Review: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)

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Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning lives up to its promise as the culmination of Tom Cruise’s spy action franchise. It contains all the insane missions, revelations and reversals, bare knuckle brawls and knife fights, vehicle chases and shots of Tom Cruise running that we expect. It boasts masterful, inventive sequences of suspense, most notably a harrowing deep-sea dive to a submarine wreck at the bottom of the North Pacific to retrieve a crucial object, and stunts that rival anything ever put on screen, with a climax featuring Tom Cruise hanging from the wings of not one but two aerobatic biplanes.

Although the producers dropped Part Two when they tweaked the subtitle, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning follows so closely on the heels of 2023’s Dead Reckoning Part One that it is still best understood as the continuation of the larger narrative about Ethan Hunt trying to stop the evil AI “Entity” from causing a nuclear armageddon. You don’t need (or want) to know more about the plot, but I will mention that certain Impossible Mission Force team members return, including Ving Rhames’ Luther (who, along with Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, is the only IMF member in all eight films), Simon Pegg’s Benji, and Hayley Atwell’s pickpocket, Grace, introduced in the previous film. Also returning is Gabriel (Esai Morales), the one-time messenger and human agent for the Entity who appears to have plans of his own this time round.

As with previous entries in the Mission: Impossible series, the exposition can be too long and dense at times. Other times, I would have appreciated a bit more clarity. With respect to how information is controlled and released to the audience, it is clear that Christopher McQuarrie, while highly capable with action, is less skilful with exposition. McQuarrie and Cruise also construct their screenplays around set pieces, which introduces certain limitations. Nevertheless, the story is satisfying if you just go with it—which I think has been the case with most of the previous entries. 

Maybe I’m giving in too much to the doomer side of my personality, but the nefarious AI Entity plot seems highly relevant to our times, more pertinent and perhaps also more plausible than many of the apocalyptic schemes of previous films’ villains. The way the Entity draws out the worst in all world governments, as they each increasingly distrust each other and retreat to unilateral concerns, certainly reflects the geopolitical moment of 2025, just as Part One, arriving in 2023, was a perfect fit for the year when GenAI launched into everyone’s consciousness. For these reasons, I think the Entity creates one of the most compelling mission scenarios the series has ever come up with.

As I noted above, like every Mission: Impossible movie, the actual plot is assembled around a few big action set pieces. The general narrative structure resembles a tent pole, with the most grandiose action-suspense sequence, which is typically some sort of a heist or caper, near the middle of the film and holding up the rest of the plot. (Stealing “The NOC List” from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia is the quintessential tentpole mission in the series.) The final climactic sequence is all about stopping the villains’ plans and involves more fighting. Although some of the stitching between these sequences might not be as memorable as in previous entries, the two main action set pieces are well-worth the price of admission for IMAX. 

The deep-sea dive obviously recalls the films of James Cameron, particularly 1989’s The Abyss, as Hunt requires special breathing gear to travel so deep to the wreck of the Russian submarine, the Sevastopol. There, Hunt must retrieve a crucial harddrive using the special cruciform key obtained in Part One. While the heist/caper at the centre of most Mission: Impossible movies is generally lighter in tone than the final battle, often leaning into its far-fetched nature for some humour in addition to generating suspense, Hunt’s descent to the Sevastopol and his arduous escape from the ocean depths are constructed to elicit fear instead of enjoyment. This time, Hunt is alone; no team members are with him or even guiding him through a microphone in his ear. There are no maps, no dialogue, and the music is largely composed of unsettling rumbles. The effect underscores that this is Hunt’s archetypal descent to the Underworld, the Belly of the Whale, to retrieve the Great Boon for humanity. Scenes like these almost demonstrate how The Final Reckoning is more self-serious and self-conscious about mythic parallels than earlier films in the series.

The final climactic sequence, which involves foiling the villain’s plot and a big fight, takes place in the hills of South Africa. This part of the movie is more Spielberg and Indiana Jones, as my brother Anders reminded me that the digital ark referred to as the “Doomsday Vault” recalls Noah’s Ark as well as the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Ethan and Gabriel’s analog biplane chase is nicely contrasted with the digital battle to defeat the Entity, led by Benji, using Luther’s “Poison Pill” USB drive. The realistic stunts—seeing Tom Cruise actually hanging from an airplane’s wing—combined with the sheer scale of the consequences if they don’t defeat the Entity—read nuclear annihilation—make the final sequence truly thrilling. 

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning also includes enough callbacks to earlier Mission: Impossible movies to parallel elements of the series finale format from TV, as well as the modern movie blockbuster format, the legacy sequel. Of course, there is no big gap between the last movie and this one, but the film does take time to remind the audience about not only the franchise’s first entry nearly 30 years ago, but also various events from the rest of the series. Without spoiling the details, I will say that this film continues previous efforts to rewrite parts of Mission: Impossible III. As with full-on legacy sequels, we also get some old faces returning (such as Henry Czerny’s Kittridge), but, thankfully, never simply in the form of a fan-service nod. What keeps this from being a proper legacy sequel, however, is the lack of desire to repeat earlier scenes (beyond the general formula for the series described above) and, above all, the absence of intention to reboot the franchise. Instead, the “legacy” aspect primarily reflects the film’s intense concern for the legacy of the series and for the legacy of Ethan Hunt’s actions and choices within the storyworld. Regardless of whether this is actually the last Mission: Impossible movie, the film does have a strong sense of finality to it. It has been designed in many ways to cap the series off.

Regardless of your opinion of Tom Cruise in real life, his dedication to delivering high-quality movie entertainment is something special. There is a reason he is the last movie star. With Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Cruise once again accomplishes the mission of delivering a must-see summer blockbuster. 

8 out of 10

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025, USA)

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie; written by Christopher McQuarrie & Erik Jendresen; starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Henry Czerny, and Angela Bassett.

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