TOM CRUISE HAS jumped from the sky, hung off the wing of an ascending airplane, been a part of countless car chases and wrecks, and driven a motorcycle directly off a mountainside cliff toward the abyss of nothing. And that’s just just the tip of the iceberg in the last ten years of the Mission: Impossible franchise.
Cruise’s incredible feats as a stunt performer and showman, though, are matched only by his achievement as a filmmaker and a movie star; We come to the Mission: Impossible series for the stunts, sure, but in the nearly 30 years since the franchise started with 1996’s Mission: Impossible, we’ve come to know Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his found family of friends and colleagues very, very well. This is a world that, through the movies, through the adventures, and through the decades, we have a handle on. It is definitively not the world we, the viewers live in, but rather an elevated one, one where the rules are constantly changing a little bit, where friendship is the most powerful superpower, and where Ethan Hunt exists somewhere between man, God, and supernatural entity. It’s an elevated world, yes, of course—but its one with an audience that more than recognizes it and understands what belongs in it when that iconic theme song starts to play and those opening credits start to roll.
All of this contributes in making the very concept of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning such a difficult endeavor. While nothing has officially been announced, the movie—which was originally planned to be called Dead Reckoning Part Two before being reworked—implies in its title alone that it’s an ending; A final chapter for a story that’s been in the process of being written since 1996. But therein lies the challenge: How do you wrap up a story with so many different nooks, crannies, and corners, so many threads, so many characters, and, yes, so many stunts? It’d be a difficult endeavor for anyone to pull off, but Tom Cruise isn’t just anyone; He’s one of the great movie stars of the last 50 years. And in his hands—just like in Ethan’s hands—you believe in anything.
The Final Reckoning, ultimately, mostly pulls it off. The movie is 2 hours and 50 minutes long, no easy buy-in, and could have easily been shorter; Much of the first hour of the movie is spent recapping things that happened in previous films in the series, and there’s archive footage from the last three decades of MI interspersed throughout the movie. You want to make sure everyone is up to speed with what’s going on, sure, but you also have to know that Mission: Impossible fans and viewers are obsessive. Despite the fact that the movie calls back to 1996’s Mission: Impossible and, surprisingly, 2006’s Mission: Impossible III, all of the extra exposition, recap, and reminding wasn’t needed. Believe in the audience—we’ve got it!
The plot, too, is a bit disjointed; Things pick up right where 2023’s Dead Reckoning (formerly known as Dead Reckoning Part One) left off, with Ethan, along with his handful of loyal friends and fellow IMF agents, facing off against an all-powerful AI system known only as The Entity. What The Entity can and cannot do is always left a little bit unclear, but we’re left to know that The Entity has the ability to control and destroy the whole world (and “The Truth,” as the movie reiterates), and Ethan is determined for no one to control it. It’s too much power, even for Ethan Hunt.
The story is fairly straightforward to put that way, but this is Mission: Impossible, so of course it becomes a globe-trotting, death-defying adventure. And those are the parts that always really work. Flying through the sky? Deep sea diving? It’s truly miraculous stuff. And Cruise and director/co-writer Christopher McQuarrie (back for his fourth MI film, after Dead Reckoning and the fantastic Rogue Nation and Fallout) know the perfect cast with which to surround Ethan. As always, he’s got friends Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames) by his side, and Dead Reckoning addition Grace (Hayley Atwell) has a whole different vibe, skillset, and personality to round things out for our core team.
But just as with Dead Reckoning, there’s a whole cavalcade of characters who are brilliantly performed and crafted here. For my money, the non-Cruise MVP, for a second movie in a row, is Pom Klementieff, who’s reformed henchman character Paris is an agent of chaos who shines every moment on screen. There’s also Henry Czerny, back again as the duplicitous Eugene Kittridge, and Shea Whigham, once again playing Cruise’s tired, weary foil Agent Jasper Briggs (and he’s got a subplot this time might not have been fully baked, but will make you yelp nonetheless). Angela Bassett is also back, her Erika Sloane now the U.S. President (after being the CIA Director in Fallout); She gives one of the best performances in the movie. After sicking her human weapon August Walker (Henry Cavill) on Ethan in a previous movie and seeing how that all turned out—and, well, we won’t spoil any of that—you can recognize the experiences she needs to reflect on with each and every decision. New characters played by Tramell Tillman (of Severance fame) and Katy O’Brian (of Love Lies Bleeding and Twisters fame) also shine in their limited time on screen.
Even Rolf Saxon, who hasn’t been seen in his role as William Donloe since the very first Mission: Impossible, shines. His return could’ve been a goofy, silly, cameo, as is all too common in modern franchise filmmaking. But he’s given a legitimate character arc, and plays the role with more gravitas than you’d ever expect. It really works. All of the above help to round what can be a bloated movie out with characters who we just like spending time with.
It’s funny to talk about all the great performances in a movie like Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, which is ostensibly the capstone to a series that is, essentially, built around stunts and action. Because the stunts and action do thrive, as they always do. There is no feeling on earth like watching a 62-year-old Tom Cruise grip his entire body to an airplane doing barrel rolls through the sky, knowing that he really did that shit. He really did it, and there’s nothing that compares to the feeling that goes through one’s body when watching.
For all that works and remains fun in The Final Reckoning, there is still all that is unwieldy, with some moments that start to feel illogical the more you think about them, and choices that you can’t follow or hang with. But then you remember that you’re in the presence of friends, watching some truly one-of-a-kind stuff on screen, and that all goes away.
Is The Final Reckoning as much of a transcendent, transformative experience as movies like Fallout? Probably not. Are you still in the hands of absolute masters? What Tom Cruise has done in the last 15-20 years on screen has been the work of a true legend. We could say that there’s no one doing it quite like him, but that wouldn’t be true; His work in practical stunt-driven filmmaking has actually proven infectious. Later this summer F1, from Joseph Kosinski, the director of Top Gun: Maverick, will hit theaters. And that movie is filmed in the same practical stunts-driven style as Maverick, which, of course, Cruise led and willed into existence.
We can only hope that someone out there working on (or obsessively watching) the Mission: Impossible movies feels just as inspired. Because if The Final Reckoning really turns out to be, well, The Final Reckoning, The Movies, broadly are going to be worse off for it. But we’ll always be thankful for what Tom Cruise gave, and we’ll always be willing to watch a Mission: Impossible.
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Evan is the culture editor for Men’s Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn’t.
