Tom Cruise Accepts Ethan Hunt’s Final Mission
DIRECTOR: CHRISTOPHER MCQUARRIE/2025
JIM TUDOR: May 22, 1996. I was in the movie theater that day for the opening of the very first Mission: Impossible film. I was there not as a Tom Cruise fan (I was ambivalent about him) nor as a fan of the vintage TV series from which it sprang (although I appreciated what little I’d seen of it and its awesome theme music). I was there as a fan of its director, Brian De Palma. To quote a friend who saw it with me, “I expected a good summer action movie. I did not expect to get blown away through the back wall of the theater!!”
And thus, a legacy franchise was born. Here we are, nearly 30 years later, with Tom Cruise actively concocting new and bigger ways to blow us away through the back of the theater. If not that, he’ll have us digging our fingers into our armrests as he risks his celebrity life and limb to up the entertainment ante. Eight movies in, the one-time dramatic heartthrob has made that his mission—and boy, has he chosen to accept it.
The new M:I film, The Final Reckoning (a preemptively reworked follow-up to 2023’s underperforming Dead Reckoning Part One) is poised to be the last in this venerable series. That’s obvious not only from its title but its frequent self-conscious callbacks to earlier films (particularly the bold, knotty, and subversive first one, which I proceeded to see in the theater five times that summer, and remains one of my favorite movies of the ‘90s). For a movie that’s supposed to be the culmination of a series all about stealth and operating in the shadows, Final Reckoning sure makes a lot of noise about itself. With virtually no spycraft or classic M:I duplicitousness as part of the mix, the years-long transition from that to all-out Tom Cruise Stunt Spectacular is complete. As such, Final Reckoning lands as my least favorite of the almost-always satisfying franchise.
TAYLOR BLAKE: I may as well not bury the lede—at press time, Final Reckoning is my least favorite of the franchise except for the Mission: Impossible II. While the action in that 2000 box office hit benefited from John Woo behind the camera, tonally it felt less like Mission: Impossible and more like if James Bond made a weak cup of tea. For me, there’s a significant amount of distance between Final Reckoning and II in my rankings, but their flaws do overlap.
The Final Reckoning picks up two months after where Dead Reckoning left off, with Ethan Hunt (Cruise) in possession of the cruciform key that will unlock the only weakness to the artificial intelligence program taking over the planet, the Entity. Even though we saw the cruciform key in use on a submarine at the beginning of Dead Reckoning, Ethan and his team are still trying to determine the sunken vessel’s location. Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg) are working to develop a counterattack to the Entity’s percolation through every world government’s intelligence and defense systems, but to deliver their virus to the Entity, they must find the program’s onetime chosen messenger, Gabriel (Esai Morales). To find Gabriel, they must bring together a team, which means breaking Paris (Pom Klementieff) out of prison and luring Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) out from the watchful eye of Impossible Mission Force head Kittridge (Henry Czerny, cooking as always). As if that weren’t difficult enough, they only have three days to destroy the Entity before it takes control of the world’s nuclear arms and launches them all.
But the team is facing a villain even more terrifying than artificial omniscience: bloat. Every M:I film until now (including the misguided second installment) has kept its plotting breezy, providing enough explanation to keep the stakes high without losing its audience in the details. For the first time, we’re now privy to every helicopter, boat, plane, and sled dog required to find the Entity’s weakness, even using cross-dissolves to demonstrate the length of travel time instead of the traditional quick cuts. Also for the first time, we see countless flashbacks to Ethan’s past adventures in the IMF, and we witness the debates inside President Erika Sloane’s (Angela Bassett) bunker with her Cabinet (Charles Parnell and franchise newcomers Holt McCallany, Mark Gatiss, Janet McTeer, and Nick Offerman). Dare I say it, for the first time, the first 90 minutes feel less like an Ethan Hunt adventure than a Jack Ryan one. A staredown with a ghostlike Russian sub? Straight out of The Hunt for Red October. Cabinet breakdowns in the face of nuclear war? Featured memorably in The Sum of All Fears. And hey, wasn’t Henry Czenry plotting inside the White House in Clear and Present Danger? Like Mission: Impossible II, The Final Reckoning loses its fastball because it tries to be something it’s not.
JIM TUDOR: I must say, I’m pleasantly surprised to see that we’re essentially in agreement about this. While I wouldn’t say that Final Reckoning self-destructs before our eyes—it remains absolutely worthy of seeing in the biggest of screens—audiences will have to endure a lot of increasingly dire and ridiculously high-stakes exposition to get to the rewards. I counted no fewer than three minutes-long verbal info dumps with many, many others along the way. It’s ironic, then, that as much as this film loves to nostalgically reference the 1996 original, it thoroughly refuses to ask viewers to do anything remotely near the kind mental work that that film does. De Palma and co-screenwriter Robert Towne (two blatantly countercultural souls of the “Easy Riders/Raging Bulls” ilk) showed flashbacks of the truth while the accompanying voiceover fed us lies. Final Reckoning, by contrast, uses and abuses flashbacks only to ensure and reiterate even the laziest people in the audience don’t forget the plot.
