The new Mission: Impossible is the strangest Mission: Impossible. Tom Cruise climbs into a sensory-deprivation coffin to mind-meld with a computer megamind. The President sends Tom Cruise into the freezing ocean, where he finds a submarine and takes off his clothes. Hayley Atwell stares upon Tom Cruise with the seductive-yet-restrained awe of a nun hot for Jesus. The bad guy has a biplane — no, two biplanes! The opening credits arrive around, I think, minute 18.
I’m telling everyone to see Final Reckoning because it is (sometimes) astonishing and (sometimes) astonishingly bad. Two big action scenes are pure blissful danger cinema. Several dialogue scenes are laughable, endless cacophonous exposition, so many good actors finishing each other’s dumb sentences. It’s never boring. The tone of apocalyptic awe approaches religious camp, as inflated and ludicrous as the old Bible epics. Prompt ChatPGT thus: Ben-Hur if Yahweh was AI. A British performer who everyone in the world remembers being British on Ted Lasso plays an American admiral. Did I mention Tom Cruise goes in two submarines, and takes off his clothes both times?
The weirdest moments are Cruise acting with anyone his age who looks his age. Co-stars Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny, and Rolf Saxon were all in 1996’s first Mission. Now Czerny shines silver like a legendary (but terminally local) news anchor, Saxon’s beard suggests Cool English Dean, and Rhames’s subplot is bad health. Meanwhile, Cruise looks like he put on a Tom Cruise mask thirty years ago. This is why the stunt sequences are so much more raw and authentic than the stilted conversations. SCUBA goggles bloat his immaculate cheeks puffy. Stratospheric g-forces blow jowls onto his face.
When Clint Eastwood was Cruise’s age, pigs knocked him into the mud and shit of Unforgiven while his angelic children looked on. Cruise still wants to be the angel, and the child. Final Reckoning tries compiling its franchise into a single saga, referencing every Mission except the one where Thandiwe Newton talked back. There are (terrible) flashback clips, a (ridiculous) parental revelation, a (silly) long-ago plot point (brilliantly) resurrected. For any of this to really work, you would need to believe Cruise himself feels the weight of years. Three decades of love interests, directors, enemies, scandals, wives, kids. But Ethan Hunt is Tom Cruise’s dream of himself. The fictional character doesn’t stop moving: Never settling down, never mentioning any family, never not performing feats of strength. Ethan Hunt has to save the world. What’s Cruise’s excuse? Is making movies enough?
It's two years since Dead Reckoning: Part One, which was heinous: Blah setpieces, a pointless big death, no ending. Cruise was riding high then off a couple mega-hits, but making that Reckoning required battling COVID with a cruise ship. It was always a bad idea to make a two-part Mission: Impossible, though. The series, which basically had no rep at all in the 2000s, rose to mega-prominence last decade as a cure for the common franchise. Other brands overdosed on pointless mythology, bad CGI, fan service. Consider 2015, when Star Wars 7 and Jurassic Park 4 cemented globo-culture’s fixation on nostalgic revivals. That was the year Christopher McQuarrie directed his first Mission — a clever little caper, The One With The Opera House, where Tom Cruise drowns to death until Rebecca Ferguson shocks him back to life. Is it a spoiler to say Tom Cruise drowns again in Final Reckoning, or a spoiler to promise it still doesn’t stop him?
This marks McQuarrie’s fourth Mission as a director, and his ninth official project with Cruise. They’re a strange pair. As a clever director, McQuarrie senses his star needs to be challenged, which is why 2018’s Fallout paired famously tiny Cruise opposite famously un-tiny Henry Cavill. McQuarrie has a splendid way of getting carried away by action, and Final Reckoning’s wordless aquatic descent is delicate with shock and awe. And those biplanes? Sick.
But: As a screenwriter who spent eight long years completing zero films before 2008’s Valkyrie, McQuarrie seems to worship Cruise as his lord and savior. The recent Mission movies abase themselves at the feet of his actor-boss. Ethan Hunt was sort of just a cool guy until 2015’s Rogue Nation, when the McQuarrie-penned script had Alec Baldwin’s CIA Director declare Ethan “the living manifestation of destiny.” That was a joke, I think, but there’s much more sincere talk about destinies in Final Reckoning. People say things like “I believe you were meant to do this.” McQuarrie’s tenure has seen the full flowering of Mission’s dead-brunette pathology, confirming Ethan Hunt’s life as a factory-line of comely endangered Michelle Monaghan lookalikes who he protects monastically until a younger Atwell-shaped model comes along.
Cruise’s weirdness was the one thing anyone noticed about him twenty years ago, when he was the posterboy for unbelievable romance, ludicrous belief systems, and celebrity egomania. Today he’s a cinephile folk hero, the John Henry of old-fashioned movie action, pushing himself beyond masochistic limits to keep up with plastic greenscreen spectacles. After Top Gun: Maverick and Dead Reckoning 1, this is his third gigantic film in a row partly or entirely about Tom Cruise Fighting The Machines. Final Reckoning’s AI, known as “the Entity,” is a bit generic, one of those wormhole-of-information abstractions. Still, the movie has some fun with a secret society of Entity worshippers. (That’s right: A Tom Cruise movie about a loony cult.) The angry-old-man message couldn’t be clearer, but the pace of technological change makes everyone feel old and angry. See Ethan Hunt, fighting a bad guy, yelling: “You spend [kick!] too much time [kick!] on the internet!”
What changed for Cruise between 2005 and 2025 was his relatability. No average person corresponded their life experience to his Eiffel Tower-and-Xenu lifestyle of yore. Now, every underemployed creative type feels the coming vortex of AI. Final Reckoning wants to prove the triumph of the human condition. It’s upsetting, then, how inhuman it all feels. Cruise’s IMF squadmates follow him without question, friction, or any notable personality. This global adventure has no local flavor or feeling for all the continents Cruise zips around. We’re a long way from Ghost Protocol’s snazzy Burj Khalifa, even further from the haunted Prague alleys where Ethan’s original IMF squad got shock-destroyed. Final Reckoning will thrill you, and worry you. It seems to offer only two bad existential choices: Work for robots or become a robot. The third option, I’m not joking, is a happy life on a remote Arctic island.
It is possible, of course, to just try being human again. But Cruise would never settle for possible.