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‘Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning’ is Tom Cruise at his best and his worst
The first hour of "Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning" is a boring, incomprehensible mess. But by the end of the movie, Tom Cruise will make you a believer.
Tom Cruise has made it his life’s work to save the theatrical movie. He has faced down the pandemic, thrown himself off a cliff, and materialized from on high to show us that the righteous path leads to the multiplex.
With “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” we have reached the apotheosis of Cruise’s Christ-like journey; nearly three hours of mythmaking and self-aggrandizement make abundantly clear that Ethan Hunt is no longer just a hypercompetent spy — he is literally Cinema Jesus.
Unlike every preceding “Mission: Impossible” film, “Final Reckoning” does not function as a standalone story. Watching 2023’s “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning” beforehand is a must, and writer-director Brian McQuarrie weaves details from all seven “M:I” movies into this saga.
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Hunt and his team are facing off against The Entity, an all-powerful AI that now controls most of the global nuclear arsenal. In an on-the-nose metaphor, we learn that the algorithm has also turned humans against each other, subsuming every aspect of their lives. (“The Entity wants you to hate me!” Ethan yells at one point. In another scene, Ethan dispatches an Entity zealot with a pithy one liner: “He spent too much time on the internet.”)
The Entity is anthropomorphized in the form of Gabriel (Esai Morales), its human conduit. In a fuzzy bit of flashback from “Dead Reckoning,” we learn that Gabriel had a hand in setting the events from 1996’s original “Mission: Impossible” in motion. This is the first of several increasingly implausible plot points used by McQuarrie and Cruise (who reportedly had final script approval) to position “Final Reckoning” as a capstone to the Ethan Hunt saga.
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Remember the Rabbit’s Foot, the laughably nonspecific MacGuffin from “Mission: Impossible III?” That was actually AI. What about the Kremlin explosion in 2011’s “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol?” Yep, that was tied to the Entity too, somehow. Everything in Ethan’s life has unwittingly been part of a larger mission to destroy this self-aware AI — a mission only he can complete.
All of this information is dumped on the audience in a torrent of flashbacks and expository dialogue that borders on incomprehensible. Things get even worse after Ethan — in a scene reminiscent of “A Clockwork Orange” — loses touch with reality after climbing into a metal box and subjecting himself to the Entity’s full power.
“Is this real?” Ethan screams, visions of missions past and future flashing before his eyes. If he can’t tell, the audience certainly can’t either.
The entire first hour of the film — the lowest point of the eight-movie franchise — has a disjointed, dream-like quality, as if an AI repeatedly prompted to generate new plot points has started hallucinating. Given the film’s plot, this might be intentional on McQuarrie’s part, but that doesn’t make it any less aggravating.
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Ethan is reliving his entire IMF career in fragments, with cross-cutting dialogue from his team (including Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, and Hayley Atwell) holding the pieces together. Sometimes it even seems like he’s popping up in other Cruise films. A scene where he jolts awake on a plane moments before dropping into a combat zone feels eerily like an outtake from “Edge of Tomorrow.” And when Cruise shows up on an aircraft carrier wearing aviator sunglasses, is he Ethan Hunt or Pete “Maverick” Mitchell?
But when all hope seems lost, Ethan compels us to believe again. Just when it seems certain that “Final Reckoning” (reported budget: $400 million) will go down in history as the film that bankrupted a century-old studio, Tom Cruise reminds us why he is still arguably the world’s biggest movie star at age 62.
The turning point comes when Ethan ends up on an American sub piloted by a friendly but businesslike captain (Tramell Tillman, “Severance”). Hunt must journey to every corner of the Earth — from the bottom of the ocean and back up to the heavens — in pursuit of the Entity. The resulting action setpieces, many of which feature Cruise doing his own stunts, are superlative. One of these scenes features both the most implausible stunt and the most heavy-handed savior allegory of the franchise, but it works.
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Ethan’s support team each get their own moment to shine as well. Grace (Atwell) is no longer merely a shrewd pickpocket, she is the world’s greatest sleight of hand artist. Luther (Rhames) has grown from a capable hacker to the greatest technical wizard in human history, with Benji (Pegg) a close second. But even though each of them saves the world in their own way, this is still Ethan’s show.
The term “reality distortion field” was first popularized by an Apple employee describing the company’s late founder, Steve Jobs. When confronted by an impossible task, employees nevertheless assumed that the job would get done due to Jobs’ otherworldly charisma and his refusal to accept failure.
The notion that Tom Cruise is a singular figure that alone can save the moviegoing experience, open the world’s eyes to the danger of AI, and reverse the corrosive influence of social media algorithms is ludicrous.
“Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” is a flawed, overstuffed, vainglorious monument to radical self-belief. But when Ethan Hunt looks you dead in the eye and says, “I’m the only one who can do this,” you believe him.
Rating: **½ (out of 4)
“Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” will be released in theaters May 23.
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