Why You Were Mildly Entertained by… Mission: Mehpossible — The Reckoning of Exposition

Why Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning Felt Kinda Possible

This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds… but only after a 45-minute dissertation and a flaccid biplane chase.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is a film caught in the awkward middle ground. It’s not bad, just blandly competent. This would be fine, except it fails the assignment: it’s not a good Mission: Impossible movie.

By the end of this review, you’ll understand why it struggles as a standalone entry, suffers from generic pacing, and lacks the franchise’s signature flair: there are barely any clever heists, disguises, or true “impossible” moments. Tom Cruise still brings Tom Cruise energy to the role of Ethan Hunt, but the flick feels repetitive and unearned, particularly the implied romance and the underwhelming villain. Negs aside, there are bright spots: excellent minor characters, strong performances from newcomers like Waddingham and Tillman, and a few solid one-liners and raised eyebrows that do amazing character work. Overall, The Final Reckoning coasts where it should climb, and ends at half-mast.

If you watched it on a plane, you’d think, “Yeah, that was better than staring at the seat back in front of me,” and then forget it ever existed after the landing gear hits the tarmac and Delta lost your luggage. Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning forgot what franchise it belonged to.

A Tale of Two Parts

The first challenge moviegoers are going to have with The Final Reckoning is that it’s totally reliant on Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One. Looking at the poster art of the two movies, you might think you’d suffered a stroke and missed something. You have not: the second poster erases mention of being the second in a two-part series, perhaps fishing for the odd sucker without access to the Internet:

If you’re one of the people who hasn’t seen Dead Reckoning, do not see The Final Reckoning before catching yourself up. If you do, you will have no idea what’s going on. This is not a movie you can see without doing the homework. That aside, the movie is front-loaded with some fairly weighty exposition, trying to reframe the stakes, and even the previous movies, rather than escalating them. It’s a weird start to a weird movie: The Final Reckoning needs you to have seen Part One, but hopes it won’t matter if you haven’t.

It definitely matters.

First Gear

There are a few cars on Planet Earth geared for glory, not groceries. The Bugatti Veyron hits 100km/h in under 3 seconds, screaming right through the gates of Valhalla. It’s a machine that understands what it’s supposed to do: get you from a standing start to full adrenaline overload in the shortest time possible.

The Final Reckoning is not keeping pace with it.

It suffers from a long intro, then a slow ramp. You know it’s coming. You want it to come. And when it arrives, the movie takes off—but until then, you’re wondering whether they put a Corolla engine in there.

Part of the problem is the lack of iconic Mission: Impossible beats. There’s no epic heist. There are no clever cons. When things heat up, it’s all action. For example, there’s an opportunity at the start of the movie to break one of the team out of prison. I was expecting this to be standard MI fare: cool voice-cloaking tech, face masks done by a briefcase printer, cybercrime to bust open the gates, and some old-fashioned charm as one of the team pretends to be a visiting lecturer studying prison inmate theory.

What we get is a fairly short action vignette. Our heroes remove masks, but all the setup—how they got there, how they got inside, how they stymied top-shelf security, and their escape plan—is invisible. It’s a lost opportunity the movie repeats over and over, forgetting that we’re there to see Ethan and his team do the impossible with a little technology and a lot of flair.

Even scenes that should have absolutely rocked take too long to get to the point. The submarine scene is overlong. The biplane finale feels anticlimactic. There’s nothing really impossible about them. They’re more about grit than cleverness—a war of spectacle over ingenuity.

Action With a Hamstring Injury

There are eight movies in this current Mission: Impossible series. By this time, most franchises would have packed it in, but Mission: Impossible somehow—perhaps impossibly—keeps things fresh. In The Final Reckoning, however, the set pieces feel familiar. Part of this is being the second part of a duo; the setup was done in Dead Reckoning Part One, and now we get to land the plane.

The problem is the plane is the same one we took off in.

The submarine section struggles to match the spectacle of the HALO jump. Henry Cavill’s August Walker Bathroom Moment™ in Fallout was crying out for a companion piece in The Final Reckoning by Pom Klementieff’s Paris, but she’s relegated to gun duty. The Burj Khalifa heist was peak MI, with insane setup coupled with insane action. While the submarine and biplane sections had creativity, they lacked tension because they were too damn long.

There are few “wow” moments to match Mission: Impossible’s best, and for what may be the last in the series, we deserved a better swansong.

The Cast Carries It

Tom Cruise is one of the best-looking, but also best-performing 62-year-olds in cinema. The man does the work of bringing Ethan Hunt to life, whether he’s carving someone up with a machete or sprinting. And he does a lot of sprinting. His lines carry emotional weight, and his delivery remains completely authentic. He is the man who will save us when no one else can. Cruise remains a believable and authentic Hunt, out for a potentially final outing, and I remain firm in never wanting to try taking him on the track.

However, he didn’t arrive alone. There are standout relative newcomers in Greg Tarzan Davis as Degas and Pom Kelementeiff’s Paris. He’s the straight-by-the-books man, and she’s the psycho with amazing flair. The duo share significant on-screen time, and it’s a shame we don’t get to see their polar-opposite moral compasses doing more work. That said, the two clearly had fun making their joint scenes. One sees them captive to the Russians, and his head-shake to murder and her nod to overkill is delightfully done. There are many of these subtle, powerful uses of facial expressions, and the actors do tremendous work without dialogue to do the heavy lifting.

Now, let’s talk about Hayley Atwell.

