Film review: ‘MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: THE FINAL RECKONING’ by Nick Gardener from ‘Built For Speed’

From its pompous title to its global obliteration scenario to the contrived sweaty earnestness that permeates most scenes, Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning has the undeniable aroma of a film desperately trying to convince us that it is bigger and more important than any other action or spy movie in Hollywood history.  There’s full throttle action, sci fi tech paranoia, espionage and political drama but it results in a gigantic lumbering machine of a film that only occasionally works how it is supposed to. It’s also more convoluted and ridiculous than a Bond film and disappointingly, it lacks a heartbeat.

In Final Reckoning, we’re reacquainted with ‘the entity’, the villainous AI we encountered in the last Mission Impossible film Dead Reckoning.  Apparently, the malevolent software has been watching the 1970’s sci fi film Colossus: The Forbin Project as it’s taken over the internet and is threatening to wipe out humanity by launching the world’s nukes.  Why it wants to do this, no one in the film is really sure.  The only person who can save humanity is of course Tom Cruise vaguely fictionalised here as agent Ethan Hunt.  To vanquish the evil AI, he has to recover a source code that went down to the ocean floor with a Russian sub a decade ago and insert it, along with another contraption, into a device that looks like a hand-held video game from the 1990’s.  Desperate to thwart him is the silver-haired meanie Gabriel (Esai Morales) who has the other vital component required to kill ‘the Entity’.  All sorts of illogical hijinks ensue as Hunt chases the sneaky Gabriel around the world.

Oddly and tediously, much of this unfurls through reams of exposition where po-faced characters, who spend a lot of time in strange subterranean dungeon-like settings, mutter repeatedly about the coming AI apocalypse and what a balls-out hero Ethan is.

While this film is effectively a sequel to Dead Reckoning, there’s also a clunky and half-baked attempt to link events here to those of earlier films in the near 30-year long franchise.  While a movie like Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy did the same thing in a poignant and  touching fashion, the barrage of flashbacks in Final Reckoning is more likely to confuse and cause headaches than evoke wistful memories of Missions past.

Most people, though, will see Mission Impossible films – and Tom Cruise films – for the action.  While there is a high quotient of action scenes here and clearly an enormous amount of planning and cash has been poured into making them, they’re strangely uninvolving.  The problem is they’re so self-consciously fixated on what a committed badass action star Cruise is. In one scene after another Hunt endures a torturous ordeal, whether it’s dangling from a biplane, getting smacked around by the old superhuman Russian tough man or swimming with the bends through a freezing Arctic Ocean.  The film seems determined to show Hunt as the tortured martyr and saviour suffering for humanity which surprisingly enough diminishes the thrill and sense of escapist fun in these admittedly technically very well staged sequences.  Some of these scenes also go on way too long and their impact is hurt by rapid cutting back and forth between multiple scenarios which makes it hard to get a fix on what is happening in any of them. Of course, there are also the obligatory yet nonsensical scenes of Tom Cruise running like a cyborg through the streets; surely a superspy would have access to some sort of vehicle.

While it would be naïve to suggest that this film is about anything other than Tom Cruise, it would have been more enjoyable had additional time been given to some of the fine supporting cast. There are tantalising but all too brief contributions from Ving Rhames as tech genius Luther and Nick Offerman playing against type as a hawkish U.S. General. Also, the film needed much more of Esai Morales as the creepy and at times hilariously over the top Gabrielle.  Simon Pegg as gadget man Benji and Angela Basset as the US President do, however, manage to make some sort of impression on this film.

Whether this ends up being the last instalment in the series remains to be seen but while there are some impressively constructed sequences this is not the satisfying emotionally cathartic end that a film franchise needs.

Nick’s rating: **1/2

Genre: Drama/ Action/ Adventure/ Science Fiction.

Classification: M.

Director(s): Christopher McQuarry.

Release date: 27th May 2025.

Running time: 171 mins.

Reviewer: Nick Gardener can be heard on “Built For Speed” every Friday night from 8-10pm on 88.3 Southern FM.

 

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