Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning fumbles its own legacy, largely by believing it had one in the first place. With apologies to Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames, this has never been a franchise powered by our emotional connections to its characters, much less any sort of overarching, thematically resonant narrative. The Final Reckoning belatedly attempts to conjure up such qualities, while skimping on what has always mattered most in the series: scintillating stunt work. A follow-up to 2023’s Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One (at least they trimmed the title), the movie spends most of its nearly three hours establishing, explaining, and re-iterating its increasingly escalating stakes, involving renegade A.I. and nuclear armageddon. Unfortunately, the only stakes that have ever mattered in these films is whether or not Tom Cruise can maintain his grip while hanging from the wing of an airborne plane. We get that sequence—and it’s thrilling, with Cruise himself clearly doing the clinging—but it arrives well over two hours into the proceedings, preceded by a few fistfights, some shootouts, a murky diving sequence, and talk, talk, talk. (The setup for the climactic hack/heist made me feel as if I had stumbled into a training session for Best Buy’s Geek Squad.) There are also frequent flashbacks not only to Dead Reckoning Part One, but every other Mission: Impossible installment, as if, taken together, these characters and the missions they’ve chosen to accept over the years have established a significant hold on our pop-culture imagination. If you’ve been harboring a deep attachment for a particular knife in 1996’s Mission: Impossible, then this is the movie for you. If you’re hoping to see Cruise defy age, gravity, and other laws of nature, you’re mostly out of luck. Directed, as were the previous three installments, by Christopher McQuarrie, and produced—as the series has been since the beginning—by Cruise.
(5/14/2025)
