Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning

NOW IN THEATERS! Director Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise are back one final time for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the concluding chapter in Ethan Hunt’s high-octane saga. This time, our favorite IMF agent faces his most unstoppable enemy yet—an all-powerful rogue AI known as The Entity. Cruise is doing what Cruise does best: risking it all to save the world, one impossible mission at a time.

Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning picks up roughly where Dead Reckoning left off, with Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team racing to stop The Entity, a rogue artificial intelligence threatening global security. With help from allies Grace (Hayley Atwell), Benji (Simon Pegg), Luther (Ving Rhames), and new member Paris (Pom Klementieff), Ethan tracks down a critical source code hidden on a lost submarine. The film opens with a tense sequence in a tunnel, setting the stage for the escalating threat of The Entity, which is taking over nuclear systems around the world, with the final system being the United States.

In the meantime, the President (Angela Bassett) and her military advisors are desperate to track down Ethan, as it is discovered that he is the reason the Entity exists. Rather than throwing him in prison, the President goes rogue and lets Ethan and his IMF team save the world once and for all.

The main storyline follows Ethan on a solo mission to recover the source code. He must infiltrate the abandoned submarine, deep deep underwater, retrieve the hard drive, and return to the surface while battling Murphy’s Law, where everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Alongside this, Gabriel (Esai Morales), the Entity’s banished human agent, works to have Ethan give him everything, including the source code, to gain control of the Entity. Past events from earlier films are revisited during the mission, and a surprise character from the first film returns, tying together the long-running franchise’s narrative threads.

“…racing to stop The Entity, a rogue artificial intelligence threatening global security.”

It’s well known that The Final Reckoning is the final installment of Mission: Impossible, for Tom Cruise at least. Rather than being the biggest stunt banger, Final Reckoning more or less ties up all the loose ends of the original film. There are elements from each of the preceding films that play either key or small roles for those who have been fans from the beginning. That said, you do not need to have seen any of the Mission: Impossible films to enjoy The Final Reckoning.

Where does this stand among the others? I call it the worst of the best. Don’t get me wrong, I loved this movie, but I’ll see the others again before I loop back around to this one. One main reason is that the action felt claustrophobic compared to the others. The main action set pieces take place in a tunnel, on a submarine, in a cabin in the Arctic, and on a prop airplane. Compare this to the series’ most iconic action scenes and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

As someone who has followed the series, this is definitely the swan song. It has everything you want from a Mission Impossible movie: an anxiety-inducing submarine sequence that goes way longer than I wanted, the political and action intrigue you expect from Cruise and McQuarrie, and some fantastic sequences with Hayley Atwell. I also love that the ending is light years better than James Bond‘s demise.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is the last of the series, giving us a victory lap wrapped in a claustrophobic thrill ride. While it trades sprawling vistas for tighter set pieces, it brings Ethan Hunt’s story full circle in a way that’s surprisingly emotional and—dare I say it—earned. It’s not the franchise’s flashiest entry, but as a final toast to Tom Cruise’s decades-long IMF run, it hits all the right notes… and unlike Bond, it sticks the landing.