I don’t care what you say about Avatar, Wicked or Superman – Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) is THE movie event of 2025. Consisting of eight films over 29 years, the franchise mostly probably but maybe not comes to a close with this nearly three-hour epic, which threw producer/star/probable maniac Tom Cruise into harm’s way one last time (he DOES his own STUNTS, and you’ll NEVER forget it). Funny thing is, the film grossed nearly $600 million at the box office, and nobody’s sure that was enough for it to break even – Hollywood! – but it bodes well for us fans, who want to see every penny on the screen, translated into heart-bursting action. Which M:I 8 does, for sure, even though it’s a little shakier than we’re used to for this series. Either way, it’s a fitting end for this four-film collaboration between Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie, and you might get a lump in your throat when it finally likely possibly not ends.
The Gist: We open with business as usual: Ethan Hunt (Cruise) gets a VHS tape from the President of the United States. What’s on it? Instructions for his most vital planet-saving mission yet – and highlights from all the past Mission: Impossible movies. Well, cues so we can see those highlights, a montage o’ crazy Cruise stunts, at least. Because Final Reckoning will twist itself into triple pretzels referencing key moments in those movies, retconning and tangling and disentangling in an attempt to Bring It All Together For One Last Hurrah. “Though you never followed orders, you never let us down,” the President says, speaking for us, mostly anyway, selectively ignoring how terrible Mission: Impossible 2 was.
And so we must recall the events of 2023’s Dead Reckoning, where Ethan and his Impossible Mission Force family (or “fambly” if you’re more of a Fast and Furious type) did insane things to get their hands on a special key for a hard drive containing the source code for The Entity, a nasty artificially intelligent digital presence bent on wiping all life off the face of the planet. In the few months since the events of Dead Reckoning, The Entity manipulated perceptions of truth, prompting the world to go to hell in a handbasket. It locked down control of several of the world’s nuclear-bomb stockpiles and is aiming for the rest. The def con clock’s ticking down down down. Ethan wants to destroy The Entity, which seems entirely reasonable. The President (Angela Bassett), CIA Director Kittridge (Henry Czerny) and various USA pols and military guys want to control the entity, which is not nearly as reasonable. And therein lies the rub.
Or one of them. These movies are full of rubs, you know. Ethan therefore assembles his crack team: hacker extraordinaire Luther (Ving Rhames), pseudo-sidekick Benji (Simon Pegg) and pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) are the core, and they end up recruiting a couple of former non-friends in deadly assassin Paris (Pom Klementeff) and former CIA guy Theo (Greg Tarzan Davis) to the IMF. There are several hundred thousand plot details to get through but the big development involves sending Ethan to the bottom of the ocean to find a downed Russian sub containing the MacGuffin, a hard drive with The Entity’s source code on it; Luther created a counter-MacGuffin, a “poison pill” virus, to kill The Entity. Easier said than done, since The Entity’s minion Gabriel (Esai Morales) has other plans, mu-hahahahahah. So the fate of the world comes down to Ethan Hunt, Christ figure, forever sacrificing his safety for the good of humanity, for, as the IMF mantra goes “those we may never meet.” Question is, do you have faith in him?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It all comes down to this: THEE definitive M:I movie ranking!
8. Mission: Impossible 2. John Woo dishes up an overblown, overdramatic slo-mo dud. The series’ only lousy movie.
7. Mission: Impossible III. J.J. Abrams made this a touch too frantic. But Philip Seymour Hoffman made it memorable.
6. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. Narrative bloat makes this one a bit saggy. However: BIPLANES!!!
5. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol – This is where the ranking gets, well, impossible, because this might be the funniest of the eight, and it set the tone for self-one-upsmanship with that wild Burj Khalifa bit.
4. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One – It speaks volumes that the fourth-best film in the series boasts two mind-blowing sequences: the airport pickpocketing cat-and-mouse shenanigans, and the most wildly entertaining car chase of any movie made this century.
3. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation – This might not chart as high for some of you, but it’s a personal favorite of mine: The Vienna Opera House shootout is hands-down the series’ greatest sequence, and the introduction of Rebecca Ferguson as Ethan Hunt’s best frenemy is a masterstroke.
2. Mission: Impossible – The vault scene, for f—’s sake. A stunner. Here’s where it all began. Brian DePalma adds a layer of brilliant spy-game subtext too, shooting in his trademark voyeuristic style. This could be two or five on this list; that’s how great these movies are.
1. Mission: Impossible – Fallout – Steps on the gas. Never lets up. Cruise enjoys the best supporting cast of the series thanks to Henry Cavill, Vanessa Kirby, Alec Baldwin and Becky Fergs (I love me some Becky Fergs!). And the final 45 minutes is an all-timer of an intense, suspenseful, bum-clenching action sequence. I’m still sweating from the first time I saw it, seven years ago.
Performance Worth Watching: I’d hate to think what the two Reckonings might be like without the chemical spark between Atwell and Cruise. In this one, they exchange a few unspoken, understated glances that could power a few blocks of air conditioners in New Orleans in August.
Memorable Dialogue: Ethan wallops an Entity-pilled bad guy: “You spend too much (WHAPP) time (SOCKO) on the internet (BOFF)!”
Sex and Skin: Is it sexy that Cruise looks like that at 60 years old? Yeah, kinda.
Our Take: “So what’s the play?” The play in Final Reckoning is, let Tom grow his hair out a bit so we know there was no faking the bit where he jumps from one biplane to another in mid-air, way way way above a gloriously beautiful canyon. Couple that with a masterfully engineered sequence in which Ethan navigates the downed submarine while it rolls along the sea floor toward a terrifying precipice, and you’ve got yourself a movie that makes up for its slightly disappointing conglomeration of flaws.
For one, McQuarrie and Erik Jendresen’s screenplay tries way too hard to fit in references to past M:Is, contributing to the movie’s tumescence, and the story sometimes feels jagged, pieced together instead of flowing smoothly; there’s more exposition here than in any of the films, which is saying a lot. That contributes to the film’s struggle to get revved up – the lack of a whopper of a first-act set piece, which the best films in the series have, is glaring. And some of us may chafe at the quasi-religious and heavy-handed manner in which the film renders Ethan Hunt as The One True Savior – it all comes down to the President and other very powerful people contemplating unthinkable nuclear strikes or just having faith in Ethan. Maybe it’s an ego thing for Cruise or maybe it’s slamming its it-all-comes-down-to-THIS cards on the table a little too hard.
But to say Final Reckoning doesn’t do justice to this all-timer of an action franchise is a bridge too far. Nothing here fails to meet base expectations, and the two aforementioned key set pieces are as good as anything we’ve seen in the series – and they tend to overshadow the brilliant construction of other moments, including a wily cross-cutting between a pair of brutal hand-to-hand-combat clashes. Subtextually, the film wrestles with ideas about fate, destiny and control, and the roles we engineer for ourselves or find ourselves in. The Mission: Impossibles have always addressed these notions, and illustrated what happens when an unflappable, spiritually and mentally indestructible, but never infallible person like Ethan Hunt finds his niche and fills it. That’s what Cruise and McQuarrie did with the last four films in the series, which is surely among the greatest runs in cinema history. To all action-movie filmmakers past and present: Reckon with that.
Our Call: Sure, Final Reckoning isn’t the best of the franchise, but even a modest winner is still a winner. And overall, these films ultimately netted far, far more joy and thrills than disappointment. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.