A One Mann’s Movies review of “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” (2025).
So, here we are at the alleged end of an eight-movie franchise that, I have to say, has been one of the most consistently enjoyable and thrilling that I have experienced. When the ‘duff’ movie in the sequence is John Woo’s “Mission: Impossible 2”, then you really have to be doing something right. While this movie is so long that it might have usefully been called “Dead Reckoning Part 2”, with “The Final Reckoning” as the 9th in the series, it makes for a long but terrifically entertaining conclusion to the series.
Bob the Movie Man Rating:
“Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” Plot:
Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is still in hiding with possession of the cruciform key that holds the solution to destroying the rogue AI called “The Entity”, now becoming God-like and at risk of destroying all life on the planet. He receives a personal plea for help from Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett), the President of the United States.
Certification:
UK: 12A; US: PG-13. (From the BBFC web site: “Moderate violence, injury detail, threat, language”.)
Talent:
Starring: Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny, Holt McCallany, Janet McTeer, Nick Offerman, Hannah Waddingham, Tramell Tillman, Angela Bassett, Shea Whigham, Greg Tarzan Davis, Charles Parnell, Mark Gatiss.
Directed by: Christopher McQuarrie.
Written by: Erik Jendresen & Christopher McQuarrie. (Based on the TV series created by Bruce Geller.)
Running Time: 2h 49m.
“Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” Summary:
Positives:
- Some astonishing stunts, especially the aerial work in the finale.
- A convoluted but engaging story of epic and global proportions
- A wonderful ensemble cast with some neat surprises!
- Great editing.
- Great music.
Negatives:
- It tries a bit too hard to tie ALL of the previous films together.
- As for other films in the series, some of the dialogue is a bit wooden and ropy.
- Claustrophobics may seriously struggle with some of the underwater sequences.
Review of “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning”:
A cast that echoes back through the ages.
What I won’t miss about the “Mission: Impossible” films is trying to constantly get that colon in the right place in the title! But where the films really win is in having an ensemble cast that has stayed consistently with the series, many from day 1. As well as Cruise, Ving Rhames as Luther and Henry Czerny as Kittridge are the only ones that were in Brian De Palma’s1996 original. (And – good trivia answer – only Cruise and Rhames have actually appeared in all of the films, although Rhames was uncredited in 2011’s “Ghost Protocol”.)
There is also one original cast member who reappears in “The Final Reckoning” that came as a glorious surprise. Don’t worry – I won’t spoil it here, but they were immediately recognisable and made both myself and the Illustrious Mrs Movie Man squeal with delight! (See the Spoiler section below!)
There were a few characters that I think would have been nice to include in this film: Vanessa Kirby does not reappear as The White Widow (other than in flashback to previous films) and I think it would have been great if Michelle Monaghan and Jeremy Renner had somehow managed to creep back in there somewhere. But there are lots of other returning characters that were welcome returns, including Angela Bassett as Erika Sloane, who has got a significant job upgrade since we last met her! (The problem however with anyone playing the President of the United States on screen these days is it brings into sharp focus just how much of an embarrassing buffoon the present incumbant is: everyone looks infinitely more presidential!)
All these actors do the best job they can with the script but, to be honest, some of the dialogue is awfully clumsy and wooden, as it was in the previous film.
High octane action.
Once again, it is the stunts, and the fact that you know it is Tom Cruise himself doing most of those stunts, that sets these films apart. I mean… it’s seriously depressing that this guy is less than two years younger than me. I habitually groan when I get up out of a chair; this joker is hanging off bi-planes and deep-sea diving! But all credit to him, the action elements of the film are top-notch.
First and foremost, the extended and ridiculously suspenseful bi-plane finale is edge-of-your-seat stuff. It took thousands of hours of flying to capture that sequence and I know there must have been loads of safety wires that had to be CGI’d ou,. but doing that work in such agressive conditions must have been physically and mentally exhausting. It looks great on film.
Elsewhere, we obviously end up in the K599 Sevastopol submarine at one point, and this is an extended underwater sequence for Cruise which again must have been fraught with difficulty and danger. It is also very claustrophobic (see below), such that the Illustrious Mrs Movie Man had her hands over her face for most of the time and the Saintly Sarah Shaw’s heart-rate-monitor-watch starts wildly beeping!
Great fight scenes.
Aside from all the high-risk stunt work, one of the things that the MI series has always done really well are the close-combat fight scenes. (The one in “Fallout” with Henry Cavill and Cruise in a bathroom was memorable.) Here again there are some great fight scenes. In particular, a sequence in the middle of the film sees Ethan Hunt fighting an assassin on a submarine intercut with Grace (Hayley Atwell), Benji (Simon Pegg) and Paris (a welcome return for the kick-ass Pom Klementieff) fighting Russian special forces in a hut on Svalbard. It’s all really adrenaline-fuelled stuff and very well filmed and edited.
As always, the action is suitably interspersed with comic moments. When a character requires medical assistance, they ask “do either of you two have medical training” at which Paris looks bemused and says (in French) “I kill people”. Very funny.
A story that aims for greatness but which tries a bit too hard.
