MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – THE FINAL RECKONING does not necessarily seem like “well guys, that’s the last one” at the end, but as a whole it definitely does play like they’re trying to wrap things up. Though the seven previous films in the series have been mostly disconnected, this one follows the series’ only cliffhanger, and has multiple instances of people discussing the past adventures of Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, THE MUMMY), complete with clips. It has two big story threads that tie directly to Brian DePalma’s part I, plus a connection to J.J. Abrams’ part III. Both the NOC list and the Rabbit’s Foot come up – mcmuffin reminiscences from a movie series that has lasted more than four times as long as the TV series it was based on. And that ran for seven seasons!
I think it lives up to the series’ 29-year-long tradition of great entertainment, but it is also by far the sloppiest chapter. That’s not to say it’s lazy – quite the opposite. I think it just got too wild and out of control to ever sculpt it into an elegant shape. They might still be chiseling away at it as we speak.
I’m not one to complain about long runtimes and unnecessary scenes, especially when the format demands zipping around through a string of incidents, but the first 45 minutes or so of this thing alternately feel like they didn’t have time to finish the edit or like we’re watching consecutive episodes of the world’s most expensive Quibi series. It opens with Ethan watching a VHS tape that’s his “your mission should you choose to accept it” message, though this time from President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett, F/X), and it’s a very long “as you know” type explanation of what happened in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART ONE, what has happened in the months since, and a reminder that he has the “cruciform key” everyone wants, that he can use to open a thing in the sunken Russian submarine the Sevastapol for access to the source code of the rogue artificial intelligence known as “The Entity” that he wants to destroy and everyone else wants to control. Though it’s obviously ridiculous for her to be telling him this stuff he already knows, and it’s awkward in its length, the forced exposition kicking off a mission is part of the fun of this series.
But it’s weird how much of that information is repeated one or more times in other forced exposition. It really seems like they filmed a bunch of different options for how to get the important story points across and then didn’t have time to trim it down to where it’s most effective. I think the overload of information makes it more confusing instead of less.
There are spoilery reasons they can’t simply cut the first chunk off of the movie, but it sort of repeated my experience of watching the first SUICIDE SQUAD and ROGUE ONE: a ways in I thought, “Oh, this is where it should’ve started.” In this case it’s when he’s brought into the war room with the president and her cabinet or whoever to again explain his past leading up to the last movie, and has to convince her to let him go and give him use of an aircraft carrier to prevent nuclear annihilation. That feels like the first scene after the title, but it’s a whole lot later.
By that point director/co-writer Christopher McQuarrie has gotten all the fuses untangled and is ready to start lighting them. Thankfully this one explodes as well as the other MISSIONs, which is to say it’s top-of-the-line, save-for-posterity popcorn spectacle. In the age of super heroes there are more than a few blockbusters that become less involving in the last act when they devolve into bluster and pixels, but that’s not remotely the case here – we’re watching Ethan climb around on a bi-plane flying low through a ravine, and though maybe that sounds less fresh than when he hung off a jet or flew a helicopter, when you see it it’s incredible, one of those magical movie sequences where it’s clear that holy shit, they really did some version of this. We are really flying. And it’s not just stunts, of course, but a story of escalating complications, with some excellent punchlines.
You could say the lead villain is Gabriel (Esai Morales, IN THE ARMY NOW), or maybe he’s just the henchman to The Entity, the Skynet-like A.I. program that has gone sentient and is on the verge of launching all the nuclear arsenals around the world, which has had the believable side effect of making at least one nation ([cough] us) consider firing ours first. It’s odd that it dips so far into sci-fi for the last chapters, and when Ethan climbs into a suitcase to talk to The Entity (which has a deep voice and shows him visions of the future) it’s a good reminder of how fucking ludicrously full of shit those real world people are who are “warning” about “artificial intelligence” being close to knowing how to think like a real human bean. Look at this shit, it’s silly, those people are lying to you.
But just go with it for the movie. It’s a good villain, a good metaphor for the very same dumb assholes I’m talking about, arrogant tech cultists intent on ruining the world in the name of their stupid god who sucks. In THE FINAL RECKONING there are crazy-eyed zealots on TV and among us willing to kill for The Entity. Gabriel’s motives shift but he’s Entity-pilled, so he gets an ending worthy of his dignity. (A hilarious one.)
