Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning Review: A Bloated Finale Trying to Impossibly Tie It All Together

Ken Jones, OnScreen Blog Chief Film Critic

I have had my butt in a movie theater seat for every single entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise, dating back to 1996. Over the last 29 years, audiences have witnessed incredible set pieces after incredible set pieces, and Tom Cruise has done increasingly elaborate stunts with the aim of entertaining audiences. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning has all the earmarks of an ending for the franchise, though nothing in Hollywood is ever really final these days.

This potential concluding chapter picks up a few months after Dead Reckoning left off, with Cruise’s Ethan Hunt on the run, off the grid, and in possession of the two-part cruciform key that is, well, the key to eliminating the threat posed by The Entity, a sentient AI threatening global destruction. Ethan, with the help of Luther (Ving Rhames), Benji (Simon Pegg), Paris (Pom Klementieff), and newly minted IMF agent Grace (Hayley Atwell), finds himself in a race against time, with four days to thwart the plans of The Entity and defeat Gabriel (Esai Morales), the former acolyte of The Entity who has been cast out for his failure in the previous film. Government forces still seek to obtain and control The Entity, further complicating matters.

Like every other entry in this franchise, The Final Reckoning is a globetrotting affair, with locations jumping from London to the Arctic to South Africa, with a few other locations in between. There are no heights and depths that the franchise will not go to pull off spectacle blockbuster moviemaking, with an elaborate submarine sequence where Ethan manages to locate the lost Russian sub, the Sevastopol, deep beneath the Pacific Ocean. The film’s climax takes place in South Africa and features an aerial showdown between Ethan and Gabriel in biplanes, a nod to some early film history with biplanes and silent film.

One aspect of this story that works much better in this film compared to Dead Reckoning was the effectiveness of how the artificial intelligence that is The Entity is deployed in the movie. In Dead Reckoning, there was a sense that The Entity could be anything that the plot wanted or needed it to be as a convenient plot device. This time, it feels more like a potential reality than a convenient plot device, showing potential consequences of living in a post-truth world where we cannot trust the information we see and read.

Cruise gives his all and leaves nothing on the table. And given a title that says Final Reckoning, coupled with an early death of a team member, there is a sense throughout the film’s enormous (and bloated) 170-minute runtime that no character is safe or guaranteed to still be breathing once the credits start to roll. The film uses this to its advantage, putting nearly every member of Hunt’s team in serious peril at various times, particularly at the end. 

Cruise’s Hunt and Atwell’s Grace have undeniable chemistry together, and the addition of Klementieff’s character to the team gives Pegg’s Benji someone to have some quality bilingual banter with. The film also returns Agents Degas and Briggs, who quickly find themselves on opposing sides in the conflict. Henry Czerny’s Kittridge is a fly in the ointment, attempting to derail Ethan’s plans and possess The Entity for US intelligence. Speaking of, Angela Bassett reprises her role as Erika Sloane, with the former CIA director now President of the United States, and needing to trust Ethan one last time. Nick Offerman, Janet McTeer, Holt McCallany, Charles Parnell, and Mark Gatiss round out Sloane’s group of advisors and experts. Hannah Waddingham and Tramell Tillman have minor supporting roles as commanders in the US Navy. Last, but certainly not least, Rolf Saxon gets to reprise his role as William Donloe, the man exiled to a remote outpost by Kittridge when Ethan broke into Langley back in 1996 to steal the NOC list, and Lucy Tulugarjuk portrays Donloe’s Inuit wife, Tapeesa.

It's a loaded cast, which is given enough time to breathe with the longest runtime in the franchise. And the callbacks in casting with Sloane and Donloe are just the tip of the iceberg regarding director and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie’s misguided attempt to tie this final chapter together with some M:I grand unifying theory.

One of the characters, I kid you not, is revealed to be the son of a deceased character from a previous chapter in the franchise, working under an alias for “reasons.” Every movie in the franchise is referenced at least once, not just through dialogue, but brief clips too. There is even a retconning of one dangling thread from a previous film that ties into the creation of The Entity. Because it’s all connected! [Groan.]

This apparent need to tie everything up in a nice bow and create a narrative thread through the franchise reminded me of the type of thing you often see in TV show series finales; heck, sometimes the entire final season of a show can be dedicated to that goal. It often leads to disappointing final seasons. 

It’s a little more understandable when a serial TV show wants to wrap up its story as a cohesive whole, but that’s not exactly why we go to the movies, and while the Mission: Impossible franchise has spanned nearly three decades, we’re ultimately talking about eight movies by five directors spread out over 29 years, with the first five entries in the series being standalone stories. I can almost assure everyone involved in making this movie that the majority of the audience was not wondering how they were going to tie everything together. That’s not why people have invested time and money in watching this franchise, and the final chapter suffers because they attempt to do that.

It also needs to be said that Gabriel is an anticlimactic villain for the franchise to end on. It may not be fair to compare him to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Davian, but even Michael Nyqvist’s Hendricks and Dougray Scott’s Sean Ambrose had more charisma than Gabriel. 

These movies have also always had inherently low chances of success baked into the story, hence the “impossible” in Mission: Impossible, but even someone like ol’ Jack Burton, who knows a thing or two about plans needing “crackerjack timing”, would admit that the missions and plans in this movie strain the suspension of disbelief to the extreme. While the submarine sequence is heart-pounding, retrieving the source code of The Entity from the bottom of the ocean and rescuing Ethan on his one-man mission to do so is just absurd. 

I had high hopes for this final chapter in the Mission: Impossible franchise. Dead Reckoning was as thrilling as just about any of the other films in the franchise. Final Reckoning is a noticeable step down. There are still some thrilling spectacle moments, but the plot is larded up unnecessarily with tiebacks to and retcons of the entire franchise. Mission creep is something you hear about in military campaigns; Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning suffers from mission creep of its own. Rather than tell a satisfying conclusion to a two-part story, they’ve needlessly increased the degree of difficulty by trying to make this a conclusion for the entire franchise, to the film’s detriment.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars