjoy it on the big screen. It shows up. The only question I have about it is would The Final Reckoning be a worst movie on its own if it were a stunt double walking out on the wing of that plane instead of Tom Cruise, or would it just have one less interesting thing going for it? But a lot of how I feel about this movie, though, it comes down to that subtitle, The Final Reckoning. It can't be officially final with the way that it ends, and I don't think there are any of us who believe Tom Cruise is done risking his life for our entertainment. So it's either the best subtitle for this movie or the worst. Maybe they completely missed the mark on the final part of that equation, and it's not a representative title at all. Or maybe it's not entirely successful attempt at tying a neat and all-encompassing bow is the final reckoning for the franchise and the path it laid out across eight movies. From a real-world perspective, maybe a messy and self-serious capstone to an otherwise iconic franchise is exactly what they deserve, and it's a perfect subtitle. For my part, though, again, because I'm a big fan of this kind of movie, I'm rooting for the latter. Threads have been picked up and tugged on in different directions throughout the course of these eight films. That's just the cost of doing business with a 30-year juggernaut of a franchise. Their mission now, should they choose to accept, is to take this clean slate they've created with all those threads tied up, however clumsily, and get back to what Mission Impossible does best, and not take itself so seriously. He gassed a security briefing. That was just two months ago. Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning, is okay. It's getting a six. While its action is reliably thrilling and a few of its most exciting sequences are sure to hold up through the years, the eighth big screen IMF outing tries to deal with no less than the end of every living thing on the planet, and it suffers because of it. The somber tone and melodramatic dialogue miss the mark of what's made this franchise so much fun for 30 years. But the door is left open for more Impossible missions, and the hope that this self-serious reckoning isn't actually final. You've always been on the right side, brother. I have no regrets, neither should you. Well, that is what I thought of Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning. What are you most excited about for this one? Submarines, biplanes, rogue AI? Well, for more of all of that and more Impossible missions, be sure to subscribe to IGN wherever you like to watch.