Tom Cruise in a death-defying stunt in the new Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning. Photo / Paramount Pictures
Tom Cruise in a death-defying stunt in the new Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning. Photo / Paramount Pictures
This dazzlingly ambitious finale sees Ethan Hunt take on a challenge of biblical proportions – and he doesn’t let us down.
Say what you will about the Impossible Mission Force, but the opportunities for internal career development are pretty good. Back in 1996, Ethan Hunt was a junior agent who was packed off to Prague to retrieve a floppy disc: 29 years later, he’s personally tasked by the US President with taking down an AI-generated supreme being while all of humanity’s future hangs in the balance.
Even by the series’ own now well-established standards, this widely presumed last entry in Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible franchise is an awe-inspiringly bananas piece of work.
Over the course of its near-three-hour run time, Hunt essentially becomes Secret Agent Jesus: there is a descent into the underworld, a death and resurrection, even a battle of wills in the desert with Satan himself. Or at least his fiendish digital equivalent – a malign artificial intelligence construct called The Entity, whom Hunt refers to as “the Lord of Lies” with a preacherly glint.
A pressing question presents itself: what in the bing-bang fiddly-foo is this film? The tone couldn’t be more different to 2023’s flamboyantly cartoonish Dead Reckoning, with its Herbie-like car chase through Rome, sublime Buster Keaton train-crash homage, and plummeting grand piano straight out of a Looney Tunes short.
Instead, it comes on like apocalyptic scripture. Within minutes, there are vivid premonitions of nuclear holocaust, then flashbacks to the earlier films – so very many flashbacks – in which seemingly self-contained plot points are revealed to have been of seismic importance to the story at hand. During the original film’s dangly break-in at Langley, fans may recall a knife slipping from Cruise’s hands and impaling itself on a desk. Rest assured, you’ll be seeing that thing again, and many more previously incidental gubbins besides. Even the first film’s release date – May 22, 1996 – plays a brief but talismanic role.
Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025). Photo / Paramount Pictures
The sheer last-hurrah loopiness of the above meant it took me a good 45 minutes to realise that not only was The Final Reckoning working – and well – but that I was watching one of the most dazzlingly ambitious, exactingly crafted studio projects of our time. Returning writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, a long-time Cruise collaborator, wittily structures the film like a single sizzling bomb fuse of epic length and explosive potential: the touch paper is lit on Armageddon, and off Cruise hares to disarm it. (There is a wonderful chutzpah in the final cliffhanger involving a wire-snipping dilemma straight out of the 1960s TV show.)
Two particular sequences stand out: a pivotal submarine raid, which unfolds in around 20 almost wordless, unrelentingly tense minutes, and the climactic dogfight, highlights of which include Cruise jumping from one aeroplane to another in mid-air. This is masterful stuff – entirely outrageous and yet, in the heat of the moment, somehow entirely real.
Imagine if it could be said that with this final episode, Cruise and McQuarrie have tied up some sort of grand project that changed modern blockbuster cinema for the better. But in fact, it’s more striking than ever that the series from its fourth entry on – 2011’s Ghost Protocol, which sent Cruise up the side of the Burj Khalifa with electrified sucker gloves – was built in defiance of prevailing Hollywood wisdom and trends.
Its peril is, and always has been, on a determinedly human scale; its action sequences are doggedly grounded, even when set 8000 feet in the air. Perhaps the only rival productions that actively paid heed to Cruise and McQuarrie’s work were Cruise’s own Top Gun: Maverick and the Daniel Craig James Bond films (Mad Max was already there): meanwhile, everyone else kept gluing ping-pong balls to leotards and pegging out the green screens.
But like Hunt himself, Cruise and McQuarrie thundered heedlessly on, proving as they went that action cinema at its most elemental could still break new ground. They were only able to do this because Mission: Impossible‘s parent studio, Paramount, lost Marvel to Disney in 2009 – and left without a weapon in the cinematic universe arms race, its board agreed to let the star and director cook up whatever they wanted, at any cost, in the hope of keeping pace with their rivals.
That effectively turned the twosome into rogue agents within the studio system, with the M:I brand serving as cover for all sorts of unthinkable schemes. (This concluding chapter reportedly cost Avatar money: more than $400m.) Now, alas, the cassette deck is smoking; the whatever-it-takes mission briefing revoked. With that brand’s apparent passing comes the end of an era, Mr Hunt, whether you choose to accept it or not.
Screening at the Cannes Film Festival. In New Zealand cinemas from Wednesday, May 22.
