‘Mission’: Finale

Impossible as it may seem, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning claims to be the ultimate chapter in impossibly unrelenting Tom Cruise’s eight-film character arc as Impossible Mission Force espionage agent Ethan Hunt. Just like its predecessors, The Final Reckoning is a full-throttle robotic rollercoaster ride as dogged and as insistent as its star. And it doubles as a swell, swole salute that gives Tom Terrific his flowers for services rendered along the way.

“You never followed orders and you never let us down,” former CIA director and now President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) says on a self-destructing VHS-taped message, delivering a poetic, preposterously contradictory accolade while we sit through an extended supercut highlight reel from the previous seven installments. The world got another sunrise because of Ethan’s deific derring-do! You remember all the excitement, right? Right?!?

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE — THE FINAL RECKONING  ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Christopher McQuarrie
Written by: Christopher McQuarrie, Erik Jendresen
Starring: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Henry Czerny, Angela Bassett
Running time: 170 mins

Tom drops down arachnid-like from the ceiling of Langley’s black vault! Tom scrambles across the dizzying façade of the Burj Khalifa! Tom rides his motorcycle off a cliff! And, thanks to some klugey CGI magic, Tom also gets blown from a helicopter onto a speeding TGV and barely survives the explosion of the entire Kremlin. He also sprints so, so, so many times, forearms knifing through the air, racing his way from one international set piece to another. Is he running from a career reckoning? Run, Tom, run!

Digital enemies

“The world is changing,” we’re told as Ethan gets called into service one last time. “War is coming. Truth is vanishing.” Those who saw the previous installment, Dead Reckoning, will remember that the root of all evil is A.I. uber-villain the Entity, a steroidal ChatGPT described in the purplest prose as the “Anti-God” and a “truth-ending parasite” that crawled out of the “primordial digital ooze,” turning allies into enemies and enemies into adversaries. You hear that, Siri? Stand down!

The only hope to stop it is a handsome bejeweled interlocking two-piece device called a Cruciform key that unlocks a submerged Soviet submarine’s sonar sphere and allows access to a router-sized device called the Podkova. That particular hard drive has the source code for The Entity which will shut it down. Got all that?

Okay, good, there’s more: Ethan’s IMF brother-from-another-mother Luther (Ving Rhames) has developed the malware necessary to short-circuit the apocalypse. It’s a digital poison pill on a flash drive to insert into the Podkova. And—wait for it—he also invented a pocket-sized 360-terabyte 5D optical drive to insert into a local mainframe on a remote, top secret, high security, electronically shielded server farm to act as the proverbial bottle into which the Entity’s genie needs to be put back. And that bottling needs to happen in 100 milliseconds—the blink of an eye. 

Cue flop sweat from President Sloane’s inner circle, who would much rather launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike before the Entity gains access to all the superpowers’ arsenals and starts an extinction-level event from all sides. DEFCON 3 is about to tick up another notch, and there are less than four days before the Entity resets Earth’s Anthropocene era.

Delivering all the thrills

Ethan’s mission, if he chooses to accept it—spoiler alert, he does—involves spectacular sequences of heart-pounding kinetic excitement, mostly dialogue-free and absolutely riveting. One of them takes place inside the sunken sub as it slowly rotates off a deep-sea ledge; another involves dangling Cruise from an actual biplane in an extended stunt sequence of such gonzo verve that he should get a lifetime achievement award for persistent virtuosic insanity.

There are also two different plutonium bombs that need wire-cut defusing and countless undercover baddies who pop up out of nowhere to shoot at our intrepid team of world-savers. Because not everyone is Tom Cruise and the other cast members need to be in more quotidian peril. 

It’s been a long, strange trip from the first entry—a sleekly efficiently, merrily convoluted big-screen TV adaptation upgraded as off-brand James Bond—to this last one, a grandiose super-sized send-off for the super-spy. The solidly successful, three-decade series started as an intriguingly eclectic action showcase that enlisted popcorn-friendly auteurs like Brian De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams, and Brad Bird before settling into Cruise control with writer-director Christopher McQuarrie’s last four entries. 

That cinematic-caboose quartet is a well-oiled set of cinematic whirligigs, all maximally modulated delivery systems toggling between breathless action sequences bristling with excitement and bloviating tête-à-têtes overstuffed with exposition. The Final Reckoning adds a valedictory air to all the tense conversations and dazzling mayhem, making sure we know that not only is the fate of the world at stake, but also the fate of the franchise. Rest assured that The Final Reckoning has a predictably satisfying conclusion—so much so that the next time there’s a mission, its sexagenarian star might find it impossible to continue.