Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

When news came that Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning might be the final film in a 19 year old franchise, I had hoped this would be a fitting conclusion to Tom Cruise's tenure as Ethan Hunt but alas the critics were not kind upon its release in 2025. And, sadly, I was not exactly surprised as this was the second half to the lacklustre Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning from 2023, which set the scene on rocky foundations making it hard for director Christopher McQuarrie to turn things around. But I still went into this hoping to be entertained and, on that basis, I wasn't too disappointed. 

The film prior to this saw Hunt trying to stop an AI force, known as The Entity, from unleashing chaos on the world and The Final Reckoning sees the team continue that mission as their enemy comes close to igniting a nuclear war. Cue Cruise running left, right and centre across the world and against the clock once more!

Unfortunately, The Final Reckoning's flaws quickly become apparent in the the first long hour with its rushed pacing that lacks any sense of clear direction, and an overreliance on flashbacks to the point of parody. This could have been much more engaging through tighter editing but instead we get a ludicrous amount of exposition on repeat without giving the film chance to breath and unravel at a more digestible pace. This is very far from the highs of Fallout, where perhaps the franchise should have ended in 2018.

In an effort to make a grand finale, it seems too many ingredients were thrown into the mix and so I imagine editing this behemoth must have been a challenge. The way the story jumps around hints at poor planning and a quick look online shows how much was cut to file this down.  Apparently one such victim was Hunt's backstory with a woman who was murdered by the villain, hastily introduced in the last film, and is practically dropped here. I wasn't a fan of how that was implemented and its absence here makes it all for nothing when its purpose was to create a personal angle between Hunt and the villain, who is practically absent here. 

There just isn't enough in either of the Reckoning films to justify a combined 333 minutes of running time when one film would have been easily sufficient. Instead, we get backstories to so many characters which don't amount to anything, huge gaps between any of the action set pieces and just too much exposition. The story had potential but nothing to grant it being more than a tidy 180 minute one-off action flick. 

That's not to say there aren't some saving graces as things do improve after the first act, particularly with the submarine action set piece which is excellent, and the plane sequence towards the end is also very exciting but everything else falls flat when this series has often provided a consistent level of entertainment. Cruise and the team still do a great job and it's all shot very well yet it's undermined by a weak, bloated story. This is one mission you may accept to watch once out of curiosity and then leave it at that.