‘Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning’ Review: Great Stunts, Messy Script (2025)

Wing walking is an art older than sound cinema. Before moviesincluded spoken dialogue, they were already filledwith daredevils who risked — and sometimes lost — their lives performing incredible feats in and on top of airplanes. So when producer/star Tom Cruise and producer/co-writer/director Christopher McQuarrie turned the climax ofMission: Impossible — The Final Reckoninginto maybe the greatest display of wing walking and aerial stunt work in the last50 years,that’s wasn’t a haphazard choice. It was a decisiondesigned to further the mission of this franchise for the last three decades: To thrillmoviegoers with old-fashioned Hollywood spectacle on thegrandest scale possible.

It’s impossible for me to give a negative review to a movie with a climax as good as the one that concludesThe Final Reckoning;Cruise hanging off a biplane hundreds of feet in the airis more than worth the price of admission all by itself. But it’s also possible that the rest ofThe Final Reckoningis a mess, and ranksnear the bottom ofthis long-running franchise.

READ MORE: EveryMission: ImpossibleMovie, Ranked From Worst to Best

It’s not just that its story is a confusing jumble, although that is also true. Some of the script’s problems are even morefundamental than that. I do not understand, for instance, how filmmakers of McQuarrie and Cruise’sexpertise and experience could make a moviethat never explains why one of its keycharacters spends almost all of his scenes in an underground hospital.Is this persondying? Can they be cured? Despite a runtime of 170 minutes,The Final Reckoning can’t find room to answer those basic questions.

That decision is all the more baffling because that same characterlooked completelyfinewhen they last appeared in the previousMission: Impossible, 2023’sDead Reckoning — Part One.The Final Reckoningestablishes that two months have passed since the events of the prior film, and while this movie doescontinueits central conflict, with Cruise’s super spy Ethan Hunt fighting arogue AI known as “The Entity,”some ofThe Final Reckoning’s twists feel oddly disconnected fromits predecessor(like afflicting apreviously healthyherowith a murky disease out of nowhere). It’sas if McQuarrie and Cruisejunked whatever plan was in place when they startedDead Reckoning and went back to square one in the middle of shooting — which, to be fair, would be an extremely Ethan Hunt thing to do.

Of course, Ethan Hunt would have pulled off that kind ofon-the-fly salvage operationwithout breaking a sweat.The Final Reckoningopens with a jarring series of scenesthat awkwardly reestablish its key heroes and villains.While the Entity spreads its truth-altering tentacles throughout the internet, Ethanraces torescue various members of his Impossible Mission Force from thecomputer’s fiendish emissary Gabriel (Esai Morales).

The same pattern repeats a couple times;Ethan gets knocked out in oneglamorous location and wakes up in another. Gabrieldrops Ethan inaninescapable trap in order to force him to do something against his will. Ethan wriggles free, only to findGabriel hasan evenmore elaborate backup plan waiting for him. (I guess when youcan consult a godlike computer, you’re prepared for every eventuality.)

Cut to: More running, more chasing, morehazy alliances between assorted members of an enormous cast that includes longtime players Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, and Henry Czerny, relative newcomers Hayley Atwell and Pom Klementieff, andtotal neophytes likeTed Lasso’s Hannah Waddingham as anNaval officerand Parks and Recreation’s Nick Offerman as the Secretary of Defense. The whiplash between locations, the bewildering web of character loyalties — some people want to control the Entity, some want to destroy it — is such a muddle I started to wonder whether Ethan was trapped inside an impressive but not wholly convincing computer simulation of reality he would eventually recognize and escape in true impossible mission fashion.

No such luck. To be sure, whenThe Final Reckoningfinally putsall its pieces in place, it quite literally flies. But there also some truly clunky exchanges — something that has never been the case in theMission: Impossiblefranchise before, especially since McQuarrie took over as writer and director with 2015’sRogue Nation. That includes way too manyself-congratulatory Easter eggs from throughout the history of the franchise. Thecallbacksinclude multiple clip montages, surprise cameos, and totally unnecessary explanations of unresolved Missionplot threads. Even the date of the firstMission: Impossible’s premierebecomes ancrucialplot point.

I love these movies as much as anyone on the planet; I’ve seen every single one in a theater, most multiple times. A few of thereferences made me smile; most felt indicative of a film that’s a bit tooclever for its own good. Every single thing in every single movie does not needs to connect to everything else.

The spectacular aerialclimaxis one offour do-or-die missions all happening simultaneously in The Final Reckoning’sfinal minutes. While I appreciated theattempt to topevery previous world-saving effort — and Cruise’s commitment to these movies is beyond reproach — Ialso found myself a little disappointed every time McQuarrie cut away fromhim dangling off that biplane. The other characters don’t add more tension; they distract from the main event. The old masters of early movie stunts who Cruise and McQuarrie so obviously admireknew that sometimes simpler was better.

Additional Thoughts:

-Flashbacks sprinkled throughoutDead Reckoningestablished that Gabrielplayed a role in a mysterious tragedy that led Ethan to join the IMF. In these flashbacks, Esai Morales appeared as a young man, presumably de-aged using digital technology.The Final Reckoningdoesn’t really pay off this subplot (yet another element from the last film that gets dropped) but in the brief snippets thatdoappear in The Final Reckoning,Cruise’s face is never shown.The “young“ Ethan Hunt onlyappears from behind or in shadow. In a movie all about Ethan Hunt trying to destroya truth-manipulating computer that can alter reality, that feels notable.

-Also notable: Ethan Hunt wants to destroy the Entity, but because the Entity has infiltrated every corner of cyberspace,that means Tom Cruisemay have to destroythe entire internetin the process.Let me tell you:I have never rooted for a movie hero more.

RATING: 6/10