REVIEW: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)

Movie Reviews

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is so poorly conceived it’s hard to believe anyone thought it was a good idea. This is a nearly three-hour film that should have been the third act of the last Mission: Impossible movie, which you can tell because, until the third act of this film, almost nothing happens. The time people probably assumed was needed to tie up the many dangling threads left by Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning is instead used for lots of talking, long takes of Tom Cruise underwater, and an endless barrage of pointless references to earlier Mission: Impossible movies. What makes it even more frustrating is that The Final Reckoning does a few interesting things here and there, things I wanted some of the previous films to do; there are also hints at better versions of this story amid the tedium and nonsensical finale. It could’ve been great.

Two months after the events of Dead Reckoning, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is on the run, pursued by his own government and his nemesis, Gabriel (Esai Morales), the chief acolyte of the Entity, the sentient AI that’s threatening to take over the world. He and his old friends, Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), devise a plan to capture and destroy the Entity once and for all. But first, Ethan needs the rest of his new team: professional thief Grace (Hayley Atwell), rogue assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff), and a surprising new recruit.

Yeah, we’re still stuck with that dumb sentient AI plot, and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning manages to make it even dumber than it was in Dead Reckoning. Last time, Gabriel was some sort of insane true believer who worshiped the AI, which was stupid, but at least it was only the delusions of one man. In The Final Reckoning, the Entity has managed to attract a worldwide cult of fanatics who want it to destroy the world. Worse still, we’re told the Entity’s forces have penetrated the highest levels of power in all the world’s governments… in two months. (And don’t worry about me spoiling anything; this is all revealed in the first five or ten minutes of the movie.) It’s a naked attempt to make the Entity sound scarier than it is, and it’s so idiotic that it has no bearing on the rest of the plot, bar one incident that hardly qualifies as “the highest levels of power.” And it has the President and the top brass of the US government so scared that they act like overly emotional lunatics, with Ethan Hunt the only one in whatever room he’s in who’s halfway intelligent. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the movie depicting the government as incompetent, but it gets too cartoonish after a while.

So, what’s Ethan Hunt doing while all of this is going on? Mostly, he’s talking to people. And I don’t mean to say this is a classic espionage story with a spy engaging in deception, investigating various leads, smoking out enemy agents, or anything as interesting as that. After an admittedly fast-paced opening, Ethan spends two-thirds of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning explaining his overly convoluted plan to different people in different locations, over and over, in minute detail, and then asking them to trust him. That “I need you to trust me” line from the trailer happens repeatedly throughout this film, albeit with different wording. Ethan’s team is doing much the same, moving from place to place and talking about the Entity, the safeguards for the Entity, what Ethan wants them to do, how computers work, and whatever else they can cram into these interminable scenes. There are two action sequences in this section of the movie, and they happen simultaneously just in case the pacing picked up a tick; they’re also extraneous and free of consequence because they only exist to keep the audience from falling asleep. (You know what else could have helped with that? Playing the Mission: Impossible theme music here and there. Why do all these modern movies have access to iconic music and imagery but refuse to use it?) And this is what I mean when I say that I can’t imagine how anyone thought this was a good idea. How did so many people sign off on making a Mission: Impossible movie this dull and lifeless?

Moreover, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning doesn’t use any of its time to answer the questions we were left with in Dead Reckoning. Remember the girl from Ethan’s past that Gabriel killed? We learn nothing more about that – who she is, why Gabriel killed her, why he hated Ethan so much, who Gabriel even is – even though the movie shows the scene again! Remember Gabriel killing Ilsa in the last one? She’s never mentioned again, despite Fallout making such a big deal about how much Ethan loved her (in one unconvincing scene, but that’s another kettle). The Final Reckoning is much more interested in hearkening back to the older Mission: Impossible films for no reason but nostalgia bate. Have you been dying to find out what happened to minor characters whose names you’ve probably forgotten? Were you wondering how many long-lost children could fit into a single narrative? Do you still care what the Rabbit’s Foot was in Mission: Impossible 3? Well, The Final Reckoning has the answers for you! It’s also got lots of clips from the older Mission: Impossible movies, hoping that the series means enough to you that reminding you of the previous entries will tug at your heartstrings enough to make you interested in this slog of a film. It’s shameless, and it would be unnecessary if they had just made a good movie.

