Angela Bassett

Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning is a compelling action-adventure thriller that grips you from the getgo and propels your adrenaline for almost three hours. Sketchily scripted by director Christopher McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen, its crazy, overly convoluted plot, punctuated with dour expository dialogue, combines high-tech espionage with stunning stunts, peppered with existential nostalgic flashbacks, beginning with Bruce Geller’s TV series that introduced Lalo Schifrin’s memorable musical theme.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning picks up after the cliffhanger of 2023’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. While less nimble than its predecessor, with a convoluted plot and a nearly three-hour running time that could’ve lost a good ten minutes or so, the film is a grand capper to this franchise—and perhaps a farewell to Cruise’s hair-raising stunts over nearly thirty years. If Cruise at sixty-three hangs up his mantle as Ethan, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is a fitting finale to an action saga around an unstoppable agent who tries—and succeeds—where few others dare.

Director Christopher McQuarrie returns to pick up where he left off from the last movie, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning. Ethan and the IMF team now hold the two high-tech keys that are the only means to control a rogue AI system known as the Entity. Unfortunately, the Entity has infiltrated intelligence networks all over the globe, so now they are on a “mission” to prevent it from causing a nuclear war. But when it comes down to it, the plot is nothing we haven’t seen before. There’s a threat to the world, Ethan has only days to stop it, and likely will within the last second.

Mission: Impossible has gotten biblical for its Final Reckoning. Ethan Hunt is proclaimed the Chosen One. Only he can save the world from nuclear Armageddon as the AI infiltrator called The Entity swallows up not just cyberspace, but all of the world’s weapons arsenals. Will Hunt live or die? Has he been inscribed in the Book of Life? Will he part the Red Sea? Tom Cruise is definitely in control in this 8th installment of the action series and possibly his last.