Movie Review 2 – Mission Impossible , Dead Reckoning part 2.

“Trust me- one last time”  Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning(2025)

Starring: Tom Cruise,

Written : Christopher McQuarrie

Directed: Christopher McQuarrie

So, this is it. Cor blimey. When Ethan Hunt utters the fateful words to appease his political masters we know or hope that he is talking to us too “ Trust me – for one last time”. What a wild ride it has been for us the fans for the last 30 years. Yes, readers , impartiality will fly out the window today as I confirm that I am an uber fan of the MI series. I have been intrigued , excited and truly entertained by the jaw-dropping stunts, the preposterous set-pieces, the camaraderie of the IMF spy crew. And not forgetting the sprinting and the prosthetic mask silliness. If you don’t know the set up / story by know , well my friend, you have wandered into the wrong screen. Does Tom deliver? Do the IMF go through hell to save the world? Can you see awesome stunts and emotional turn arounds ? Hell, yeah. There is a distinct and ,hopefully, definite sense of an ending here, a much-deserved victory-lap for this most consistently thrilling of franchises.

As always ,the movie starts with Ethan reviewing a message that outlines his next mission before it , inevitably , self-destructs after 5 seconds . But this time we are treated to a kind of Mission Impossible greatest hits video complied by no other than the president herself. A tape that not only recaps plot but also throws in umpteen clips of the previous films in the saga. Cruise’s Ethan Hunt rightly looks puzzled as to why he’s being told – and shown – all of this. A fly in the ointment is the treatment of the fans (us) regarding all this exposition and explaining of what is going on– The Final Reckoning isn’t just content to recap things once or twice. Across its overlong 170-minute running time, it’s comfortable flashing back to other movies in the franchise with some regularity, and – if needed – sitting the characters down and getting them to explain it all again.

After all ,who is going to go into this not having refreshed themselves by watching part 1 again? 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. 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. The villainous Gabriel (Esai Morales) is on the loose, and the AI antagonist The Entity is going to destroy everything. Tom Cruise versus AI? Bring it on. Cue the action and the guts of the piece as we see Ethan Hunt, Simon Pegg’s Benji, Ving Rhames’ Luther, Hayley Atwell’s Grace, Greg Tarzan Davis’ Degas and Pom Klementieff’s Paris as the last line of resistance, with The Entity trying to engineer nuclear war. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning bafflingly keeps getting pulled back to earth by an inexhaustible desire to keep explaining things, or to throw in a reference, or try to describe the ever-complicating plot. But for this viewer , this is forgivable when Tom and co. go big on the set pieces.

The 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. This is fundamentally  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) forced into unthinkable choices, It sets the grandest, most apocalyptic stakes in a Mission film yet, with nothing less than “the total annihilation of humankind” on the table.

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. 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. 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.

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.