Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning Movie Review — Sucharita

I strongly — and I cannot stress this enough, but like, rather emphatically — am telling you:

Please re-watch Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning right before you go in for Final Reckoning, if you want to truly reckon with this film and its complicated, multi-layered, multi-dimensional storyline.

Picking up directly after Dead Reckoning, the movie opens with an ominous voiceover:
“The end you always feared is coming.”

Partly an acknowledgement that this 30-year franchise might finally be drawing to a close, the voice belongs to the dangerous AI known as “The Entity.” While it whispers these apocalyptic warnings, we’re treated to a supercut of every Mission: Impossible film so far, young and old Tom Cruise seamlessly blending into one. For longtime fans, this is an absolute treat, like graduating from a very long, very intense college course. Everything is about to pay off.

Director Christopher McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen spend 170 minutes hammering that point home. Old characters return in major roles, realistic face masks come off, and Tom Cruise pushes himself harder than ever. I swear, I’m pretty sure I saw him straight up pass out in one shot. With fire in its veins, the film travels through metro cities across the globe. Villains are villain-ing, cyanide pills are swallowed, knives are brandished, secret underground tunnels are blown up. The messaging is classic and clear, good versus evil, the old-fashioned way.

If you’re a fan, it’s incredibly satisfying to know that a major movie star is willing to go this far to cater to your excitement, constantly raising the bar with insane, death-defying stunts just to win your attention?

For some others, the movie might feel like a glorious mess. Ethan Hunt’s extraaaaaaa, world-saving plans always involve at least three layers of simultaneous action. For an espionage film, that’s expected. But when the movie repeatedly reminds you just how much plot has led to this moment, the overload becomes overwhelming.

Strangely, the more the stakes escalate with every scene, the more the film sort of flattens? Everything on screen hits you with the intensity of a solid cement block projectile hurled from a cannon. By the time one climbs back up from the impact crater, the next one is already at eye level. You’re expected not just to catch it, but to calculate the cannon’s make, trajectory, and how it will affect the next shot.

Not that one should expect simplicity from these films — Cruciform keys, source code, anti god, rabbit foot, a bajillion Macguffins and terms flood each scene and the dialogue. Final Reckoning is also reckoning with the state of the world as it stands in real life right now, and how we might have come to the point of no return wrt rampant misuse of AI, fascist governments, widespread and undistinguishable fake news. In one sequence, during a brutal fistfight with a gunda who is also a conspiracy theorist, Ethan Hunt grunts between blows,
“You spend too much time on the internet.”

Underneath the grandeur, making sense of the world has always been important to these larger than life films, an aim that’s probably the clearest in this outing. At a masterclass I attended where both McQuarrie and Cruise spoke for over an hour, the director said, “Without character, action remains just a spectacle”.

Tom Cruise has dedicated much of his career to becoming Ethan Hunt, blurring the line between actor and character through insanely well-conceived and executed stunt work. I was not ready for how hard the climax goes. For most of this sequence, Cruise is hanging off multiple aircraft, battling, bleeding, maiming, and injuring. It’s a perfect way to forget the real world, where no rogue agent, with a key to our salvation, will emerge to save the day.

Will AI devour us all? Probably yes. Until then, I’m happy to believe there’s a handsome man, and Angela Bassett, Simon Pegg, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Nick Offerman, Tramell Tillman, racing across continents and submarines, trying to keep the world from falling apart.

So, on a scale of 1 to 10, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning is…1 sequence you’ll constantly be hearing about is the submarine sequence, and for good reason, you have to see it to believe it! Jaake dekho, aur bataao.