Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning Review

The Mission: Impossible film series has endured for nearly 30 years, thrilling audiences and producing some of the best Hollywood blockbusters, especially in the 2010s. Tom Cruise has called time on his longest role by concluding the events of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning and the series as a whole.

The world is in chaos and on the brink of war. The Entity has manipulated cyberspace, leading to the rise of a Doomsday cult, and governments across the world have declared martial law. The Entity has also started gaining control of the world’s nuclear weapons. Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his team only have four days to find the sunken Russian submarine, the Sevastopol, so they can gain The Entity’s source code and destroy it before it causes nuclear destruction.

Mission: Impossible has been an indelible series. The three films made in the 2010s were arguably some of the best Hollywood blockbusters of that decade. This resulted in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning being a highly hyped film and earning rave reviews. However, Dead Reckoning underperformed at the box office, and my own review was only mildly positive. The Final Reckoning made Dead Reckoning look like Fallout.

One of my main criticisms of Dead Reckoning was its story structure. That film consisted of exposition scenes followed by action scenes. The Final Reckoning took a different approach since it frontloaded all its exposition in the first half. This approach was worse since Dead Reckoning had a good spread of action set pieces. It was frustrating that the characters were reciting the same information, and the film overcomplicated a fairly simple plot. This overcomplication resulted in a lot of recognisable actors, like Nick Offerman, Janet McTeer, and Hannah Waddington, in perfunctory roles. The film also went to great pains to highlight Ethan Hunt’s (i.e., Tom Cruise) infallibility, which made him less interesting to a morally grey James Bond or Jason Bourne.

The Final Reckoning can be described as The Terminator, Indiana Jones, and Pirates of the Caribbean made through an espionage lens. The Entity was Skynet, a computer programme that developed self-awareness and set out to destroy humanity through nuclear weapons. The Indiana Jones and Pirates of the Caribbean comparisons come from the fact that Final Reckoning was a treasure hunt since the IMF team had to use one item they had to get another item, and so forth. A comparison with Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End would be particularly apt since that film was also made as a series conclusion, had a darker tone, and a bloated runtime.

The Final Reckoning also had some similarities to Spectre and No Time to Die. No Time to Die was the final film in Daniel Craig’s tenure as James Bond, and the character was put through the emotional wringer. Like Spectre, The Final Reckoning did try to tie the previous films together. There were many references to the first Mission: Impossible film, and The Final Reckoning finally revealed what the ‘Rabbit’s Foot’ was. The Final Reckoning felt like it was repeating story ideas from the previous films: it’s the third time Ethan has had to stop a Doomsday cult from causing nuclear destruction.

The Final Reckoning came to life when the action moved to the Bering Sea. The Americans and the Russians were searching for the Sevastopol, and there was a Tom Clancy quality to it because of the naval action and special forces subterfuge. Tom Cruise got to show off his physique that men in their 20s would envy, let alone men in their 60s. There was a lot of action on land and undersea. The third act was the highlight of the film because there was an incredible chase sequence involving two brightly coloured biplanes. It was a fantastic piece of stunt work. It did feel a little too similar to the climax in Fallout, but Fallout was the best film in the series, so The Final Reckoning may as well resubmit its own homework.

The Final Reckoning wanted to be a grand sendoff to the Mission: Impossible series, and there were moments of spectacle. Sadly, it was an overly indulgent film that needed some restraint.