Since part III some of the joy of these has been the teams. We lost our best and brightest member last time around and, though I like them, new recruits Grace (Hayley Atwell, PADDINGTON IN PERU) and Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis, TOP GUN: MAVERICK) could never hope to fill an Ilsa-Faust-sized hole. I’ve been partial to Atwell since that Agent Carter show, and Grace gets some moments – I’m glad her fast pickpocket hands help save the world – but it’s a pretty generic blurring of the line between mentee and wait-a-minute-is-she-supposed-to-be-a-love-interest?, feeling like less of a role than last time. That’s also true of Paris (Pom Klementieff, INGRID GOES WEST), but only because she got to have so much fun in DEAD RECKONING as the most colorful henchperson of the series. I’m glad to have her on the team, she gets some good kicks in her escape from captivity, and I like how there’s kind of a Chewbacca rule that she speaks French, everyone else speaks English, but everyone always understands each other.
My favorite part of this one is actually the reappearance of Donloe (Rolf Saxon, THE DIRTY DOZEN: THE NEXT MISSION), the CIA analyst who comically missed seeing Ethan during his iconic wire-hanging heist in the first film. I don’t like how thick they have to lay it on to make sure everybody gets the joke, though admittedly 99% of my sold out Imax screening seemed to need the help. But there’s a good 30 seconds there where real ones get a good laugh connecting for themselves why this particular guy is manning a radar tower in Alaska.
It’s a funny callback, but the beauty of it is that it’s more. McQuarrie takes this guy who was a funny visual gag with two lines in 1996 and makes him a dignified, heroic, central character, who has lived a beautiful life with his wife Tapeesa (Lucy Tulugarjuk, ATANARJUAT: THE FAST RUNNER) and doesn’t need our charity, yet transcends beyond cute cameo to full-fledged team member. I didn’t see that coming.
There has also been an evolution for Benji (Simon Pegg, THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: THE SECRET OF THE UNICORN), once a comic relief character who was in over his head, now getting laughs from his confidence that, as he keeps saying as things get worse and worse, “We’ll figure it out.” (Which seems to be McQuarrie and Cruise’s approach to making these movies as well.) He gets to lead the team, and has pretty much supplanted Luther (Ving Rhames, THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS), the only character to join Ethan in all 8 films, but this one also makes a point of reminding us how much we as a civilization have loved Ving Rhames for 30+ years. Even if we mostly just hear him talking about Arby’s these days.
Part 1 IMF director, now CIA director Kittridge (Henry Czerny, THE A-TEAM) is a funny foil in this one, still trying to put Ethan in his place and still always being way behind him. When he catches up to Ethan you don’t think “oh no, he’s got them now,” because he never will. Now he has Jasper Briggs (Shea Whigham, FIRST MAN) with him, seeming more embarrassed about it than him.
How many of these are there where Ethan doesn’t drive a motorcycle? Not many. He does get to do lots of his precious running, though, including in situations where it seems like maybe he could’ve gotten a vehicle but he just convinces himself nah, I’m Ethan Hunt, running will be faster. Come to think of it they seem to have used up all the motor vehicle business last time around. In this one you’ve got underwater, you’ve got in the sky. Grace does ride a dog sled at one point, I was hoping Ethan would get to do a huge, crazy dog sled stunt. Not sure how it would’ve worked though.
I forgot that Katy O’Brian (LOVE LIES BLEEDING) was gonna show up – she has a small part as a soldier on a submarine, but she gets to be awesome. It’s her take on a Vasquez-from-ALIENS type character but something about the glamorized way the people on the submarine are shot, posing with wry smirks looking down at the camera, made me think of Tony Scott. Hannah Waddingham (THE FALL GUY) and Nick Offerman (THE KINGS OF SUMMER) both get to shine in small but notable parts as military leaders. There’s lots of tension and disagreement about whether or not to trust this one guy they never heard of and violate all protocols for his ridiculous sounding plan to save the world. (Hint: they should.)
I want to note that the command center in this movie is really impressive – warehouse-sized. I’ve never seen one like that in a movie. But the quarters get smaller as the nuclear threat heightens and the president’s circle shrinks. I like that everyone’s faces are dripping with sweat except the president’s. Is it because she has full faith in Ethan Hunt? Or is it because Angela Bassett doesn’t sweat? I guess that depends on your religion.
