Your Final 'Mission,' Should You Choose to Accept It | Review

'Final Reckoning' and Bidding Farewell to Hollywood's Most Consistent Franchise

It’s fitting that the Mission Impossible franchise is bookended by films that deal with emerging technology.

1996’s first entry constructs what feels like an entire set-piece around Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt using newfangled technology to send an “email” to another character. 2025’s Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, the conclusion to the eight-film series, sees Hunt face off against “The Entity,” an all-powerful AI in a bid to prevent the destruction of the world.

It’s exactly this escalation and attempt to reckon (pun intended) with changing technology that makes Mission: Impossible so great. And it’s what makes The Final Reckoning a huge, messy, but ultimately satisfying swing for the fences.

Final Reckoning picks up shortly after where 2023’s Dead Reckoning left off: The world is in turmoil, thrust into crisis by The Entity’s ability to twist the truth and the encroaching threat of the AI infiltrating major world powers’ nuclear arsenals. An early montage informs the viewer that The Entity’s ability to manipulate the truth includes changing footage of school buses into tanks and guns into cameras. It’s an effective—and highly relevant—visual that sets the stakes.

Where Dead Reckoning hurtled like a freight train through its rousing, and often quite funny, set-pieces, Final Reckoning spends significantly more time on exposition and set-up in its first act. The film takes some time to rumble to life as it puts all its different characters and subplots into place, giving the following two acts a weighted and epic feeling at the expense of a brisk pace. But it’s never boring. Writer-Director Chistopher McQuarrie (director of the previous three Mission films and frequent Cruise collaborator) knows how to frame emotional beats to keep the stakes feeling as high as possible.

It does feel disjointed at times because, in a curious creative decision, the film sidelines major franchise characters in favor of introducing a bevy of new faces that often lead to the audience wanting more. A thread involving Nick Offerman’s general and other government leaders managing the nuclear crisis is inserted while fan-favorites like Vanessa Kirby’s White Widow are dropped entirely. And after an intriguing setup in the previous installment, the film also doesn’t seem to know what to do with Haley Atwell’s Grace. The result means Final Reckoning lacks a strong second lead like Rebecca Ferguson or Henry Cavill to bolster the proceedings. But, on the plus side, Tramell Tillman’s submarine captain is a delight!

These decisions, intentional or not, put the film entirely on Cruise’s shoulders. And he delivers. He and McQuarrie spend an inordinate amount of time flashing back to previous films, pulling in plot threads and characters from previous films with varying levels of success. The montages don’t just tie the series together: They make clear that this is, and always has been, Cruise’s franchise.

And while we can quibble about the success of every narrative thread, there is one universal element that can be celebrated by anyone who watches Final Recknoning: Every dollar of the reported $400 million budget is on-screen. Every. Single. One. A sequence featuring Hunt swimming to and surviving the wreck of a submarine is among the franchise’s best. The nearly dialogue-free sequence is brutally tense, gorgeously shot, and a refreshing change of pace from the film’s and franchise’s other louder, more boisterous set pieces. And the much-hyped biplane finale is jaw-dropping to watch. Together, these two set-pieces make for the best second-half of any Mission Impossible movie.

Final Reckoning’s disjointed and slightly bloated nature feels more reminiscent of a series finale like The Dark Knight Rises, another overstuffed conclusion with an epic scale that delivers big emotional payoffs. Even if certain threads and ideas don’t pay off as well as they could, the film’s preoccupation with the threat AI poses to knowledge and phenomenology feels all too relevant.

Film critic Sonny Bunch described the series as the “first major franchise of the digital age.” I couldn’t agree more. May more action franchises be this interested in ideas about the threats of new technology while placing such an emphasis on practical, tactile action sequences. If this is indeed the end, what a luxury we have as moviegoers to see a series of films this committed to giving us the biggest and best experiences possible.