“Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning” has a running time of just under three hours. Within those three hours, alas, I’d say that Tom Cruise has a running time of only a minute or two. For those of us who’ve grown fond of Cruise the cardio demon, this is dispiriting news: what a letdown after “Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol” (2011), in which he raced heroically through the blinding fury of a Dubai sandstorm. And who could forget the blissful London chase sequence from “Mission: Impossible—Fallout” (2018), in which Cruise spent a whole seven minutes tearing up the geometric staircase at St. Paul’s, then sprinting, like an unusually stiff-backed cheetah, across one rooftop after another?
Cruise does go for another brisk London jog in “The Final Reckoning,” and, although he’s had tougher workouts, he seems intent, as ever, on outrunning time itself—an idea literalized by the sight of Big Ben glowing in the distance, ticking away the seconds until doomsday. Cruise’s character, the Impossible Mission Force agent extraordinaire Ethan Hunt, has a bomb that needs defusing; a beloved teammate, Luther (Ving Rhames), who needs rescuing; and an artificially intelligent nemesis, the Entity, to banish to the pits of cyberhell. But for Cruise the actor, who turns sixty-three in July, running has become more than a means to a narrative end. He does it for the same reasons he scales skyscrapers, plunges into watery depths, and dangles from renegade aircraft: to cast aside any hint of creeping senescence, and to remind us what an honest-to-God movie star is willing to risk for our entertainment. And that means something in a Hollywood that now caters to puny screens and punier visions, outsourcing the finer mechanics of action filmmaking to the visual-effects department. (Is it any wonder that A.I. is this movie’s supervillain?) Cruise means to turn back the clock in more than one sense. He may be older and puffier around the eyes than in 1996, when the first “Mission: Impossible” film was released. But he still dives headlong into each adventure as if it were his personal fountain of youth.
But has that fountain now run dry? “The Final Reckoning” is Cruise’s eighth “Mission: Impossible” outing and—assuming the title isn’t wearing a rubber mask—perhaps his last. The script, which the director, Christopher McQuarrie, co-wrote with Erik Jendresen, too often sags under the weight of end-times portents; even for a series that treats global destruction as an occupational hazard, the mood has never been quite this oppressively doomy. The Entity, which McQuarrie introduced in “Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One” (2023), has now conquered all of cyberspace, and thus become more pernicious, more deadly, and more tedious to summarize than ever. It has endangered world economies, unleashed plagues of misinformation, and even spawned a powerful cult that seeks to hasten humanity’s end. Paris (Pom Klementieff), herself a former servant of the Entity who has since joined Ethan’s team, murmurs, “It is written,” as if the techno-apocalypse had been foretold, eons ago, in the e-book of Revelation.
Is the Entity a metaphorical variant of Trumpism? At least one of Ethan’s lines—“It wants us divided”—presumably means to make us wonder. Yet the “Mission: Impossible” movies, for all their invocations of statecraft, terrorism, and impending nuclear catastrophe, have generally danced nimbly around real-world geopolitics. You’d have to go back to J. J. Abrams’s “Mission: Impossible III” (2006) and its implicit critique of George W. Bush-era torture tactics, to find the last Cruise missile that made contact with a real-world target. Still, “The Final Reckoning,” unwittingly or not, pushes back against a few Trumpist idiocies. For starters, the President of the United States is a Black woman, Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett), and her poised, empathetic leadership strikes a utopian chord even under dystopian circumstances. If anyone cracks a nasty D.E.I. joke, I didn’t hear it above the din of propellers, gunfire, and earnest war-room speechifying.
And then there’s the itinerary. Like most of its predecessors, “The Final Reckoning” was shot outside the U.S.—locations include the U.K., Malta, Norway, and South Africa—and thus represents exactly the kind of Hollywood-branded, internationally filmed mega-production that would suffer should Trump make good on his recent promise to impose tariffs on films shot abroad. A movie needn’t be a work of art—and “The Final Reckoning,” the baggiest, least satisfying film of the McQuarrie quartet, falls well short of the mark—to lay bare the anti-art implications of an America First agenda. There’s a reason we describe great cinema as transporting. To cut us off from the thrill of crossing borders and soaring over distant landscapes would deny us a fundamental pleasure of moviegoing.
