Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to join Tom Cruise and friends for one last outing in the purported franchise finale of one of cinema’s most enduring action series. As Mission: Impossible closes the door on hero Ethan Hunt with a disconcertingly relevant war on artificial intelligence, corruption and power, do Christopher McQuarrie and cinema’s golden boy have what it takes to launch a showstopping conclusion to a series that has continually pushed the boundaries and redefined the blockbuster over the past three decades?
As a terrifying artificial intelligence known as The Entity infiltrates nuclear networks across the globe, Ethan Hunt, alongside friends old and new, enters a race against time to stop the world as we know it from changing forever. Cruise has assembled a team including Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Esai Morales and Pom Klementieff for The Final Reckoning, arriving two years after its predecessor, Dead Reckoning.
A bad franchise instalment from a once-enjoyable series is never an enjoyable experience, but it particularly stings when it’s signing off an otherwise impressively consistent run with a whimper as underwhelming as this one. While it may not have found its footing until later in its run, Mission Impossible has, generally speaking, gone from strength to strength over the years, pushing the limits of cinema (and Cruise himself) to deliver exhilaratingly entertaining pieces of work that succeed in both quality and creativity. That the ball has been dropped so spectacularly in this concluding entry is genuinely devastating, a misfire that will haunt whatever life the Mission: Impossible moniker will hold moving forward.
A bloated and surprisingly lethargic instalment that spends so long talking up dramatic stakes that it forgets that the emotional throughline, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning is stuffed with so much exposition and characters voicing their concern that the unrelentingly desolate tone of hopelessness becomes an overwhelmingly one-note onslaught without the heart, soul or creativity to counteract it. Written by McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen, the film finds itself between a rock and a hard place from the get-go, following the underwhelming box office performance of Dead Reckoning during the Barbenheimer summer of 2023. Forced to go to great lengths to recontextualise its jumping off point, and swept up in the recent growing trend of leaning into nostalgia and fan service to best engage its audience, it wastes almost an hour re-laying the groundwork, swallowing up time better spent enriching the team dynamic or cementing the emotional magnitude in a way that feels satisfying and deserved.
You know something has gone amiss when even the set pieces, typically the franchise’s crowing glory, underwhelm as they do. Of course, no one is saying there isn't any entertainment to be had watching Cruise climb between colourful aircrafts and tumbling around in a submersible, to which he commits to with reliable gusto, but seriously lacking both scope and invention, the set pieces are mired by a nagging sense of “seen it!” that has otherwise evaded the series due to its boundary-pushing approach and wink-nudge sense of personality. Everything here feels minor in comparison to the derailing train of Dead Reckoning, the rooftop chase of Fallout or the scaling of the Burj Khalifa of Ghost Protocol, a really rather disastrous moment for the series to lose steam. It is abundantly clear a great deal of hard work has gone into crafting these set pieces, and McQuarrie ensures that they are executed with a respectable practicality you cannot help but appreciate - but it's almost as if the technical focus has zapped the film of the much-needed spark of creativity that is so crucial to our enjoyment and amazement in watching the death-defying stunts unfold in front of our very eyes.
Final Reckoning’s cast does a mighty fine job of dragging the franchise through its finale. Cruise's sheer commitment is undeniable, and Atwell is a highlight, profusely charming as pickpocket Grace; it feels like she has been part of the team forever, her recruitment in Dead Reckoning a thrilling decision that she shoulders in the scenes when the team is parted from Hunt. Such separation takes up a surprisingly large portion of Final Reckoning's runtime, and with the team's roster largely made up of new or briefly-seen characters, its worth questioning whether this was the strongest group of characters to take the franchise out with, given that so very few of them have roots within the franchise that provide it with the emotional heft required.
If the emotional stakes approached the heft of Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning's dramatic weight, we could be on to a winner with Cruise and McQuarrie's franchise swan song, but lacking boundary-pushing creativity in its set pieces and without the heart and soul needed to end on a high, we are sadly left with a mission that limps to an unfortunate end. Undoubtedly, some entertainment can be found in the action scenes, but you are not left with the same thrill that has empowered the franchise over the past four films in particular, with no one scene in this concluding chapter registering anywhere near the series' very best and the storyline that surrounds it is contrived and frustratingly nostalgia-laden. Mission: Impossible made its own bed as it grew in scope and scale over the years, and while it would inevitably crash and burn at some stage - after all, once you hit the peak, there's only one way to go - it's genuinely disappointing that it happened during what should have been a victory lap for McQuarrie, Cruise and crew. Still, the cinema landscape is being left in a better space through the practical, daring approach these filmmakers have brought to it over the years, and when the dust settles on The Final Reckoning, we can hope we look back more fondly on Mission Impossible's generation-shaping success.