Review: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - THE FINAL RECKONING

 by Rob DiCristino

Nothing can prepare you for the return of Willam Dunloe.

A member of the Impossible Mission Force is about to die. They have mere minutes left. Seconds. Chained to a nuclear device poised to raze London to the ground, our friend has come to the sobering conclusion that this will be their final assignment. Their final task. Their final contribution to the cause. They can’t stop the bomb from going off, but they can dismantle it enough to mitigate the damage and give others a chance to survive. Not only will our friend pull this off — natch — but they’ll do it with a smile. “I’m right where I want to be,” they say to their teary-eyed partner in lieu of a final goodbye. This is the path they agreed to walk, after all, the commitment that gave their life texture and purpose. It’s what the ancient Greek philosophers called “eudaimonia,” the idea that true happiness is rooted in virtue and sacrifice, the idea that authentic humanity is born from excellence and satisfaction. It’s true that this agent is going to die. What really matters, however, is that they’re going out practicing that excellence and completing a mission they chose to accept.

That concept of choice is all over Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning, the epic conclusion to a series that has evolved from star-driven programmer to the gold standard of big-budget filmmaking. Picking up some time after 2023’s Dead Reckoning — and after seven or eight minutes of exposition meant to get everyone back up to speed — the film finds Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) in possession of both halves of a cruciform key that grants unrestricted access to the Entity, the all-consuming artificial intelligence that has pushed world governments to the brink of nuclear war. With civilization in shambles and an Entity-worshipping cult calling for a cleansing armageddon, Ethan and his team (Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, and Hayley Atwell) join forces with intelligence agent Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) and French assassin Paris (Pom Klementieff) to destroy the Entity once and for all. Standing in their way is Entity acolyte Gabriel (Esai Morales) and, well, all world governments — chiefly CIA director-turned-U.S. president Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett).

Acting as both the second half of a two-parter — literally, before Dead Reckoning quietly dropped its “Part One” subtitle a few months back — and the culmination of nearly three decades of big screen derring-do, The Final Reckoning has its impossible mission cut out for it: General audiences will expect producer/star Cruise and director/co-writer Christopher McQuarrie to push the boundaries of action cinematography — in other words, to come as close to killing Cruise on screen as practically possible — while the Letterboxd crowd will expect an elegant — and, perhaps in this case, elegiac — statement on the greater role of movies and movie stars in our collective pop culture consciousness. After all, while maestros like Brian De Palma and John Woo were foundational to the franchise’s initial success, it’s in McQuarrie — at the helm since 2015’s Rogue Nation — that Cruise found his true partner in bombastic, irresponsible, achingly sincere cinematic crime. If this really is the final reckoning for Ethan Hunt, then these two madmen owe it to their audience to outline a new mission statement: Where do blockbuster movies go from here, and how?

The Final Reckoning is ultimately a mixed bag on both scores, an ambitious if unwieldy victory lap that packs the series’ trademark visual punch but lacks the narrative sophistication that gave superlative entries like Ghost Protocol and Fallout a place in the conversation about the greatest action films ever made. Considered as a five-hour whole, this last Reckoning phase seeks to answer one long-running, series-unifying question: Why do Ethan Hunt and his team choose to accept these impossible missions? Dead Reckoning introduces a practical answer — that the IMF is made up of would-be criminals serving unconventional sentences — but that hardly feels like enough motivation to transform the jocular Hunt we meet in 1996’s original film into the Living Manifestation of Destiny he later becomes. No, Hunt is defined by his inability to prioritize any mission over his individual team members — a theme artfully dissected in Fallout — and the Reckoning films are built around reshaping this personal commitment into a department-wide mandate.

And while that allegiance to humanity suits some characters better than others — again, one familiar face reaffirms it beautifully in their final moments — it does dovetail nicely with Reckoning’s other major thesis: Automation is a parasitic infection that must be destroyed at all costs. We’re talking about the Entity, of course, the ultimate personification of Cruise’s one-man war against the sniveling corporate bullshittery that took away our Batgirl movie and fucked up the frame rate on our TVs. Hunt fascinates the Entity — likely because they’re the only beings on the planet who juggle nuclear weapons with such reckless abandon — and their ideological struggle is far more interesting than whatever unresolved history Hunt shares with — *checks notes* — Gabriel. No, Cruise is still extolling the virtues of analog filmmaking in a digital world, an argument that sings during a breathtaking biplane duel but smacks a bit insincere in a sunken submarine sequence that, while undoubtedly well-crafted, clearly benefited from some computer-generated assistance.

Still, no minor uses of CGI should distract from The Final Reckoning’s effort to deliver another genuine spectacle, to satisfy longtime Mission fans — get ready to finally learn what the rabbit’s foot is — and inspire new viewers to put down their TikToks and feel something real for a change. It’s far too plotty to ever be dramatically coherent or emotionally satisfying — its weak character work and starchy dialogue also suggest that McQuarrie may have finally run out of enthusiasm for these things — but even that scattered quality feels in keeping with the basic irreverence of Hunt’s work: These missions are so ridiculous that he has no choice but to make things up as he goes along, to put a deeply impractical amount of faith in luck and happenstance. There’s beauty to that randomness, in fact, the very human beauty that this film — indeed, this entire series — is fighting to preserve. So while The Final Reckoning may never crack the top tier in Mission: Impossible rankings, it’s still a valiant effort to bring closure and catharsis to characters whose work will never — could never— be truly finished.

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning hits U.S. theaters on Friday, May 23rd.