Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning – REVIEW

Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning


I’m not gonna lie, this review is tough to put into words. Mission: Impossible is personally one of my favorite franchises ever, handily the most consistent one since the first film’s release in 1996. I personally haven’t seen the original show, but I did end up buying the whole series right after I watched this movie, so I’m hoping to watch the series, or at least start it, soon. I could also easily say that Fallout, the sixth entry, is one of the best action movies ever made. I know it’s not a rare opinion to have Fallout as the best entry (shoutout Rogue Nation), but any franchise would be lucky to have a movie with such a striking banger:flop ratio. In my opinion, only one M:I movie is bad, and it’s the second one. Every other one is a banger, some of them for completely different reasons. As much as I love the last entry in the franchise, 2023’s Dead Reckoning, I did think “how could they possibly one-up this after the next one?,” especially since it was originally titled Dead Reckoning, Part One and dropped the “part one” after its release. What was the next move, though? Seemingly, it’s to bid farewell to the franchise’s central character, Ethan Hunt. The Final Reckoning is Mission: Impossible’s equivalent to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and that has a lot of baggage. I’m getting this right out of the way now because I feel like this is going to be lost: The Final Reckoning is a very good movie, much better than The Rise of Skywalker. If you’re a fan M:I, I do think that this is a solid conclusion for Ethan Hunt, but not the franchise. There’s a massive difference between the two, which puts The Final Reckoning over The Rise of Skywalker. There is a lot happening in this movie: The Entity, a rogue AI that’s become sentient and has gotten access to the world’s entire supply of, well, everything, is about to nuke the planet to restart humanity, and Ethan Hunt and his team have to stop it. That’s the basic premise, but in this movie, we’re wrapping up Ethan Hunt’s character arc. You know how I opened up this post saying that this is tough to put into words? It’s how they go about wrapping up Ethan Hunt, and that stems from the use of the past M:I movies. The opening of the movie, where Hunt gets the mission, is intercut with footage of literally every single movie in the franchise that lines up with the dialogue about the mission and about Ethan. Again, this is very tough to put into words because I do care about this character, this franchise, and I even agree with some of the story choices in this movie to push Ethan to the edge of insanity. There’s something about the presentation of this, the way they include the other movies, that just kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I wouldn’t call it fan-service, though. The big inclusion is the return of a minor character from the first movie, William Donloe, who was a CIA agent during the Langley heist. He does have a lot to do and, oddly enough, The Final Reckoning would be weird without him. The other two things I was irked by are very spoilery, so I won’t directly say, but they retcon events from Mission: Impossible III and Dead Reckoning, and while I actually enjoyed how they worked in the events from III, the retcon they did for Dead Reckoning made me actively angry. It still makes no sense to me, and it really muddies up the M:I timeline. However, I’d be remiss to say that once the movie gets through all the exposition and explanation of what they have to do, The Final Reckoning hits the highs of the best entries. I’ve said to myself in other entries “How did Tom Cruise do that?” very often, but during the two big set pieces of the movie (one’s in a submarine, the other involves two biplanes), I thought “How did he not literally die?”, and those two sequences are personally some of the best theatrical moments I’ve had in my life. I still have to say that, outside of the exposition-filled first act, I did miss the more comedic aspects of these movies. I get that this is the last one for the time being and it’s a much more somber tone, but the last entries have had a good balance of action and comedy that I missed. I have to admit that part of me is disappointed that this isn’t the best movie of the year, but even with The Final Reckoning’s very obvious story flaws, this is still some of the best blockbuster filmmaking you can get out there.


Ryan’s Grade: B+