Has the fuse finally been unlit? After 30 years of saving the world with stunts, set-pieces, spycraft and a substantial amount of sprinting, is Tom Cruise’s possibility-defying IMF agent Ethan Hunt finally hanging up his prosthetic mask? Whether or not Final Reckoning is truly the final Mission: Impossible remains to be seen. But there is a sense of an ending here, a much-deserved victory-lap for this most consistently thrilling of franchises.
It is, to some extent, ‘Mission: Impossible — The Greatest Hits’. It opens with a valedictorian montage of all seven previous films, makes a nice narrative link to Mission: Impossible III, and even offers a scene which plays out like the Seinfeld finale, Ethan’s lifetime of crimes and misdemeanours put on trial. Hapless analyst William Donloe (Rolf Saxon), a minor character from the first film, makes a welcome return here too, the resolution of an arc established in 1996 with the line of dialogue, “I want him manning a radar tower in Alaska by the end of the day!”
As much as it nods to the series as a whole, however, this is first and foremost a direct sequel to 2023’s Dead Reckoning, which first established the sentient AI a-hole the Entity as the ultimate cyber-baddie. Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie — the series’ longest-serving steward — ups the ante here in terms of bold narrative ambition. Picking up months later, the world has now irrevocably changed: governments have collapsed, nuclear arsenals have been compromised, societal order has crumbled. And only one man can save us.
Two major set-pieces are among the best Mission has ever managed.
Where the earlier films felt like tightly wound, ground-level espionage thrills, this is storytelling on a vast scale. It is essentially a war film, and a Cold War-era one at that, with the Entity forcing superpowers into military brinkmanship, and CIA head-turned-President Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett, more regal than ever) forced into sweaty, unthinkable choices, the trolley problem on a global scale. It sets the grandest, most apocalyptic stakes in a Mission film yet, with nothing less than “the total annihilation of humankind” on the table. From a less capable filmmaker, that could feel silly or over-the-top, and though the opening act of this lengthy film — a touch under three hours — initially creaks under the weight of its set-up and exposition, you always feel in safe hands.
Tense, dense, and stressful, it’s hardly the feel-good hit of the summer. But it speaks to McQuarrie’s fascinations across his now four Mission films — his ability to paint on both a colossal canvas and an intimate character one. Our lives, as Henry Czerny’s Kittridge says in the first film, and as Ving Rhames’ Luther repeats in this one, are the sum of our choices, and much of Final Reckoning is about understanding Hunt’s choices across his life, all apparently culminating here. He is a man dedicated to saving the world at whatever cost, yes, but he is also dedicated to his friends, to his decency.
That focus means that, unusually, this is a Mission film which is largely action-light, at least in its first half. There are really only two major set-pieces. Thankfully, they are among the best Mission has ever managed. The first is a true nail-biter and nerve-shredder, in which Ethan makes a daring, potentially deadly ocean dive to retrieve the Entity’s source code from a sunken submarine. It features one of the great rotating sets of cinema, equalling 2001: A Space Odyssey or Inception in its disorientating brilliance, its potent application of production design.
And the final showdown, in which all the chess pieces finally converge, sees Ethan engage in a jaw-dropping battle in the skies, Cruise hopping casually between two biplanes, with some of the maddest, most astonishing stunts he has ever achieved. Your jaw will detach and your palms will leak sweat. However you feel about the star, his commitment to spectacle and showmanship remains extraordinary. Old enough to qualify for a pensioner’s bus pass, he has never been more game — and is still running, relentlessly, even when there are ample public-transport options available nearby. Running like his life depends on it. Running like cinema depends on it. He is the effective self-appointed UN ambassador to the movies, the last true Movie Star. If this is indeed his final mission, it’s quite the appropriate swansong — but let’s hope the door will stay open, should he once again choose to accept.
