The Final Reckoning reminds us why Tom Cruise remains cinema’s biggest star.
Tom Cruise — Hollywood’s last true action hero and our most committed insurance liability — closes out the Mission: Impossible saga with The Final Reckoning. It’s a sprawling, frequently thrilling, occasionally messy chapter that mostly sticks the landing. It’s not the franchise’s finest hour, but it’s strong enough to remind us why these films matter — and why Cruise remains cinema’s biggest star.
The familiar setup is given a timely jolt: Ethan Hunt and the IMF team must stop a rogue A.I. known as the Entity from seizing control of the world’s nuclear systems. The key to stopping it lies with the Podkova, a module stuck in a sunken Russian submarine, which Hunt is forced to retrieve at the behest of his old adversary Gabriel (Esai Morales), who seeks control of the Entity’s source code. Add Grace (Hayley Atwell), a thief turned quasi-agent, some doomsday cultists, and a healthy dose of CIA double-dealing, and you’ve got a global chase stitched together by stunts, gadgets, and Cruise’s bravado.
The underwater sequence near the wreck of the submarine (the Sevastopol) is tense and beautifully shot, bordering on horror in its depiction of claustrophobic descent. But the film’s real showstopper is the airplane stunt: Cruise clings to a biplane as it spirals through the sky — no CGI sleight of hand, no volume stages, just muscle over microchip. It’s one of the most impressive pieces of practical action filmmaking in years — the kind of stunt that reminds you why we go to the movies in the first place.
Cruise remains a force. His physicality, his sincerity, and his refusal to phone it in elevate even the clunkier moments. There’s no ironic detachment here — just a guy who sincerely believes in the magic of movies, still trying to outrun death with a camera rolling. More than an actor, he’s an ambassador for a kind of blockbuster filmmaking that still values presence over pixels. It’s not just Ethan we’re rooting for — it’s Cruise, because of what he represents to the craft.
Of course, the film isn’t without flaws. The first hour is a tangle — overloaded with so many legacy callbacks it starts to feel like an ESPN special on the ’96 Bulls. In one baffling early sequence, we hear Ethan take down a bad guy for a solid 20 seconds while the camera stays locked on Grace’s face. Cruise is still an elite physical performer — let him show it. Thankfully, once the narrative kicks into gear, the film finds its rhythm.
Gabriel, meanwhile, is more telenovela archetype than antagonist. Morales does what he can with the material, but the character amounts to a collection of ominous stares and cryptic one-liners. The real villain is the Entity — an all-seeing, self-aware algorithm capable of simulating identities, driving us crazy, and nudging the world toward annihilation.
If that sounds like science fiction, log on to the digital dumpster fire formerly known as Twitter, and within ten minutes, you’ll be arguing with a foreign bot, dodging an OnlyFans pitch, and scrolling past someone explaining that birds aren’t real. Read another way, the Entity is a metaphor for the film industry itself: over-programmed, risk-averse, increasingly run by algorithms and accountants. In that sense, Cruise isn’t just fighting the machine — he’s fighting the machine behind the machine. The ideas at the heart of this film are hardly far-fetched — they’re already here.
The concept is strong enough to stand on its own. But instead of leaning into the paranoia, too often, the movie hedges with kitsch. It gestures at relevance, then retreats into one-liners and stock villainy. There’s a sharper, smarter film buried under the wreckage, and it keeps trying to claw its way out.
In fairness, expecting Mission: Impossible to deliver a serious meditation on algorithmic overlords is a bit like believing Jim from American Pie read Playboy for the articles — we know better. This is an action movie, not a philosophy class — and on that front, it delivers.
The Final Reckoning may not reach the heights of Fallout (still the franchise’s crown jewel) or Brian De Palma’s Hitchcockian original, but it’s a fitting finale for one of modern cinema’s great action sagas. It’s loud, sharply assembled, and often genuinely exhilarating. While most tentpoles now feel assembled by committee — or code — this one plays refreshingly analog, stitched together by sweat, steel, and swagger.
If this truly is the end of Ethan Hunt’s adventures, it’s a worthy sendoff. But this is Hollywood, where fuses don’t go out — they’re rewired.