'Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning' Movie Review: Tom Cruise in Search of a Finale
Tom Cruise races toward closure in a franchise that keeps running in circles.
What does it even mean to be a film critic in 2025, when week after weary week you drag yourself to yet another sequel in yet another franchise—second film? Eighth? Sixty-fifth? And as these franchise feedback loops continue to chew and regurgitate the same stunts, the same emotional beats, the same wide-eyed close-ups of imminent doom, you find yourself writing the same review. Again. And again. And again. And... well, you get it.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning moves with a pronounced, almost burdensome sense of finality. And yet I hesitate to believe it. Franchises have broken my trust before. Robert Downey Jr. is back in the Marvel machine, after all. I want this to be the last impossible mission. But I worry it isn’t.
We rejoin Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his loyal team in the immediate aftermath of Dead Reckoning: Part One, though if you haven’t seen it or haven’t retained much since Part Seven, don’t fret. The film opens with a voiceover recap and a montage of flashbacks that efficiently spoon-feed every essential plot point, as if assuming either that someone might choose to jump straight into the eighth instalment of a franchise with zero context, or anticipating a collective amnesia.
The stakes, as always, are cataclysmic: the Entity, an all-powerful artificial intelligence wants to annihilate the world as we know it. Nuclear threat looms. Exposition abounds.
After 35 years in the IMF (still perhaps the least convincing acronym for a world-saving organisation), Ethan Hunt and his dependable crew—Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), and the ambiguously aligned pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) have set out to defeat this truth-devouring, AI. The mission: find the source code, destroy the source code. The impossibility: well, just about everything else.
As franchise tradition dictates, each new instalment must outdo the last. Higher stakes, louder stunts, longer everything. In this case, literally. The first Mission: Impossible (1996) ran for a tidy 110 minutes. The Final Reckoning clocks in at a sprawling 170. That’s a full hour more, with runtimes across the series increasing by an average of about 6.89% per film. It’s not just that it feels longer. It is longer. Director Christopher McQuarrie chooses to linger where he might have leapt, and to lecture where he might have simply trusted us to follow along.
Indeed, should you step out mid-film—say, to refill your soda or engage in existential crisis—you’ll likely return without having missed much. Characters talk. A lot. For stretches, The Final Reckoning plays like it was made for audiences who watch movies from the kitchen. And yet, for all its dialogue, the film never quite clarifies what the Entity stands to gain by destroying the species it aims to dominate. Is this annihilation as ideology? Algorithmic nihilism? Hard to say. It doesn’t help that some of the lines are delivered in the hushed intonations of Very Serious Cinema. If you’re going to save the world, you might as well enunciate.
But then, just when you start checking the time, or, like the woman a few rows ahead of me, begin editing a man out of a wedding photo on your phone, Cruise starts running. And everything else is put on hold.
This is still a Tom Cruise production in the truest sense: earnest, adrenalised, impressively committed. For a 62-year-old man, dad bod and all, Cruise moves with startling ferocity—he jumps, he falls, he fights, he sprints like someone trying to outrun not just death, but obsolescence itself.
When The Final Reckoning locks into its action rhythms, the film briefly becomes the thing it’s always promised to be. An underwater sequence pulses with claustrophobic dread. A high-altitude escape evokes windburn and vertigo in equal measure. The snow tingles your skin with a chill. After eight films, the action still crackles with real, tactile ingenuity. The problem is it takes nearly an hour to build momentum and once it does, it can’t quite let go.
To hold and release tension is the essential grammar of the action film. Release too early and the payoff feels cheap. Release too late and the audience burns out. Here, exhaustion sets in not by accident but seemingly by design: a long, drawn-out breath that never quite exhales. Time dilates and warps. Minutes on a bomb tick by at an agonising pace. Four minutes stretch into forever. And by the end, that sense of urgency you’ve been clutching feels like a false promise.
Thankfully, this isn’t a solo mission. Ethan’s crew gets their due. Atwell, especially, is a welcome addition: her Grace is competent, cunning, and fully present, never relegated to the sidelines during the climax as women too often are in films like these. There’s even a welcome nod to the franchise’s past, a brief but earned blast of nostalgia that reminds us how far we've come.
There’s also a faint signal of moral ambition. The film gestures toward the ethics of sacrifice, of choosing peace in moments of justified vengeance, of weighing the needs of the many against the desperate few. You might have to listen closely to hear it. But it’s there.
As farewells go, you wouldn't be wrong to expect a little more: more pathos, more gravity, perhaps a tear or two. What we’re left with instead is a question: Will this franchise self-destruct in 30 years?