And about that plot… As was the case with Dead Reckoning, this business about “The Entity” is a big fat disconnect for me. A few years ago, the notion of an A.I. suddenly emerging and taking over everything was far less stale. It was still something of an eye-roller, as they unmask these two movies to be, at their hearts, the base-level technophobic nightmare of an obviously aging Tom Cruise. (As this franchise is now entirely under his full control). If there’s one thing that scares Cruise, it seems to be loss of control, particularly at the non-corporeal hands of some computer phantom of our own misguided creation. In true Old Guy fashion (and I say this as an old guy), these two recent M:Is, as well as the hopelessly retro Top Gun: Maverick (where only 60-year-old Tom Cruise flying the waaaay-antiquated jets of the first Top Gun can save the day) ultimately scream, “There’s no school like the old school!” echoing Disney legends Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston on that park bench in The Incredibles. There’s an air of desperation to remain relevant (as Ethan is told again and again and again that only he can save the world) and the strained veering of this franchise into the realm of cautionary science fiction, à la 1950s Atomic Age monster movies. And since Ethan Hunt can’t punch a computer program, the sneering Gabriel will have to do.
As a side note, for all its stilted nonsense, I’ve come to appreciate 2000’s Mission: Impossible II. Obviously it’s now the black sheep of its flock, but it does land as a wildly vibrant and kinetic yarn while also being most unapologetically romantic of the series. (And when it comes to this franchise, I’ll take melodramatic romance over paranoid sci-fi). It’s key in the series’s initial phase of being both a director’s showcase (in this case, the great Hong Kong action master John Woo, who I don’t believe is struggling here as badly as some say) and a Tom Cruise showcase. There was some fantastic artistic tension there that’s been placed aside for installments 5-8, all helmed by the competent but increasingly style-free Christopher McQuarrie. I don’t mind the McQuarrie phase, but even he seems bored by Final Reckoning’s litany of exposition and ticking-clock cut-the-wire/stop-the-bomb sequences.
TAYLOR BLAKE: Alas, we’ll have to debate Mission: Impossible II on our own time since that’s not the film we’re reviewing here, but I will jump in defense of McQuarrie’s subtle approach to style. After the 1996 original, Rogue Nation is my favorite entry because of all the panache he brought to spy movie tropes. My favorite set piece changes depending on which one I’m watching at that moment: Hanging from an ascending plane in Minsk! The silent knife fight at the opera in Vienna! The underwater data heist and motorcycle chase through Casablanca! And through it, Ethan’s ever-rotating IMF team has its best chemistry with Luther, Benji, Brandt (Jeremy Renner), and Ilsa (Rebecca Ferguson), the last of whom is sorely missed in Final Reckoning. (Her calm, intelligent spirit is my pick for Ethan’s best romantic match.) McQuarrie arrived as the fifth director in a five-movie franchise, but he’s stuck around for half of it for a reason. I could’ve lived without many of the flashbacks (and mild spoiler alert: the needless long-lost child reveal of a very supporting character), but his decision to revive the Dutch angles De Palma kicked the series off is an excellent homage to where we started. The Entity is as cinematic as a computer program can be, and it accurately captures many of the fears I have a for our new normal, one that 99% of the world didn’t choose to accept.
Most importantly, McQuarrie knows how to shoot and edit the stunts we come to these movies for, which is why I ultimately agree with you, Jim: The sub excavation and the dueling plane battle finale are worth the price of admission. Even if it takes awhile to get there, the final hour is as thrilling as you’d hope, and its colorful South African backdrop and bright brass-heavy score are what we want from this series. Though I could go on with questions about why Hannah Waddingham’s character is in this film at all or why the signature masks are used so little, I’d rather my final reckoning be a positive one. Is this the first movie Cruise (almost) looks his age? Though his plane stunts are an excellent advertisement for whatever his core workout and (likely unnatural) hair care routines may be, this is the first time the world-weary Ethan looks as if the world has wearied him. This is not a backhanded compliment—it’s a refreshing change for the onetime dramatic heartthrob, one that makes me look forward to the new work he could try with this franchise behind him. (The look worked for Paul Newman, and if it works for anyone else, it’ll be Cruise.) Is his shouting, “You spend too much time on the Internet!” an Old Guy move? Perhaps, but he’s backing up that laugh line with smarter material than if, say, Fast and Furious took on an A.I. villain. Is this where he thought he’d be on May 22, 1996? Probably not, but he (and we) could do worse than the 30 years he’s blown us away as Ethan Hunt.