‘Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning’ (2025) Movie Review - Cruise Control

I have never been a fan of the Mission: Impossible franchise, and Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning did nothing to make me a Tom Cruise fanatic. The key to the acclaim that these movies, over the years, have received lies in the presence of Cruise himself - a megastar who, for our entertainment, puts his body at risk. He will climb Burj Khalifa or jump from the highest mountain like a daredevil, and the marketing team makes sure we know that all the stunts are real, that they are performed by the actor and not by body doubles. The audience appreciates the fact that a human being is experiencing extreme physical stress for their pleasure and thus rewards this franchise with love, adoration, and respect. For these devotees, Cruise becomes a Christ-like figure who undergoes torture to save something they worship: Movies. This fawning adoration can sometimes come across as irritating. For instance, when some people who got early access to both Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One and The Final Reckoning came out of their screenings, they tweeted that they personally didn't like the film but hope that others end up cherishing it. They wished to be part of the "minority." The least these people, who value a movie whose actor doesn't seem afraid of mortal peril, can do is not act like wimps. Be confident if you don't like something. Cruise won't hang you from a plane if you accept that these films are mediocre (which they actually are), and these movies certainly don't depend on critics for success at the box office.

The audience goes to a Mission: Impossible movie for stunts, not story. Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie and his co-writer Erik Jendresen have apparently forgotten this, which is why they inject a heavy dose of drama into the prosy script. The so-called drama, though, merely involves exposition delivery with either sobriety or urgency. From the beginning of the film, the atmosphere feels funeral-like. There have been reports that this will be the final film, which, of course, sounds like rubbish. A spy never retires; a superhero never sleeps. When Hollywood can bring back Keanu Reeves and Robert Downey Jr for another trip, how can Cruise be left behind? Nonetheless, the mood in The Final Reckoning is deadly serious for most of the time, and by killing a few characters, the filmmakers try to increase the stakes and the urgency. This tone is nothing but a red herring. Almost all the Mission: Impossible movies spend their energies trying to convince you that this time, Ethan Hunt is going to face his biggest enemy. Yet, after watching the climax, you feel as if the film is giggling at you for having pulled off another prank successfully. This is not so different from the mask trick the characters often use to fool their enemies. Give this franchise truth serum; the new title will be Mission: Impossible - Just Kidding.

In the Reckoning films, Ethan's enemy turns out to be AI. He even kicks and scolds someone for spending too much time on the Internet. This AI, known as the Entity, tells Ethan that it has the computational skills to predict multiple possibilities. Once again (like Sister Sage in The Boys), we face the problem of being introduced to a villain whose intelligence is undermined by the filmmaker's narrow thinking. The Entity can compute complex things, but it's stuck within the confines of an incredibly predictable film. You don't need to be the smartest person on the planet or in the theater to figure out if Ethan will be able to save the world from the nuclear threat. And since The Final Reckoning's idea of drama and dialogue is nostalgia and exposition, you simply wait for Cruise to hang from a plane, a building, or anything. But even the stunts this time are unremarkable (the only good action scene here occurs offscreen while we focus on Grace's [Hayley Atwell] expressions). Whether they are real or not seems beside the point because they look like products of green screen. There is no sense of thrill in the scenes where Ethan attempts to take control of a plane or retrieves whatchamacallit from a submarine. That bathroom brawl in Mission: Impossible - Fallout has more palpable feelings than any set piece in The Final Reckoning. Ethan and, by extension, Cruise, defeat AI in the film, but their film itself looks like a creation of AI. The movie cherishes humans and their determination, which means it also implicitly cherishes their creativity. All this celebration, however, is done through a film that has no trace of human touch or emotions in it. McQuarrie's co-director seems to be Sora, and the third writer of The Final Reckoning could very well be ChatGPT.

Final Score- [3/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times