’Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning’ review: Spy franchise wraps a self-regarding double bill

Dir. Christopher McQuarrie. US. 2025. 169mins.

Lost for the first third in its own lore, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is only final in that it’s the second part of an MI two-parter made concurrently by star/producer Tom Cruise and director/producer/co-writer Christopher McQuarrie, their fourth collaboration on the franchise. (Dead Reckoning released in July 2023.) It’s no more, no end to, and certainly no less than the all-action popcorn spectacular that audiences have come to expect and admire over the past three decades (with nearly $5bn in box office to prove it). 

Part of the problem is that the film is so in service to its own lore and its hero

What distinguishes it, and the now eight-film series, is the spectacular nature of its stunts, and the well-publicised fact that Cruise, now 61, performs them himself. Here, they are married to a hokey plot that might have fuelled the original 1966-72 TV series, but that’s not the main challenge. What risks de-railing the franchise more than the train wreck at the end of Dead Reckoning is how much this Mission Impossible is in thrall to itself.

Between Top Gun: Maverick (2022, $1.5bn) and Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning Part One (2023, $571m), Cruise has become a one-man post-Covid global box office booster, and the MI series a substitute in the current Bond interregnum (No Time To Die; 2021, $775m.)  Certainly they’re similar when it comes to action-men running through exotic locals with their elbows high and pumping, but Final Reckoning harks back to the wink-wink pre-Daniel Craig, pre-Bourne  days when Bond was just a bit silly, but we were charmed nonetheless.  Whether audiences can look past that, and the film’s overweening sense of its own importance, will make all the difference to Paramount’s global launch post-Cannes red carpet premiere.

Almost 25 minutes pre-credits and an hour in total elapse before the film’s actual Mission: Impossible kicks in. Having left matters dangling over a cliff at the climax of Dead Reckoning, there’s an excuse for a recap, but flashbacks to heroic acts over 30 years – which very few outside of cast and crew will recall – pushes the four-quadrant viewing envelope: you can sense restless kids. Plotwise, it turns out everything-is-connected, and the success of the all-too-topical ‘truth-eating digital parasite’ called The Entity is the result of mistakes made by super-human IMF crack operative Ethan Hunt (Cruise) in the past. But this is a film where the Mission is to get the thing to the thing to put into the thing to stop the thing, with four days to save a world that is also constantly at the mercy of detonating nuclear bombs. It doesn’t merit so much explanation.

As expected, desperate hunts for cruciform keys and ‘podkovas’ take us from the depths of the arctic circle to the heights of the skies over the (gorgeous) South African veldt. The stunts are stunning, although the train wreck at the end of Dead Reckoning proves hard to crush. Hunt’s prowess is now so extraordinary it’s a surprise he hasn’t been given super powers, but a diving sequence, a bare-knuckles fight while clad in short-shorts and an amazing bi-plane stunt are superb feats. It’s fair to say that Final Reckoning delivers ever more thrills and spills, even though the links between the action are ever more frayed. 

Part of the problem is that the film is so in service to its own lore and its hero, producer/star Tom Cruise as Hunt. He’s eulogised at every corner, “every living soul on Earth is his responsibility,” and he’s the only person who can be trusted to save the world from a threat that doesn’t even have a face, given it’s a prescient computer AI graphic. Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames return as his loyal IMF team, and the romantic sparks with Hayley Atwell die down to sparring partner status, but mostly their dialogue serves to underline how important and vital Hunt is to the future of mankind. Gabriel (Esai Morales), a supposed villain, lurks around corners with no palpable menace, given he doesn’t have a backstory and isn’t super-human like Hunt - he mainly seems to padlock gates shut. Even the brilliant Pom Klementieff has been co-opted to provide admiring soundbites in French. Angela Basset does her best as an embattled president, but it’s a rote role we’re familiar with from the actress.

The press notes get the tone of the film best: ”It is impossible to overstate how seismically significant the filmmaking partnership between Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie has been on the direction the Mission: Impossible franchise has taken since they first joined forces on it,” they intone. “Or how uniquely potent it is.” Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning, the second instalment in a globally-shot, monumental multi-year concurrent film-making effort which should be lauded for its ambition, knows what popcorn cinema escapism is all about. But, like the perennially defiant Hunt, it sometimes over-estimates its own powers.