Words by JANE CROWTHER
In case you missed the previous instalment, The Final Reckoning begins by ensuring viewers are on the right page with this adventure, kicking off a couple of months after the events of Tom Cruise’s 2023 summer blockbuster. Now Ethan Hunt’s (Cruise) hair is longer, his tech whiz Luther (Ving Rhames) is ill and the rogue AI threat, The Entity, has plunged the world into chaos. The Entity plans to initiate a world wipeout via armageddon by taking control of the nuclear codes of all nations, the only way to stop it is to retrieve its source code from the bottom of the Arctic ocean where it’s trapped in a crashed Russian sub (seen in Dead Reckoning) and then play out a complicated game of digi cat-and-mouse. The only person who can complete this mission is Hunt – appealed to by the US president (Angela Bassett) – and the thorn in his side is Big Bad Gabriel (Esai Morales) who holds a vital piece of the plan. The mission is literally world-saving and it triggers Hunt’s memories of all the people he’s lost and all the crazy stuff he’s done across seven previous films. Cruise and his co-conspirator/producer/director Christopher McQuarrie set this chapter up as a swan song (but is it really?), and ensure it goes out with a bang.
As is now expected of Cruise, The Final Reckoning ups the ante on stunts that its star completes personally, his face clearly visible as his body is battered by water and G-force. While there’s plenty of globetrotting, trademark running, mask removal, double crossing and bomb defusing, the big ticket here are two set-pieces in which Cruise and cinematic innovation are pushed to their limits. After a series of fights and escapes, Hunt embarks on solo deep diving to the Russian submarine, his chance of drowning immeasurable due to depth, location, temperature. Add to that a sub that is glitchy and moving on the Baring seabed, and the sequence becomes literally breathtaking as Hunt is trapped in the oceanic version of a freezing washing machine as his oxygen depletes. The production built the world’s deepest and largest water tank at Longcross studios and devised new diving masks to show Cruise’s face to complete the scenes for real, and it translates. It’s a claustrophobic, teeth-clenching watch.
It’s no spoiler to mention the finale – promotion quite rightfully leans hard into the vintage bi-plane sequence which see Cruise clinging to the spindly wings of not one, but two different swooping, diving and barrelling planes with South Africa’s stunning Drakensberg Mountains flying beneath him. His face flapping in the G-force, his body weightless as the planes invert, this is another breath snatching moment (certainly for Cruise trying to suck a breath in hurricane-level wind resistance) and provides some much needed levity. There’s a reason Hunt is costumed like Indiana Jones at this point – it’s the sort of delirious der-doing that evokes classic cinema. It’s worth the ticket price alone.
Though the extended IMF team play a part in proceedings (a bow-out adds emotional resonance), they are certainly second fiddle, facilitators to the Hunt show. That may disappoint fans who enjoyed the previous spike of Grace (Hayley Atwell) and Paris (Pom Klementieff). Via additional characters the movie champions the unpredictability of human nature, the concept of being on the right side of history despite the rules, the celebration of the rebel, the maverick. That’s seen in Bassett’s POTUS, Hannah Waddington’s aircraft carrier Admiral and Tramell Tillman’s sub captain who likes to call everyone ‘mister’ (bringing Jeff Goldblum levels of deliciously unexpected line delivery). But the star is certainly Cruise, his previous M:I incarnations celebrated in flashback montages and his character praised continuously by his team. ‘Only you can do this,’ he is constantly told, and when you see Cruise dangling off the corner of a vintage Boeing Stearman as it flips around a canyon, you might have to agree.
Words by JANE CROWTHER
Images © 2025 Paramount Pictures
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning played at Cannes Film Festival and will release in cinemas on 21 May
