Masks off. That describes at least one scene from just about every Mission: Impossible movie, and also the slightly unhinged quality of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the eighth and maybe-last of the spectacular spy film series. I don’t mean that Final Reckoning unveils the true, malevolent face of the series, baring some kind of nationalist snarl. If anything, it falls prey to the same equivocating bromides about favoring selflessness and kindness over division and violence that emerge from so many cautiously faux-political blockbusters, here distorted through a lens trained intently on our lord and savior of the analog world, Ethan Hunt, which is to say Tom Cruise. That’s the face that becomes more visible when the series mask comes off, not that it’s been completely concealed since the second film: one consumed with a solemnly messianic fervor over the following of Ethan/Tom’s vaguely expressed but deeply held values. For Cruise will deliver us, selflessly yet deathlessly, from a narcotized web of sensationalized lies.
Or something. There’s a great, paranoid sci-fi thriller concept embedded in, and not quite excavated from, this second-half sequel to a sequel, a direct (yet still sometimes slightly baffling) continuation of 2023’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning. Ethan and his ever-shifting team of often-disavowed spies are still on the, ah, hunt for the Entity, an artificial intelligence that has gone rogue (like Ethan) and threatens to destroy the world (like the anti-Ethan). Past missions have threatened global unrest and perhaps millions of lives, but the Reckoning duology levels up to truly apocalyptic stakes – which may be a strategic disadvantage for a series that frequently approximates a kind if high-tech Hitchcockian wit to its clockwork set pieces. Not much space for that quality in the scenes where the president (Angela Bassett) confers with her advisors over whether to launch pre-emptive nukes in an imprecise attack on a computerized villain.
Mission: Impossible Final Reckoning is also saddled with the burden of functioning as a grand finale, which means including a previously-on montage narrated and cut together almost like an In Memoriam, as if cinema itself may die with this series, along with frequent-enough flashbacks to remind you of a padded-out clip show. Some of its attempts to weave a grand tapestry from relatively stand-alone entries—half directed by an anthology collection of disparate filmmakers, half directed by Cruise’s talented right-hand man Christopher McQuarrie—go beyond Fast and Furious (a series that soared and crashed in rough imitation of that Mission sleekness) and head into the fevered headspace of Saw.
It’s a little rough in the early going, is what I’m getting at, even though sheer love for this series may power viewers along, as it did for me. The previous picture ended with a clear objective: Use a newly procured high-security key to retrieve the Entity’s source code from a sunken submarine before its maniacal human assistant Gabriel (Esai Morales), or any one country’s government, can take control of its power. Yet the new picture begins months later, as the Entity continues to run wild, radicalizing sections of the internet and accessing various nuclear codes, while belaboring yet muddying what exactly Ethan has been doing with the downtime. It’s not diving for submarines, that’s for sure. He seems to have been running interference while his best friend Luthor (Ving Rhames) works on a digital weapon that could, combined with said source code, destroy the Entity. His other best friend Benji (Simon Pegg) remains somewhere in the loop, while his latest mostly-platonic but heterosexual soulmate Grace (Hayley Atwell) has been recruited into the IMF, the organization that allegedly employs Ethan (though not especially often in these movies; maybe three out of eight? Possibly two?).
Later, the team is rounded out by semi-reformed assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff) and IMF employee Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), and the movie’s great error of its first hour (there are nearly three – hours, not great errors) is that the lengthy assembly of this group is only somewhat fun. McQuarrie can still pull off a committed gag in the midst of subterfuge and action – here Cruise has a brutal fight scene that takes place entirely off camera through outlandish sound effects – but despite the cast’s natural chemistry and some flashes of MI humor (mostly reflecting a growing self-awareness about the absurdity of Ethan’s various plans and, for fans, how they mirror the we’ll-figure-it-out ethos of making these actual movies), a pall hangs over much of the movie’s set-up. McQuarrie sometimes revels in the shadowy spycraft of it all – his Rogue Nation is maybe the series’ most sumptuous entry. But the lack of a playful, seductive Vanessa Kirby figure makes the cloak-and-dagger stuff feel like a throwback to the slightly dim quasi-geopolitical thrillers of the ’90s: presidents, control rooms, lots of people saying “cyberspace.” Had the series kept its door revolving, another filmmaker might have found a fresher angle on this stuff (or the courage to jettison it entirely). McQuarrie, gifted as he is, has to clock in. He’s caretaking a franchise now, seeing it through.
What he brings to the job, however, is the dedication of an acolyte, which is just what Cruise/Hunt demands. When the mission to send Ethan down to the sunken submarine kicks into gear, the movie feels as adventurous and elaborately eye-popping as any in the series. Here, though there are a few fights and scuffles along the way, McQuarrie and Cruise shepherd a wealth of resources toward essentially two set pieces, mid-movie and climactic. One is a long, mostly wordless underwater sequence with parts that had me wondering how it was made. The other is a long, mostly wordless aerial sequence where I’m pretty sure I understand exactly how it was made, and can still hardly believe it. Both are jaw-dropping. Let’s go further: The aerial stuff, involving a pair of biplanes, is among the best, most convincing sustained stunt sequences I’ve ever seen. And in between these feats, Atwell, Pegg, and Klementieff make for delightful company. The majority of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is spectacular entertainment whose in-movie absurdity is nearly matched by the technical absurdity required to pull it off behind the scenes.
The movie’s fealty toward less digitally-centered forms of wonder seems to tie into its themes; at one point, Ethan Hunt kicks a bad guy in the face while admonishing him to spend less time on the internet, and if it might have come across as a Luddite demand a decade ago, now the forcefulness seems only necessary. Yet the movie doesn’t go all-in on the sci-fi dystopia stuff, or even its digital-era cautionary tale of disinformation run wild; it’s ultimately distracted by finishing the rites on unnamed new religion, like Scientology with its own running-based Stations of the Cross. Thanks to its pairing of unreconstructed Cruise worship and the presumed on-the-fly rewriting, this is the most purely loopy Mission since the second. Interestingly, it’s the third that gets some surprising shout-outs and story connections here, alongside a couple of characters from the first movie, plus various locations that visually recall all of McQuarrie’s entries, consciously or not. (Curiously, an unseen episode from Ethan’s past teased in the earlier Reckoning goes absolutely no further than that in this follow-up; this previous retcon is now re-retconned into another clip from a movie we may have seen.)
The ties to past Mission movies are mixed, some hokey and some genuinely clever; the long-term reshaping of Ethan Hunt’s pure determination into a more crusading version of Maverick from Top Gun, however, doesn’t do full justice to Cruise’s movie-star range. As past Hunts, he’s done De Palma wrong-man intensity, Woo badass romanticism, wife-guy charm, and a strange, slightly unknowable punch-drunk superhero. He’s still a kick to watch in Mission: Impossible The Final Reckoning, throwing himself into harm’s way and babbling on about choices. But even for a highly satisfied 30-year fan of Mission: Impossible as a Hollywood institution, this adventure is a little exhausting, and leaves Cruise looking ready to move on to the next world, even if he refuses to admit as much on screen. He’s a great actor and peerless movie star. Maybe it’s time to find another mask to put back on.
Director: Christopher McQuarrie Writers: Christopehr McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen Starring: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny, Angela Bassett, Esai Morales, Greg Tarzan Davis, Shea Whigham Release Date: May 23, 2025
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.