One way to do that would have been to focus on the characters, which Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning doesn’t do. Almost nobody here has much of an arc or even a personality; they just drift along until the credits roll. To be fair, character work was never this series’ strong suit, and I usually prefer it when they just give up and go for pure entertainment. But to do that, the movie has to be entertaining, and this one isn’t. You can forget a character is two-dimensional when they’re jumping from a helicopter, outrunning an explosion, or enacting a complex spy operation, but when they’re sitting around talking about boring nonsense, you feel how empty they are. As a result, this massive cast of good-to-great actors has virtually nothing to do but recite bland pablum, which makes it even more annoying that they brought in so many new actors instead of simply focusing on Ethan, his team, and the villain (who is barely in the film, which is unforgivable when he’s played by an actor like Esai Morales), with maybe a handful of government suits mucking things up for the heroes. Culling this cast of thousands could have gone a long way towards trimming the fat from a narrative so bloated it was split into two movies and wastes the bulk of the second one.

Is there anything good about Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning? Yes, and it all points to a better movie that was ruined for reasons I don’t understand. Ving Rhames is back as Luther, and he has the best scene in the film, bar none, where he and Ethan reflect on their long friendship with subtlety and real emotion that is absent from every other aspect of the film. Rhames is so good in this scene that it amplifies how wasted he’s been since the first Mission: Impossible (and what a crime it is that he seems to have drifted into direct-to-video obscurity). Nick Offerman plays a very minor role as the secretary of defense, but he has a surprising mini-arc that exists only in the space of a few scenes, and it blows away most of the main characters. And, as with the last film, Hayley Atwell is absolutely enchanting, and I don’t just mean her goddess-tier looks; even in a part as underwritten as hers is, she manages to give Grace a personality, bringing the character to life in a movie that, frankly, doesn’t deserve her. Atwell, on the other hand, deserves to be a huge star because she knows how to command the screen despite her lousy material. There’s a fight scene between Ethan and some random bad guy early on that happens entirely off-screen (I suspect because, despite the mystique that’s been built around him, Tom Cruise is in his 60s now, and there’s only so much he can do), and the only reason it’s somewhat entertaining is because the camera focuses on Atwell’s face as she reacts to what’s going on, and she sells it. I feel bad that she finally gets a blockbuster movie after Captain America fourteen years ago, and it’s this. Finally, of course, Tom Cruise has some big stunts, particularly the one you’ve seen in the trailers where he hangs off a biplane in midair; it’s cool, and I admire that he still puts himself through this for our entertainment, but he’s let down by the lame ending to the sequence, a potentially satisfying payoff that’s ruined when it’s turned into a sight gag.

Other than a few of the actors, some of the camera work in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is good, particularly the shots of Ethan underwater. While the sequence is boring and feels like it’ll never end (at least three James Bond films did this infinitely better), the cinematography is lovely, with these majestic shots of Tom Cruise looking like he’s being swallowed by the vastness of the sea. I also enjoyed the attempts to make Ethan fallible, something that very few of these movies do; in the early scenes, he’s at an extreme disadvantage, and even though he’s up against AI (I know I keep harping on this, but it’s so bad), he looks like he’s going to have to go through hell to win – and if you count being bored to tears as going through hell, I guess he does. Moreover, there’s a notion introduced early on that Ethan made a big mistake in the past, and that contributed to the nightmare the world is going through; this is something they teased in Fallout before taking it back and assuring everyone that Ethan was still perfect and we had nothing to worry about. The Final Reckoning doesn’t do all it could with the idea (like making Ethan go through the movie determined to make up for his screw-up), but at least it’s never undone. There are other potentially interesting elements introduced as well, things that, if expanded upon and used instead of most of the story, would have made for a much better movie. Imagine, for example, Ethan and his team having to contend with agents from other countries as they search for the MacGuffin, Ethan having to balance the good of the world with his desire for revenge, or Ethan dealing with rogue elements of the American government who want to use the AI for their own purposes… people who know Ethan and never liked him, and now have the opportunity to kill him like they always wanted to. But no, The Final Reckoning plays footsie with those ideas before abandoning them completely. Ultimately, it’s a mess of a film that could have been great.

Let us know what you thought of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning in the comments!

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