Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) | Film Review

For nearly thirty years, Ethan Hunt has accomplished the impossible repeatedly, through multiple rubber faces and hairstyles. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to acknowledge that, perhaps, Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning is the best evidence that it is finally time to retire Tom Cruise’s spy franchise.

This time out, Ethan Hunt and his team are on a mission to save the world from The Entity – a faceless AI that has hijacked the world’s nuclear capabilities, and frankly a terrible choice for the final film’s overarching villain – as well as track down the maniacal Gabriel (Esai Morales, patently underserved this time out) before he takes control of the aforementioned Entity. Of course, there is only one man competent enough to defy orders, gravity, and physics to defeat everyone and save us all…and his name is Tom Cruise. Or Ethan Hunt. One of those.

Beginning way back into 1996, Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning spends a lot of time trying to force its way into connection with the past films, even reaching back for previous characters that have not mattered since their respective films (it’s wonky at best), devising plans that make less sense than Fast & Furious going to space, and crafting set-pieces that are borderline mundane, especially compared to the near-perfection that was the previous film, Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning.

Director Christopher McQuarrie is typically brilliant at ramping up the tension and energy, but other than a few early moments, things feel more preposterous than exciting this time out. For example, Tom Cruise runs when a car would make more sense (and probably save specific lives), the bi-plane chase touted in trailers is rather lackluster and nonsensical, and the underwater sequence is excessively exaggerated and borders on science fiction.

Tom Cruise still has it, the team – Haley Atwell’s Grace, Simon Pegg’s Benji, Ving Rhames’s Luther, Pom Klementieff’s Paris, Angela Bassett’s President Sloane – are all riveting despite getting little screen time compared to their fearless leader, and the elements are all here. Unfortunately, excessive exposition attempting to forcibly tie in the previous films feeds the feeling that this ultimately feels a bit like jamming puzzle pieces together that do not fit, rather than continuing the masterful cinematic delight that was Dead Reckoning.

Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning is a fine film, but definitely not memorable nor up to the standards of either Christopher McQuarrie or Tom Cruise. The script is the most innocuous since Mission Impossible 2. This franchise deserved a better send-off, as did Cruise especially, who has carried this franchise on his back for 3 decades. Occasionally you get an average entry in any franchise. I was just disappointed it had to be the final mission.