Film Review - Mission Impossible the Final Reckoning (2025)

Mission Impossible the Final Reckoning is the newest and supposedly final film in the MI series and once more Christopher McQuarrie is on writing and directing duties, the story here picks up from where 2023’s Dead Reckoning left off and Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his team (Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg and Hayley Atwell) still hunting down the Entity AI program as it threatens nuclear Armageddon on the world.

Mission Impossible the Final Reckoning is a good way for this series to exit if this is supposedly the final film in the franchise because while it has a big storytelling issue I still had a good time watching this movie and Cruise and Co still commit to their roles and Atwell has been a memorable addition to the series in the previous 2 films.

The film also has 2 great action setpieces, the first of those is on a downed submarine which is starting to flood while Cruise has to retrieve something from it and the whole time watching that scene play out I was reminded a lot of the Abyss (a very underrated film by James Cameron) in terms of being down in the depths of the ocean with the clock racing against you and hoping you don’t run out of breath and die all alone down there and the tension was very apparent in that sequence.

The other involved the films climax with a race against the clock on the ground and in the air and the editing by Eddie Hamilton is excellent generating maximum amounts of tension and counting down plus vintage Tom Cruise daredevil stunt work though you could see this time around that it was starting to take a toll on him.

But this movie also has a big storytelling issue and that is the convoluted ways it tries to tie together all of the previous movies so that it all feels like one big story and more than once did I not only think to myself “what the fuck” but I was also reminded in all the worst ways of Spectre which I consider the be the worst James Bond film ever made and one of the reasons why is its pointless attempts to tie together all of the Craig era films up to that point and it was totally unnecessary there and here.

And lastly this movie is also very long, it runs just shy of 3 hours but it sure felt like 3 hours and at one point my bottom did start falling asleep in my cinema seat and the opening segment could’ve easily dispensed with the pointless tie ins for a more straightforward “Hello Mr Hunt” exposition dump and we all would’ve been much better off.

And so that was Mission Impossible the Final Reckoning and I enjoyed it for the most part and it delivers a good enough finale but its also too long and too needy to tie everything together when it didn’t need to, 3 out of 5.