About halfway through “The Final Reckoning,” as Ethan descends into the frigid depths of the Bering Sea, something overdue and wonderful happens: the movie falls silent. Until now, there has been a chatty overabundance of micro-logistics, even for a “Mission: Impossible” movie: there are aircraft carriers to be commandeered, secret coördinates to be transmitted, and laws of physics to be preposterously circumvented. (Also, fine actors playing top government and military leaders to be acknowledged, including Nick Offerman, Janet McTeer, Hannah Waddingham, and, most impressively, as a submarine captain, Tramell Tillman.) So much information is laid out—and so much emphasis placed on risks, stakes, and disastrous potential outcomes—that you strongly suspect only a fraction of it will matter in the end, and you’re right. For perhaps the first time in McQuarrie’s assured handling of these movies—for my money, “Rogue Nation” (2015) remains the underappreciated best of the lot—he makes the mistake of detailing the action so thoroughly in advance that actually dramatizing it becomes almost superfluous.
But, finally, the expository blather dies away, and the mission is upon us: Ethan Hunt, meet shipwrecked submarine. His aim is to retrieve a chunk of hardware holding lines of digital code (it is written!) with the power to override and perhaps defeat the Entity for good. For a few spellbinding minutes, Cruise does everything he could possibly do underwater, short of singing “Eat your heart out, James Cameron” into his oxygen tube. He sloshes his way through waterlogged chambers, juggles unexploded Russian torpedoes, and, in a delightful and probably unintended homage to “Risky Business” (1983), briefly swim-dances in his underwear. It’s action cinema at its purest and most existential: “The Ethan Hunt for Red October.”
For all the dangerous missions that Hunt has embarked on solo, I can’t recall one that has conveyed such a primordial sense of abandonment. For a moment, Lalo Schifrin’s irresistible theme is a distant memory, and the fate of humanity really does seem to rest on the shoulders of the most unreachable man on the planet. Such loneliness is another I.M.F. occupational hazard, but a self-imposed one: again and again, both “Reckoning” movies emphasize that Ethan’s most heroic virtue—his refusal to sacrifice his teammates for the greater good—is simultaneously his gravest weakness. It explains why, beyond a valedictory sense of full-circle symmetry, McQuarrie piles on so many callbacks to the first “Mission: Impossible” film, in which Ethan’s teammates were murdered before his very eyes—a formative trauma that he seemed to forget for long stretches of the series, but which has been selectively retrieved, like sublimated source code, for this movie’s narrative purposes.
More than once, McQuarrie splices in an indelible image from the 1996 film: a knife falling into a top-secret vault, the blade embedding itself in a desk. It’s a reminder that the director of that movie, Brian De Palma, remains the series’ most intuitive visual stylist and most concise storyteller. Not that I craved concision from McQuarrie’s film; God knows he and Cruise have earned their double-decker climax. But, amid the brooding sprawl, I wanted less big-screen doomscrolling, less self-indulgent gravitas, and less of the unspeakably boring villain Gabriel (Esai Morales), who bears the name of an archangel but never achieves the stature of an archenemy. There are also far too many repetitions of the I.M.F. creed—“We live and die in the shadows, for those we hold close and for those we never meet”—which soon starts to sound like greeting-card John le Carré.
I also wanted more from the teammates whom Ethan professes to care about so much—particularly the women, with no shade intended to Luther or Benji (Simon Pegg). I suspect that the apocalypse will rob more than a few of us of our wits and personalities, but must our movies be so willing to prove the point? As Grace, the wily pickpocket who joined Ethan’s team in “Dead Reckoning,” Hayley Atwell has been stripped of humor and playfulness. And I missed the vicious verve of the still formidable, now reformed Paris, although I suspect that Klementieff’s days as an action star are just beginning. What new adventures could bring out—and deepen—her combustible mix of vulnerability and ferocity? Finding that out will be her mission, and I choose to expect it. ♦