Yes, that Hayley Atwell. See, one of the great crimes of cinema is that we didn’t get enough Agent Carter. In the totally forgettable Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, we got to see what Atwell might have become for the MCU if they’d let her take a front-line role. Well, Marvel’s loss is Mission: Impossible’s gain: Atwell joined the team in Dead Reckoning as the charming and cleverer-than-Ethan Grace.

She remains a delight. What cleverness the movie has is down to Atwell’s Grace, whether it’s using pickpocketing as a disarmament tool or carrying the movie’s payoff to great heights.

There is one fly in this ointment. There’s a sort-of-romance between Grace and Ethan. I’m not trying to be vague for spoiler reasons. I honestly don’t know what their relationship is supposed to be. To quote Icy Blu, there’s a little chit-chat and lots of “who’s that?” and several invitin’ glances. But aside from a cleavage-heavy resuscitation scene, we’re left at a loss. Is Ethan over Ilsa? Moved on from Julia? It’s unclear, but I feel the romance is more of a plot device than anything earned. They just haven’t done enough together to be all that and a bag of chips.

The Problem With Evil

Esai Morales gave us the very punchable Gabriel in Dead Reckoning. He was sly, clever, and backed by a super-intelligent AI. All cinemagoers wanted him dead, and we wanted his death to be a bad one.

Fast forward to The Final Reckoning, and Gabriel makes a return, but he’s now Evil Lite. He’s moved from cold, calculating mastermind to cackling side note. There’s no positive evolution of his character from Part One. It turns out everything that made him special was the Entity.

Which brings us to another missed opportunity. The Entity doesn’t tempt or manipulate Ethan, which is what I’d do when facing the kind of man who’s saved the world six previous times. It shows no real strategising that can’t be explained away in one of the movie’s tired exposition moments. The Entity doesn’t feel like a true sentient threat. Hell, James Cameron gave us the T800 way back in 1984, and that killer machine used clever tools like the phone book to get the drop on Sarah Connor. 

With all the angst we feel about AI taking our jobs, rampant downsizing, and the layoff tsunami hitting the world, the Entity’s role in The Final Reckoning feels more MacGuffin than actual threat. It’s a lost opportunity, conceptually interesting but executed like a PowerPoint presentation.

Lip Service to Loyalty

The big themes Ethan’s built his team around are loyalty, sacrifice, and found family. Long-time players on his crew like Benji and Luther stick with him because they’re the best at what they do—but also, they love each other deeper than many families ever do.

We expect more of this in The Final Reckoning, but like The Fast and the Furious’s constant repeating of, “It’s all about family,” this feels like it’s all tell, no show. There’s a lack of meaningful character arcs. Relationships get no deeper. It really feels like important emotional beats were cut in favour of the punch-run-explode vignettes of the movie.

There are some clever moments here, though. Henry Czerny’s Kittridge continues to be one of the best Top Men™ at the agency, and we’re never quite sure what he’s doing or thinking, only that he’s doing it for the greater good. Nick Offerman’s General Sidney shows us the meaning of true sacrifice when we expected him to become a villain. Holt McCallany’s Serling is a constant nag at Angela Bassett’s President Sloane, but in the end he admits her play was the right one.

We touched on Hannah Waddingham’s Admiral Neely and Tramell Tillman’s Captain Bledsoe earlier, but they deserve a special mention here. There is a pure line of earned off-screen friendship between Sloane and Neely, and then Neely and Bledsoe, that allows us to win an unwinnable war. These heroes use command not as a shield from accountability, but as a platform for justice. And not just justice for America, but for the world. They know the stakes are high, and it’s us versus the machines. The flags on the battlefield are less important than the aspects of shared survival backed by time served. They trust each other, and in that trust, Ethan gets his chance.

These moments where side characters carry the messages of loyalty and sacrifice are as magnificent as they are brief, and I’d have loved to see more of them.

Doctor, What’s the Diagnosis?

I think what went wrong here is as simple as Part One got all the good shit, and Part Two got the leftovers and the difficult job of closing out the plot.

If we were in an alternate universe where people were happy to watch a six-hour movie without their bladders bursting, and Parts One and Two were released together, this would be a pretty good movie. You’d have all the setup from Dead Reckoning, then the satisfying closure of The Final Reckoning. We wouldn’t have to have the first third of the movie get bogged down while failing to explain the previous movie. We’d potentially have more joined-up character moments from start to finish.

Splitting the story tanked the pacing. Ultimately, The Final Reckoning plays like a DLC pack with no new mechanics. We get to see how the story ends, but there’s less spectacle and a more workmanlike approach to finishing the story.

The Final Verdict

As a movie, Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning is… fine. Competent. Action popcorn.

As a Mission: Impossible movie, it’s… underwhelming. Generic. And crucially, it lacks that franchise identity that’s carried us through seven prior movies. You’ll definitely find bits to enjoy, but downgrade your expectations going in to avoid ennui. And for newcomers, don’t start with this one unless you want to be confused, bored, and wondering why people love seeing Tom Cruise run so much.

Maybe the mission really was impossible. It could’ve been too hard to make us care about Gabriel or to prove that biplanes are still cool. The best way to watch these movies is as a pair. Take the day. Put the first one on, then see the second right after. You’ll have a better time because a) you’ll be able to get the whole story at once, b) the pacing will feel better, and c) you’ll be able to fit in your own bathroom breaks.

What did you think of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning? Did it pop for you, or turn into a slowly sinking submarine in the Baltic Sea? Let me know in the comments below. Feel free to disarm that Like button, or Luther your way into Subscribing. And thanks for watching!