Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) Director: Christopher McQuarrie
“Our lives are defined by the sum of our choices.”
Continuing the wild adventure from the previous Mission: Impossible film, in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has gone rogue from the IMF with the cruciform key that has the potential to destroy the ascendant all-consuming sentient artificial intelligence known as the Entity. Ethan believes the Entity is too dangerous a power for any one man or nation to possess, whereas every government on earth is desperately trying to get its hands on it. And now Ethan has the two united keys (the MacGuffins from the previous film) and he needs to find Gabriel (Esai Morales), the ally of the Entity, in order to track down the Sevastopol submarine in order to find the Entity’s original source code and hopefully destroy it. But Ethan soon learns that Gabriel has been outcast by the Entity for failing in the previous film to steal the pair of keys while aboard the Orient Express. The plot gets entirely convoluted in this film but essentially Ethan plans to retrieve the “Podkova” from the Sevastopol submarine (the Podkova virus code was called the “Rabbit’s Foot” which he unknowingly stole in the third Mission: Impossible film to save his wife). And Luther (Ving Rhames) has created a “Poison Pill” which can be used to infiltrate the Entity. Meanwhile the Entity desperately wants to be transported to a bunker in South Africa to wait out the coming global destruction.
In some ways, the overarching plot to this film doesn’t even really matter. The Final Reckoning is really just a string of heart-racing action sequences with a loose plot stretched over them. Some key moments in the film: Luther, dying of cancer, sacrifices himself while defusing a bomb. The Entity slowly takes control of every nuclear arsenal around the world. Ethan is given the united pair of keys and access to an aircraft carrier called the USS George H.W. Bush, then a plane, then a submarine called the USS Ohio, and a highly dangerous decompression dive in the open ocean. There is an incredibly tense stand-off at a remote signal station on St Matthew Island followed by an equally tense white-knuckling scene in which Ethan dives down to the Sevastopol as it goes tumbling off a seacliff and Ethan is forced to cut apart his decompression suit and swim freely at lethal depths while trapped beneath an ice wall.
Miraculously, Ethan survives this madness when he is revived by the former thief he met in the previous film Grace (Hayley Atwell) as well as his other friends as they seek out a heavily secured doomsday bunker in remote South Africa where Ethan faces off against Gabriel while Ethan’s team attempts to isolate the Entity using the original Podkova source code recovered from the Sevastopol as well as Luther’s “poison pill” algorithm. But the confrontation is disrupted by Eugene Kittridge (Henry Czerny) and the CIA which leads to a shoot-out, injuries, a nuclear bomb, and Ethan chasing Gabriel in an extraordinary series of daring plane stunts which famously features Tom Cruise dangling upside-down on a small plane flipping around in the sky. It’s incredibly entertaining (in many ways, I preferred the second half of the film to the first). Perhaps it goes without saying that in the end Ethan manages to boot Gabriel out the plane, recapture his stolen device, all while parachuting out of a flaming plane, and upload the Luther’s virus, triggering his team to eliminate the Entity inside the doomsday bunker, after defusing a nuclear bomb, while the President of the United States avoids nuclear conflict around the world.
I’m sorry to say this film was a bit of a disappointment for me. Long stretches of the film are very boring (I fell asleep several times trying to finish it). It is all-too often weighed down by technobabble and convoluted exposition, and for a nearly three-hour-long action flick, this just felt painful. Part of the film was just a clipshow from all the previous Mission: Impossible films but at least some familiar characters reappear in this one, especially William “Bill” Donloe from Langley in the first Mission: Impossible film (in this film, he has been banished to St. Matthew Island as recompense for Ethan’s break-in to the Black Vault thirty years ago in the first film). Other memorable appearances include Nick Offerman as a member of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (he is tragically killed in a shootout with an agent of the Entity).
As far as the primary villain goes, I like the idea of a rogue AI that has run amok, but why exactly is the Entity trying to destroy all of humanity in a nuclear holocaust? What is it hoping to accomplish? Is it just evil simply for the sake of being evil? Unfortunately, the demise of the Entity was underwhelming for this being the chief antagonist in the last two films. But the stunt work and special effects in this film are simply astounding.
Credits:
- Director: Christopher McQuarrie
- Written by: Christopher McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen
- Produced by: Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie
- Starring:
- Tom Cruise…..Ethan Hunt
- Hayley Atwell… Grace
- Ving Rhames…..Luther Stickwell
- Simon Pegg…..Benji Dunn
- Henry Czerny…..Eugene Kittridge
- Angela Bassett…..Erika Sloane
- Esai Morales…..Gabriel
- Cinematography by: Fraser Taggart
- Edited by: Eddie Hamilton
- Production Companies: Paramount, Skydance, TC Productions
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