Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning

AIs Wide Shut

Mission Impossible
The Final Reckoning
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
USA 2025
Paramount
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: Spoilers for the last movie.

Okay... so right up front I will say that, since I thought the last film in this mostly wonderful franchise was a bit dull and, since there’s been a lot of word of mouth and critical response that the first hour or so of this one is pretty dreary before it picks up, I was going into Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning (which should rightly be called Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 2 but I suspect there’s a very good reason it isn’t, perhaps to do more with the box office returns on the last one rather than any superstitious caveats the main lead has with the number two) with not so high hopes. So right up front I would like to refute all those claims because, frankly, I had at least as much fun with the pre-submarine sequences in this as I did with the rest of the movie. Perhaps more than the rest of it to an extent.

This one sees the return of most of the crew from the previous three films... Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, and Ving Rhames (alas, my favourite character played by Rebecca Ferguson was killed off in the last installment) along with recent new regulars Hayley Atwell and the increasingly brilliant Pom Klementieff. Plus assorted newcomers.

Cruise’s Ethan Hunt character is in hiding, now possessing both parts of the cruciform key needed to lift the next gadget to help bring down the Artificial Intelligence (AI) known as The Entity, which is gradually taking control of the nuclear arsenals of the world for a big bang day to wipe out humanity. It’s obviously down to Cruise and some new, acquired on the job team members (including an absolutely brilliant call back character who was a very minor character in one sequence of the first film and played by the same actor... who’s has a lot more to do here and is just fantastic) to help him in his quest.

It’s fast and furious and everybody is really good, with some intense scenes between the president (played by the great Angela Bassett) and her staff, who want to start the nuclear war just a little early. Can Cruise and co come through in time? Well, the highly improbable set of split timing sequences which make this a possibility, leading to a thing which has to be timed blindly to within literally a blink of an eye, requires... people performing the usual superhuman style antics which takes a lot of suspension of disbelief, for sure.

Now the two big action set pieces of the last two hours of the movie were, to me, a little dull... a submarine suspense sequence and a bi-plane suspense sequence (I prefer the more punch punch, shooty shooty explosion style set pieces myself) but all in all I’d say this film has a much more even tone than the last one and it is, I’m glad to say, a fair bit better than that one (even with the exclusion of Rebecca Ferguson). The score by franchise newcomers Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey is serviceable but seems to be lighter on the Lalo Schifrin themes than some of them... that being said, since it’s so far not had a proper CD release at time of writing  (just a rubbish digital and scratchy vinyl release) it may be that I don’t ever get to hear it away from the movie, which would be a shame.

All in all, I didn’t find this film at all slow and I’m scratching my head at some of the comments by the critics. A criticism would be that Shea Whigham’s character did not, this time around, need an almost ‘so tacked on it seems fake’ callback to one of the characters in the first movie... that was kind of dumb and unnecessary, I thought. However, having said that, I’d like to throw out a big shout out to Rolf Saxon and Lucy Tulugarjuk, who were both brilliant here. Not to mention Love Lies Bleeding star Katy O’Brian, who doesn’t have much to do here but who certainly has a lot of screen presence.

And that’s me done with Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning other than to say... final reckoning my backside. Cruise and his cast and crew could easily make another one of these if they change their minds and the big bad of the movie could also easily be brought back if that is what the writers intend. Not the best of the Mission Impossible films (that would be this one, here) but nowhere near the worst of them and with some nice shout backs which tie it back to a number of the previous films too. Works well at the cinema and would probably suit a big TV set too, I suspect.