Movie Review : Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025)
I don’t know anyone who watches Tom Cruise movies for dialogue or plot anymore and I suspect he is quite aware of that. They watch them to see Tom Cruise do something that can only be described as "insurance fraud with better cameras." For the last twenty years, Cruise has basically turned into Hollywood’s most self-serious alternative to Johnny Knoxville, a man willing to obliterate his body for your applause. Which is both awesome and a little sad.
In Mission Impossible -The Final Reckoning, he goes full blackout dare-mode, as if the only way to close out a franchise is by trying to die more spectacularly than the previous six times.
The Final Reckoning picks up where Dead Reckoning left off, which means Tom Cruise is once again fighting a villain you can’t punch: an evil AI named The Entity. Its plan is to manipulate world powers into nuclear war, which seems self-defeating since ruling over a radioactive wasteland is a bit like buying beachfront property in Arizona. Still, every other human on Earth wants to control The Entity for themselves, except Ethan Hunt, who’s the competent guy at the office who’s doing everybody’s job again.
The Very American Idea of Ethan Hunt
As I was saying, The Final Reckoning isn’t a movie so much as a carnival of dares. Every fifteen minutes Ethan Hunt is shoved into another scenario that feels like it was invented by a sleep-deprived stunt coordinator trying to win a bar bet. Cruise dives into the Arctic Ocean not once but twice, because apparently hypothermia only counts if you do it three times in a row. He also has a mid-century propeller plan fight with an awesome mustache-twirling villain (Esai Morales) who wandered out of an Indiana Jones movie.
Ethan Hunt might be the most American Christ figure we’ve ever put on film or at least the only one who can run a six-minute mile while carrying the cross. He’s been standing between humanity and the apocalypse for over thirty years, dying for our sins in ways OSHA would never approve of, then disappearing off the grid until the world needs him again. What does Ethan do in those off-seasons? Does he grill or builds home for orphans in Katmandu? That’s an SNL sketch if I’ve ever seen one.
By now, the villains barely matter. These late Mission Impossible movies are really about the myth of Ethan Hunt our death-proof, self-sacrificing stunt savior and that makes them weirder and more compelling than any Marvel content mill product.
That’s why it feels right, almost righteous, to watch him survive things that would atomize anyone from Evel Knievel to Bam Marger (and let’s be honest: Bam wouldn’t even try. He’d hand Steve-O the parachute and film from a safe distance.) Hunt’s whole deal is that he’s not doing it for glory, he’s doing it for us. As a character, he functions like an insurance policy for our darkest intrusive thoughts.
We’re all low-key terrified of AI, Skynet, Siri’s evil twin (take your pick) but there’s something comforting, almost primal, about imagining a perfectly calibrated human brain inside an inhumanly athletic body whose only purpose is to keep the apocalypse on pause.
But is it good?
Here’s the part where I should make some grand pronouncement about the value of Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning, but I have honestly no idea. I do think there’s artistic merit to Ethan Hunt as a character, but the movies themselves are basically engineered joyrides. They exist to make you ooooh and aaah for three hours and then send you home buzzing, secure in the knowledge that Tom Cruise just bruised three ribs so you don’t have to feel bad about asking ChatGPT to ghostwrite your apology email.
That’s their lane. They’re not "art" in the sense of layered themes and complex psychology, they’re art in the sense of a fireworks finale or a demolition derby. Pure spectacle, unapologetic and necessary.
I know some dweeb is already drafting an email about how "our culture is rotting" and "our brains are under siege by content." And sure, part of that rant is technically correct. But here’s the truth: we all dedicate a few hours a week to being an audience, and I’d rather burn mine watching Tom Cruise hurl himself off skyscrapers than scrolling through a hundred algorithmic three-minute lectures about how I’ve been loading my dishwasher wrong.
At least Cruise gives me something resembling peace of mind. Call it meditation by spectacle: a full vacuuming of the spirit, clearing out all the petty concerns so I can walk back into my life a little lighter, a little cleaner, and definitely more entertained. I mostly agree with the Martin Scorsese rant against Marvel movies, but I also think not everything needs to be smart or enlightening and that the world would be boring if it were. Take that internet, I have a paradoxical opinion about something and I’m not going to explain myself.
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Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning probably work best if you treat them like a six-hour block, the way people marathon Lord of the Rings, except here you can keep a beer in hand and never miss the plot. They’re not difficult to follow. You can step out to do laundry, come back twenty minutes later, and odds are Tom Cruise is still dangling from a cliff or outrunning physics. I can’t tell you to watch it and I can’t tell you not to. It’s just cinema aggressively trying to be fun.
Probably the exact same energy Tom Cruise brings to a party: relentless, a little exhausting, but undeniably impressive.
6.7/10
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