Review: ‘Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning’ Ends Tom Cruise’s Towering Action Franchise On An All-Time Low
With retcons, callbacks and endless irrelevant exposition dumps, a series that thrived apart from Hollywood's misguided 2010s conventional tentpole wisdom concludes with a whimper by drowning in it.
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
2025/169 minutes/PG-13 (for strong violence and action, bloody images, brief language)
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
Written by Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen
Produced by Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie
Based on the Mission: Impossible television show created by Bruce Geller
Starring - Tom Cruise, Esai Morales, Hayley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny, Simon Pegg, Angela Bassett, Greg Tarzan Davis and Shea Whigham
Cinematography by Fraser Taggart, Edited by Eddie Hamilton
Music by Max Aruj and Alfie Godfrey
Production Companies - Paramount Pictures, Skydance and TC Productions
Opening theatrically the week of May 23, 2025, courtesy of Paramount Pictures
As a longtime fan of Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible series, who ranks Christopher McQuarrie’s Rogue Nation as the best of the franchise, no less, I optimistically attributed some of Dead Reckoning Part 1’s artistic deficiencies to situational circumstances. I can’t imagine it was easy to shoot a globe-trotting, somewhat “real-world” (no outer-space locales or fantastical imagery) adventure spectacular amid a global pandemic. Surely, some of the hobbled storytelling, awkward interactions, and use of an all-knowing artificial intelligence as a narrative cheat were partially due to unprecedented circumstances, right? However, Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning suggests otherwise by tripling down on its predecessor’s least appealing aspects. It presents a “final form” of Ethan Hunt as “the Chosen One” in a fashion suggesting that Cruise took the chatter about Top Gun: Maverick “saving the movies” too literally.