I do not believe THE FINAL RECKONING will ever be a favorite of the series for me. But like all of them it will be worth rewatching and appreciating. As a whole, this run of movies is some kind of miracle. Consider that it came out of a trend of nostalgic movies based on old TV shows; in the ‘90s we also had THE ADDAMS FAMILY, THE AVENGERS, THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES, BORIS AND NATASHA: THE MOVIE, THE BRADY BUNCH, CAR 54 WHERE ARE YOU?, THE FLINTSTONES, THE FUGITIVE, LASSIE, LEAVE IT TO BEAVER, LOST IN SPACE, MAVERICK, McHALE’S NAVY, MISTER MAGOO, THE MOD SQUAD, MY FAVORITE MARTIAN, THE SAINT, SGT. BILKO, and WILD WILD WEST. All but three four* of those were one and done, a similar amount of them sucked, only this one became an ongoing series that evolved and grew, eclipsed the source material in popular culture, for me also surpassed the James Bond movies it ran parallel to.
It’s so funny to think that at first there was controversy about it disrespecting a character from the TV show. It didn’t stick because it never seemed interested in being “i.p.” or “for the fans,” it was (at first) an excuse for the rare auteur-based blockbuster franchise. As it continued it shifted into something else very specific to the unique mania of its star and the type of filmmaking developed with the team around him. And now part 8 of a ’90s adaptation of a ’60s TV show represents a refreshing break from the usual bullshit.
I mean I love these movies is what it comes down to. Let me know what you think of this one.
P.S. SPECIAL SUPER SPOILER SECTION SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT IT (reference to Mission: Impossible)
Okay, so there’s a big shocking (but mostly inconsequential) reveal that Sheah Whigham’s character Briggs is in fact named Jim Phelps Jr., because he’s the son of Ethan’s mentor who turned out to be the villain in part 1. My only guess for why they did this is they wanted to somewhat redeem the name of the original TV series character by introducing a non-traitor Jim Phelps, but it’s really ridiculous. I’m unclear why Hunt figures it out in the moment where he reveals it to us, or why Phelps was previously (and continues to be) called Briggs, and it does not (thankfully) become a secret villain motive. It honestly seems like they might have come up with this on the fly and not necessarily known it during other scenes they’d already shot. I guess the one good thing about it is that during that scene suddenly there does seem to be a resemblance between Whigham and Jon Voight. I was looking at him thinking, “Oh yeah, I see it.” The power of suggestion.
Also I enjoyed their “final reckoning” at the very end when we get to contemplate whether Junior purposely made it seem like he was going to execute Ethan or whether he just severely lacks self awareness when it comes to gun protocol.
I got a laugh from Luther’s recorded message played as narration at the end. I know it’s an accepted trope but it always amuses me that a guy’s voicemail hastily recorded from a hospital bed would come out as eloquent, poetic, professionally recorded voiceover wisdom.
I know bringing back Donloe was the greatest thing they could’ve done, I don’t need more, I’m no ingrate. But just for the record I would’ve been excited to see the forgotten characters played by Maggie Q (III), Paula Patton or Jeremy Renner (GHOST PROTOCOL) pop up. But the actual coolest would be Thandiwe Newton from part 2. And try to shoot her like a John Woo character the whole time. Bring in Hans Zimmer just to score her part. Many missed opportunities here come to think of it. But that’s life.
APPENDIX – My MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE reviews throughout the years
Brian DePalma’s MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (reviewed in 2015)
John Woo’s MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2 (reviewed in 2015)
J.J. Abrams’ MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III (reviewed in 2006)
Brad Bird’s MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL (reviewed in 2011)
Christopher McQuarrie’s MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – ROGUE NATION (reviewed in 2015)
McQ’s MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – FALLOUT (reviewed in 2018)
McQ’s MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART ONE (reviewed in 2023)
*Thanks to Preachzilla on Bluesky for reminding me to include U.S. MARSHALS in my math here
May 28th, 2025 at 11:12 am
but something about the glamorized way the people on the submarine are shot, posing with wry smirks looking down at the camera, made me think of Tony Scott
Sub sets often (usually) utilize overhead lighting, and NOBODY loved overhead lighting more than Tony Scott