Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025) & Dead Reckoning (2023)
Dear readers, today I’ve got not one but two Mission Impossible reviews for you. Not only did I see The Final Reckoning, I also pulled from the Archive for Paid Subscribers my review of Dead Reckoning from two years ago. Hope you enjoy it!
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: THE FINAL RECKONING (Christopher McQuarrie, 2025)
Incredibly top heavy, but at times still a lot of fun, The Final Reckoning is the weakest installment in the Mission Impossible franchise, even if it does manage to end on a high note.
It is way too long, it drags more than it flies, and it’s hampered by both endless exposition and dialogue that is both laughably pretentious and ludicrously on the nose. Or vice versa.
The stakes are both too high and not very interesting. And there are so many flashbacks to previous movies that it feels both self congratulatory and reeking of desperation.
But when The Final Reckoning does finally kick into action, it offers up some of the best action sequences in the series, including one that flies so high that it’s bound to take your breath away. If the one that takes place under water didn’t already do that!
It’s also still, and I hate to admit this, cause it already contradicts some of what I’ve said, a great hangout movie. It’s still fun to be in the company of the guys and gals in this team, including some surprising new additions and more room for the likes of Hayley Atwell and Pom Klementieff - even if I also think they could have been given even more room, because their characters are so great.
If this really were to be the final Mission Impossible movie, it would be justified, cause I don’t think Tom Cruise could take his Ethan Hunt character further than he does in this movie. He’s given so many victory laps, it just wouldn’t make sense anymore.
Still, that’s not to say, there couldn’t be a way forward, if Cruise were to step down completely, or take a Q like role in further movies. (I don’t think any studio would seriously consider abandoning the lucrative world of Mission Impossible.) There is the surprise addition to the team of Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis), who was already in the previous movie as the right-hand man to Shea Whigham’s Agent Briggs. (David first acted with Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick.)
Then there is the great Tramell Tillman (Severance) who has a fun supporting role as a submarine captain. And then there is the surprise return of Rolf Saxon, who played a minor role in the first movie as CIA analyst William Donloe, got fooled by Ethan Hunt and was then exiled to an isolated place that’s now a major location in this very last movie.
Saxon has a sizable role, and the same goes for Lucy Tulugarjuk, the Canadian Inuk actress who plays William’s wife Tapeesa. I like that director Christopher McQuarrie (who once again wrote the script with Erik Jendresen) takes these roles seriously and not just uses them as expendable fodder. In this case the almost sentimental qualities of this movie suddenly work in its favor.
In the end I got through the movie, not because of the action or the story (which is a continuation of Dead Reckoning with the implication that AI will at some point take over control of the earth’s nuclear weapons) but because I care about the characters and the actors that portray them. Over the years they have become, well, like, friends. Movie friends, but still, friends.
Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Angela Bassett, Henry Czerny and Esai Morales are also there, even though the last one, in his role as Gabriel, is supposed to be the enemy. But unfortunately his role is still severely underwritten, as if AI is the real enemy (oh yeah, that’s the point of the movie, why are we only told this 120 times?).
The Final Reckoning does get better as it goes along, and the last 50 minutes are pretty spectacular. Besides being a reminder that this is probably the closest to a James Bond movie we’re gonna get for at least the next couple of years.
So be careful what you choose: if you go in, the Cinema that is, be prepared to slog it out, just as Ethan Hunt and friends do. For the sake of humanity! You’ve been doing it for so long! It’s simply too late to stop now!
(Some of the dialogue feels like it could have been written by AI).
I give it 3 stars.
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: DEAD RECKONING (Christopher McQuarrie, 2023)
Mission: Impossible has a reputation of being the best action franchise around, so how does Dead Reckoning hold up?
I like all the movies in this series, especially the first one (by Brian de Palma), Ghost Protocol (by Brad Bird) and the Christopher McQuarrie ones, with the most recent one, Fallout (2018), being a close to perfect action spectacle.
The new one, written and directed as per usual by McQuarrie (he shares the writing credit this time with Erik Jendresen) doesn’t really strive for that kind of technical perfection, even if it features a fair number of extraordinary action sequences.
Instead it goes straight for the emotional jugular. Shot for the first time with digital cameras, it is a very immersive movie, that makes the 163 minutes fly by and tugs at your heartstrings like no other entry in the series. As such it does a wonderful job of manipulating our feelings, in a way that left me wanting more, much more, for the final part of this franchise.
The title is a nautical term for (educated) ‘guesswork’ and can be interpreted, at least in my opinion, as a reference to both the art of filmmaking and the spy game.
Storywise, there is a welcome topicality to the movie as Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his International Mission Force (IMF) team must track down a two-part gold key, which is the, eh, key to a sentient AI programme that can give its owner dominance on a global scale.
The gold key is a wonderful MacGuffin, that would have made Hitchcock proud, as it allows the team to travel the world, with amongst other a memorable trip to Rome, where a memorable chase scene becomes a tribute to classic action movie The Italian Job, with Hunt and new addition Grace (Hayley Atwell) in a Fiat 500, tied to each other with handcuffs.
Those scenes - there is another on a speeding train, which you think you’ve seen before until you realize you ain’t seen nothing yet - are worth the price of admission alone, but it’s the emotional undertow that makes the movie genuinely moving.
The M:I series has always been about friendship, loyalty, loss and courage in the face of adversity, but as the characters, like trusted sidekicks, Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames), have gotten older the depth of feeling has become more profound. There is a sense of finality at play here and not all the characters we’ve come to know and love may make it across the finish line.
Having said that, apart from the always dependable Cruise as Ethan Hunt, there are stand-out roles for some of the best actresses around. Like series mainstay Rebecca Ferguson (as rogue agent Ilsa Faust), Vanessa Kirby (returning as The White Widow), new addition Pom Klementieff (as deadly assassin Paris) and the aforementioned Atwell in a plum part as a brilliant thief, whose name, Grace, reminded me of Grace Kelly, who once starred as a brilliant jewel thief in Hitchcock’s legendary To Catch A Thief. Could be just a coincidence but then again, McQ does know his movie history.
If I have a minor quibble with the movie it’s that the storyline of bad guy Gabriel (well played by Esai Morales) seems lifted - like a similar storyline in Fast X - from the James Bond movie Spectre, in which a figure from his past comes back to haunt him.
On the other hand, the return of Henry Czerny, who played a big part in the first Mission: Impossible (1996) as slippery government operator Eugene Kittridge is more than welcome.
I haven’t said very much about Tom Cruise, but as always he is the driving force behind the whole M:I enterprise. There is a motor cycle stunt quite late in the movie that is so breathtaking you really have to see it for yourself.
Cruise is one of our last remaining movie stars and when Ethan Hunt tells a new team mate ‘your life will always be more important to me than mine’ you get the feeling that on some personal level he’s talking directly to the audience, such is his dedication to risking life and limb providing us with an amazing cinematic experience. (If that sounds like myth-making, so be it).
The fact that Cruise found the perfect creative partner in Christopher McQuarrie, who after his Oscar-winning screenplay for The Usual Suspects (1995) struggled for years to get anything made in Hollywood, is something to cherish, as they really seem to bring out the best in each other.
How the franchise will end will be decided in Dead Reckoning Part 2. But when it comes to summer blockbusters, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part 1 simply towers over the competition.
I give it 4 1/2 stars!