With Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the franchise has finally made good on its title and accomplished the impossible. That mission, which we’re forced to accept, is watching a new installment that doesn’t live up to the high standards of the usually stellar series. The Final Reckoning has all the elements of a great Mission: Impossible movie—action set pieces beyond your wildest dreams, world-saving stakes, all with a globe-trotting, ticking clock narrative—but never the right balance to make them work together as they have in the past. What we get instead is an overly long, plot-heavy movie that builds to two of the best set pieces the franchise has seen. Those scenes almost make you forget about everything else, but not quite.
That’s because the “everything else” is a lot. With a runtime close to three hours, The Final Reckoning attempts to act as a direct sequel to 2023’s Dead Reckoning, a finale to the entire 25-year-old film franchise, and a drawn-out explainer of how the missions in the film are the most impossible yet. Long stretches of The Final Reckoning are only about the difficulty of the team’s missions. Detail upon detail discussing the improbability of every tiny piece of these elaborate puzzles coming together. Which, of course, they eventually do. But the film is so concerned with setting up these missions that the pace suffers greatly. Points are constantly repeated, entire sections become superfluous, and some plot lines get ignored entirely. Then, on top of all that, anytime one of the previous films is referenced, The Final Reckoning shows us that footage, so it also acts as a rewatch in addition to everything else.
When we last left Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his IMF crew, they’d gone through hell to get a special key. A key that is the only thing in the world capable of killing the Entity, an unstoppable artificial intelligence hellbent on taking over the world. Ethan learned the key unlocked something on a missing submarine, so of course, that becomes the first thing he has to do in the sequel.
Only, it’s not really. The film takes about an hour and a half to get to that moment, setting up Ethan’s elaborate plan, piece by piece, with tangents galore. First, the film explains everything that happened between films, which is incredibly dense on its own. Then, through a separate aside, we learn Ethan’s plan. He has to get on one specific ship as the rest of his team scours for one specific place, but only if the government allows him to by sending a crypitc message between old friends that’ll ensure he’s brought to a second ship, where he hopes they have a solution for him, which they may not. It’s just all too much.
Eventually, once the film has beaten you over the head with everything that has to happen, we get to see Cruise as Hunt dive underwater to the submarine, and the scene is incredible. There’s tension, excitement, and relentless twisting—quite literally—of expectations. It’s awesome and, for a few minutes, you forget that the movie is only about halfway over.
From there, the film moves forward with a new, even more impossible mission. One where even more wild things have to happen along the way and it takes forever. In each section, there are a few hand-to-hand combat scenes that keep things moving, but the movie is much more reliant on building your anticipation to see how the characters, and ultimately the filmmakers, will pull off what needs to be done to save the world. The first time, that’s the submarine, and the second time it’s Ethan hanging off a small yellow biplane in midair. This scene is, again, jaw-droppingly spectacular. You can’t help but sit in stunned, joyous silence because it’s so amazing.
But then the scene keeps going, and going, and your mind starts to wander. You start thinking about why the film hasn’t paid off that whole flashback about Gabriel and Ethan’s lady from the last movie. About why Hannah Waddingham’s character, the head of an aircraft carrier, is in the movie in the first place. About how characters are reintroduced, and in some cases retrofitted, to link back to the previous films, and whether or not that adds much in the end. About why they left in all this footage about Ethan’s underwater health, if it was just going to get ignored. Then don’t even get us started on the ending, which we of course won’t spoil, but leaves more than a little to be desired in terms of closure for the story at hand, or the franchise as a whole.
And yet, in spite of all of that, there is something inherently entertaining about watching these characters in this world do these kinds of missions. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is repetitive and frustrating, and at times it’s even slow. But it’s never boring. On a few occasions, it’s an absolute delight, even when it keeps rehashing the same points over and over again. It’s almost certainly the Mission: Impossible film with the least traditional action in it, which is surprising since everything else in it is so excessive. But, at least in terms of that action, what it lacks in quantity, it makes up for in quality. A huge part of that is also because Cruise’s undeniable movie-star charisma rubs off on anyone he shares a screen with. And there are a lot of those people this time; more often than not, five to six characters basically follow Ethan around like lapdogs, especially near the end.
Among those are Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames, who have smaller roles than in previous installments, but each gets a few key moments to shine. Hayley Atwell has a bigger role in this film and finds her own IMF niche along the way. There’s also a who’s who list of actors in even smaller supporting roles, many of whom have little or nothing to do in the story, but are welcome sights nonetheless. This includes Angela Bassett as the President of the United States, Tramell Tillman as a brazen submarine captain, Nick Offerman as a U.S. military leader, and others.
You can’t help but think that at some point, probably before the film had its title changed from plain old Dead Reckoning Part II, it may have been a more focused, singular story that was then morphed into something more ambitious. The problem is that most of the previous Mission: Impossible movies felt ambitious because they were so focused and singular. Sure, they were sometimes confusing, but everything came together and paid off well. This movie is bigger, longer, and more complex than all of them, and yet it lacks that cohesion, never quite matching up with the others. The two big scenes are excellent, everyone in the cast seems very happy to be there, but the misplaced mix of nostalgia and narrative left us feeling like the next impossible mission for this franchise should be a fresh start.
Co-written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is in theaters May 23.
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