The MI films have always involved high-stakes, whether it is preventing the release of a deadly virus or preventing a nuclear bomb going off (again!). Never has Ethan been responsible for the salvation of the whole planet and everyone who lives on it! This is high-stakes poker, with “the entity” having many similarities of course to Skynet from “Terminator 2: Judgment Day“. So all of this needs to be taken with a strong pinch of salt, but the salt-supplies really need to get reordered when the script attempts to rope in the plots of multiple of the Mission: Impossible series…. even the early ones. In fact, this is a bit like a “Mission: Impossible Greatest Hits” as we reshow numerous little clips from all of the previous films. Some of these include:
- a surprise revelation about a supporting character, who we know has a grudge against Ethan from the last film (“Dead Reckoning – Part 1“). (See Spoiler section.)
- most surprising of all, the film links its current protagonist to events in the second film which feels like a massive stretch to me. Everyone has been recommending as homework for this film a rewatch of “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1” (which I agree is a good thing to do). But it’s “Mission: Impossible 2” that I now need to rewatch in order to try to tie the story up: I personally can’t relate the actions of Cruise and Thandiwe Newton’s characters in that film to what is claimed in this film!
It is, of course, all ridiculous.
The film is ludicrous in places and you seriously need to park your thinking brain at the door. Would the President of the United States really trust this rogue and disavowed agent “one last time” with the safety of the world? I think not! Would someone be able to grab on to the axle of a biplane taking off over them and not have their arms wrenched from their sockets? I definitely think not! Would two characters trying to disarm a nuclear bomb really spend three-quarters of their remaining time (which seems to be ‘Microsoft time’!) in earnest discussion rather than getting on with it and saving the city? Uh-huh, no way!
This is all popcorn fantasy stuff, and you need to go to the cinema with that head firmly glued on.
Eddie Hamilton: A quick digression.
I attended one of the regular “Mark Kermode in 3D” events at the London BFI on Monday and was delighted to see Eddie Hamilton in conversation with Mark. Eddie has been the editor on all of the Mission: Impossible films since “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation“. What a great job to have! Eddie showed the editing screen for the first few minutes of a “Mission: Impossible” film (I think it was “Rogue Nation”), see below, and then gave a view of how hours of footage of the helicopter chase in “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” could be reduced to just a 2 minute draft clip and then further (after draft screenings) to just 15 seconds (including the over-the-shoulder shot that Tom Cruise wanted left in there!). Fascinating stuff.
Great editing and great music.
But, I digress. Hamilton has done a really great job with the editing on this film. There are some amazing sequences, lasting just a few seconds but consisting of 24 different images per second from different MI films. (I did something similar for my daughter April’s wedding video… it is VERY labour intensive work!). The editing overall is very slick indeed – a scene where Ethan Hunt engages directly with “the entity” is particularly impressive. I think we should expect to see Mr Hamilton’s name on the Oscar nominations list for editing next year.
The music is also yet again great. Lorne Balfe had delivered the scores of the three previous films but this time it is from a different team of composers – Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey. But the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree: both Aruj and Godfrey are, as was Balfe, members of Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions scoring company in LA. The score (which I can’t see is yet released on Spotify) is suitably bombastic and hits all the right well-known Mission: Impossible themes, with some new eerie themes added, particularly for the underwater scenes.
Triggers.
As mentioned above, the underwater scenes in this film are seriously claustrophobic and my two cinema companions were just begging them to stop. If you suffer from this anything more than mildly, then you should come prepared.
Summary Thoughts on “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning”
This is the one summer blockbuster that I have really been looking forward to, and I was not disappointed. Is it the very best of the series? No, not in my opinion. (Views obviously differ, but my personal favourite is “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation“) But it is a real blast of popcorn entertainment and it is good for Ethan Hunt to go out on a – literal – high. I really hope they call it a day with this one.
Where to Watch it (Powered by Justwatch)
Trailer for “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning”:
The trailer is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsQgc9pCyDU. At last, after months of having to cover my eyes, I can finally get to watch the trailer! (It’s actually a bit less spoilery than the one for the last film.)
Spoiler Section:
Don’t read past this point if you’ve not seen the movie.
…
…
…
NO, SERIOUSLY!
…
…
…
The surprise returning actor to this film is…
…Rolf Saxon who played the CIA techy operator William Donloe in the now famous vault scene from “Mission: Impossible”. He even returns Ethan’s knife, LOL!
As reported by the site movieweb.com, the call to Saxon for his return came as a big surprise:
“I was contacted saying that there was a film company in Europe that wanted to contact me. I spent most of my career in London, so I figured, ‘Okay, fair enough. Who is it?’ They wouldn’t say. They said, ‘Yes, they want to speak with me. It’s something called Skydance’ [which has produced the Mission: Impossible movies since the fourth one],” explained Saxon, thinking it was a prank.”
“And then I got the link saying that the writer-director, Chris McQuarrie, wanted to speak with me. I thought, ‘Yeah, right. Okay, sure.’ […] Then the picture came on, and it was McQ, and it was like, wait, what? We spent almost an hour on the phone. He explained to me what he wanted to do. It took me about five minutes to say, ‘Yeah, of course.’ It was amazing.”
And the surprise character revelation is…
… that Jasper Briggs (Shea Whigham) is revealed to be really called Jim Phelps, the son of the original Jim Phelps played by Jon Voight who Hunt killed in the tunnel helicopter explosion (“red stick, blue stick”) at the end of “Mission: Impossible”. Now, why Phelps would be working under the name of Briggs is unclear. And why his mission of revenge is never carried out at the end also seems to be a bit of a damp squib. This is all stuff that might have usefully have been fleshed out more by turning this film into two films!
Subscribe
Don’t forget, you can subscribe to One Mann’s Movies to receive future reviews by email right here. No salesman will call!
