Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning (2025)

Watched 5/23/25 (theater)

Expectations have been set high for the Mission: Impossible franchise’s final entry. I tried to check those expectations at the Imax doors, ready for perhaps a middling story with the sweet kicker of ultra-elevated, Cruise-powered stunt work. They write these around the setpieces, and some of the scripts have more successfully filled in the connective tissue than others. Unfortunately, The Final Reckoning makes some baffling script choices that undermine and eventually overshadow the two premier stunt sequences, which don’t quite have the sound design and kinetic propulsion to justify all of the fluff around them.

Final Reckoning, even from its earliest moments, feels like a strange Saturday morning cartoon for adults. It’s a string of bland, recycled setup and exposition conversations. And they all feel like they’re taking place in a Sci-Fi Channel original movie, with many great actors forced to give soapy, melodramatic performances as The Entity, the villain returning from Dead Reckoning, weaves its web of portents. The cartoonish vibe isn’t just in the offbeat editing, with many plot points feeling stitched together with the lack of care found in time-crunched kid shows, but it’s also in the over-cranked tone that a lot of the dialogue takes.

The plot this time around is a true followup to Dead Reckoning. Gabriel (Esai Morales) is back in cahoots with the AI vessel known as The Entity. Morales gave a chilly, mysterious performance in the first film worthy of intrigue. But here, he goes full crazy Nicolas Cage, which really just doesn’t fit the franchise. And The Entity isn’t up to the task of making up for the lack of menace. Without a face or personality, The Entity can’t work as anything more than a redundant MacGuffin that we’re hit over the head with over and over. There really isn’t a conversation in the film that doesn’t mention The Entity… And there’s a ton of dialogue here. Too much. Yes, The Entity has taken hold of the world’s nuclear arsenal. But no, I don’t need half of the film’s runtime taken up by the American war room solemly debating what to do about it.

The first hour of the film eschews any setpieces in favor of unnecessary fan service, awkward hijinks, and mostly just the aforementioned, lame talking beats. When we’re an hour+ in and we finally get to the submarine sequence hinted at in the end of Dead Reckoning, I was excited. Cruise must brave the ice-cold waters of the deep Atlantic to get in and out of a sunken sub rigged with nukes, Entity stuff, etc. Collectively, it’s a mixed bag. The imagery is stunning and convincing. Everything from the initial descent into the water to the aspect-ratio shift to the near-collisions… It looks 150% real. And there’s a tactile care here that is just absent from 99% of modern blockbusters. But the sound design underperforms, the lurches and creaks of the action are too quick, and the tension isn’t slow-dripped to the desired effect of the best white-knuckle sequences this so badly strives to emulate. I wish it had been a little better.

After the sub sequence, we move into a hodgepodge of third-act checklist items. Competent shootouts, more annoying doomsaying conversations, and some vanilla car chases lead to that plane sequence you saw in all of the marketing material. And again, the sound design just isn’t there. This movie not only feels like its editing has taken a hit during the secondary table-setting scenes, but the action-scenes feel like they too are missing a piece that rocked your world in the last couple of movies. Everything moves too fast and without enough jolting power to arrest you to your seat. It just kind of dragged for me, despite the beauty of the location work and the impressive guts of the stunt work itself.

This is all of course intercut with the bureaucratic naysaying of the President’s cabinet in the war room. This constant back and forth of doubting Ethan Hunt and his team while trying to decide what to do nuke-wise is so overwritten and over-performed that it feels like it was taken out of a wholly different franchise. Even with how much goes into the ultimately underwhelming submarine scene, it’s like writer/director Chris McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen get obsessed with these kernels of ideas for their movies and can’t help but force-feed them down the plot pipeline no matter how stagey and off-putting they feel.

Tom Cruise can do SOME wrong. Not much, but some. Final Reckoning is just a mess of a movie that shows flashes of that old-MI charm while never finding its own identity. It’s a slapdash stitch-job of a finale that feels completely out-of-touch with the rest of the franchise. There are still extremely cinematic moments, but the editing and overall story direction are daunting problems that I don’t plan on revisiting any time soon. Some guts…but no glory.

4.75/10